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EVERY SEASON IS ANOTHER
Poems by R.H. Bowden
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R.H. Bowden was born in Lincoln in 1916. He qualified as Architect at Liverpool University and practised briefly, but later turned to teaching Art and English Literature in Comprehensive Schools in London and West Sussex. He now lives at Lavant, Chichester. Being both painter and writer, he was a regular contributor to Arts Review from 1970 to 1978, and he writes plays, short stories and criticism as well as poetry.
Every Season Is Another is R.H. Bowden's first Peterloo collection. An earlier collection, Poems From Italy, Chatto and Windus (1970) was selected by C. Day Lewis. His poem 'Sand' won first prize at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature in 1982 and ‘Romeo in Capel's Monument’ first prize in All-Sussex Poets, 1983. In 1978 his play The Death of Pasolini was awarded an Arts Council Drama Bursary, and produced in Edinburgh, 1980. After Neruda a play about the death of the great Chilean poet, was performed at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith in 1984. His latest play, The Fence, about the Greenham Peace Women, was produced at the Gardner Centre, Brighton in 1985.
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Sand
I am myself
through my own fingers, -
touching the soles of feet,
I am a footprint;
touched by the water,
a cough
runs through me.
I’m hard,
yet everything that’s hard
falls through me:
I borrow light,
then bury
most of all myself.
Shapes
I turn shapeless:
toes, elbows,
pebbles, knee-joints,
keels and anchors, whatever penetrates
I trust, I take,
am most impressed:
and yet
my answer to each question’s
always rubbed off, lost.
”In time,” they say, “in time . . .”
In time I cannot stay the same:
I trickle white through glass.
- That’s where they thought they’d caught me,
for a minute, - once.
I trick them all the time;
my head becomes my feet.
They wait a further minute:
nothing waits in me.
My thoughts are at both ends,
both in and out.
So gently I lie down
I lull myself to sleep:
I make a floor of dreams
that goes beneath the sea.
There nothing wakes me:
night slips through my grains;
the world turns over,
on my further side
the dawn climbs out of me .
Wherever you may go
I am the wedge
that nudges out your toes,
I am the grit
that gets between your teeth.
Should you confuse me,
tire me, wear me out with flames,
I’ll be the final crystal waiting in your glass.
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EVERY SEASON IS ANOTHER
Price £7.95 per copy post free (£5.30 post free to Associate Members)
Cover illustration: Photo: Carmelo Guadagno, Marino Marini, The Angel of the Citadel. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation).
Publication: 1986 (70 pages laminated paperback)
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