by Wendy Hawkin | Mar 3, 2017 | Ireland, journal, mythology
I think of Yeats often these days. Perhaps, I conjure him in the dreamtime and we meet in hazy green fields beyond time and place. He is one of my muses and seeps into my work.
When we visited the ruins of Lady Augusta Gregory’s estate at Coole Park in Gort, Ireland, a few years ago, I wrote her a letter. A flame, for the Irish Literary Revival, she co-founded the Abbey Theatre with WB Yeats and Edward Martyn.
AE, John Millington Singe, George Bernard Shaw, and Yeats, many of the Irish giants of literature and theatre, came here to socialize and create in the lush lands by the turloughs. They carved their initials on a tree that still stands. Lough Cuil is now an explorable nature reserve of 400 hectares. Yeats wrote several poems here including “The Wild Swans at Coole.” His Norman tower house, Thoor Ballylee, is nearby.
A Letter to Herself
It is August at Coole.
Black cows break from ivy-braided trees, crisscross our path,
and peer from leafy bowers in the seven woods,
While in the stonewalled pasture, a big-racked buck grazes lazily
among his harem.
Wild cows and docile deer. Nature topsy-turvy —
Like Ireland.
There are no wild swans — not nine and fifty — not two, not even one.
But it is only August at Coole.
Horseflies harangue us, freed from swaying heads of purple loosestrife
Where is this still brimming water?
The tide is out.
Sunlight shimmers waves and ripples through my lens and
distant trees appear as shaggy skulking arrows;
We are alone here on the strand.
Tara writing poetry on her Burren rock, and I, courting the ghost of Yeats
It is August at Coole.
Augusta Gregory has passed away, Bohemian crown askew,
Royal Lady, heiress to the unimagined, patroness of poets,
Poet herself and playwright, dearest friend and grand mum,
Molding all in ink-stained hands. But no Victoria.
Desperate Creatrix. The centre did not hold.
Your home demolished in the widening gyre,
Anarchy for the Republic —
All that remains are Yeats’ immortal words on plastic posts.
His vision revealed. All’s changed.
Arrows point tourists here and there through your memories
Your autograph tree now numbered and analyzed, imprisoned behind
Iron bars, tagged and martyred like Patrick Pearse —
Do you mind, Great Lady?
People still come, to know, to feel, to walk in the footsteps of
Poets and playwrights: Yeats and Synge, Æ, Shaw, and Auden.
Children play football and hang like fools, dogs chase sticks,
Dirty your walkways, and life spirals on.
Lough Cuil is Irish now.
Comforted by stone and sea, sun, rain, and western winds
Stories resurrected in the Gaeltacht. This you must love.
And your small patch of Ireland breathing still, a sanctuary of green —
No withered boughs.
I miss him too, but feel him somehow in the worded wind, and
My throat aches …
Yeats.
This is August at Coole.
by Wendy Hawkin | Feb 24, 2017 | journal, writing and publishing
More and more, I feel the need to go to a free and magical isle, whether in spirit or on foot.
Yeats Country: The Hills Above Glencar, Ireland
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping
slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket
sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
wbyeatsfoundation.org
by Wendy Hawkin | Feb 23, 2017 | writing and publishing
An interesting post from Kristen Twardowski:
The English language may be absurd and magical, but it also fails to capture the entire nuance of human experience. Other languages, however, can fill in some of those gaps. Tim Lomas, a lecturer i…
Source: Untranslatable: Words Writers Should Know
by Wendy Hawkin | Feb 19, 2017 | journal, writing and publishing
Revenant: a person who has returned especially, supposedly, from the dead (Oxford Dictionary)
Hugh Glass, does not die, but comes close, when he is brutally mauled by a mother grizzly on a bank of the Grand River in 1823. A fur trapper with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, his wit and skills and some strong Sioux medicine enable him to survive the fall and winter. Glass is abandoned by two company men, Fitzgerald and Bridger, charged with making sure he’s given a proper burial. The thing is: they don’t just leave him to die, they take the only things that might enable him to live: his rifle, his knife, his flint and steel. But live he does; if only to pursue them and get his stuff back.
Written with plenty of detail and historical authority, Michael Punke leads us through the plains and river valleys east of the Rocky Mountains: the land of the Sioux, Arikara, and Mandan people. The Sioux and the trappers have been allies in a war with the Arikara, and it is an old Sioux medicine man who really saves Glass’s life by killing the maggots that have burrowed inside his festering back wounds.
This is a historical novel that reads like non-fiction. The author, Michael Punke, explains in his Historical Notes that the main events are true to history. I haven’t read an omniscient viewpoint for a long time–agents and editors stress that scenes by narrated by one character in limited omniscient–so I notice when we pass through several minds within a chapter. It’s not distracting; just different. The writing is almost objective–written like a journal article. We never go deep inside this man, who suffers agonizing wounds to body, mind, and spirit. And I ask myself: what is Glass thinking besides how to find his next meal?
Michael Punke is a D.C. lawyer and deputy U.S. trade representative and ambassador to the World Trade Organization in Switzerland. He wrote this novel in his spare time, ten years before it was adapted for film. I read the novel first.
The award-winning film is “based in part on the novel” and a small part it is. The main characters, Hugh Glass (Leonardo Dicaprio), Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), Jim Bridger, and Captain Henry are here, as is the main theme of revenge. But everything else is bolder, much more complex, and visceral. By adding other key characters and subplots, the screenwriters dramatize what falls fairly flat on the page. This is where we begin to understand what Glass is thinking as he rises from the dead to pursue Fitzgerald through spectacularly perilous country.
Besides incredible directing by Alejandro González Iñárritu and brilliant acting, what’s memorable is the cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki. Filmed near the Rocky Mountains in Alberta and Argentina, the film presents what we can only imagine frontier life might have been like in the 1820s. (To view stills and read more on the locations click here.) This is no romance, thought heart-wrenching spiritual moments lead us to the abyss more than once.
by Wendy Hawkin | Feb 17, 2017 | Book Review, journal, mythology, writing and publishing
“If we do not raise our arms and will the mists to rise we will stumble forever in the fog.”
I first read The Mists of Avalon, written by Sci-fi Fantasy author Marion Zimmer Bradley, close to thirty years ago. It was a Christmas gift from my sister. No doubt she saw a connection; for this is a book about sisters.
An epic narrated by women, it unravels the story of how the new Christian religion eclipsed magic in Britain. Viviane, Ingraine, and Morgause are the three sisters who birth the kingdom of Arthur. Great granddaughters of Taliesien, the Merlin of Britain, magic is in their genes. Viviane, the eldest, becomes priestess of Avalon and Lady of the Lake; while Ingraine conceives Arthur and then marries her lover, Uther Pendragon, with the magical aid of Merlin.
Ingraine, feeling her heart pounding in her breast, knew it was true, and felt confusion and despair. In spite of the fact that she had seen Uther only four times, and dreamed twice of him, she knew that they had loved each other and spoken to each other as if they had been lovers for many years, knowing all and more than all about each other, body and mind and heart. She recalled her dream, where it seemed that they had been bound for many years by a tie which, if it was not marriage, might as well have been so. Lovers, partners, priest to priestess–whatever it was called. How could she tell Gorlois that she had known Uther only in a dream, but that she had begun to think of him as the man she had loved so long ago that Ingraine herself was not yet born, was a shadow; that the essence within her was one and the same with that woman who had loved that strange man who bore the serpents on his arms in gold…How could she say this to Gorlois, who knew, and wished to know, nothing of the Mysteries? (64).
