John Welch is a good, complex, sometimes very moving and thoughtful poet whose work deserves attention. He is very welcome at Eyewear this Friday. I include a brief biographical note below:As well as editing an anthology, Stories from South Asia (OUP 1988), Welch has contributed articles to Poets on writing (Macmillan 1992) and more recently to journals including the London Review of Books, fragmente and Scintilla. A new poetry collection is The Eastern Boroughs (Shearsman Books). I included a poem of his on the Oxfam audio CD Life Lines, released this summer.
Approaching
Constable's Painting "Weymouth Sands"
It's these spaces you are beginning to find
Opening up behind you, these gaps in memory,
Bits that fly out of your head like birds
And then disappear as if overwhelmed by sky.
The sensation is not altogether unpleasing.
This trying to remember, will it feel more and more
Like reconstructing an accident,
As if you had been living in its aftershock?
The thing is, as you get closer, one by one
The echoes disappear. Instead there are
These gaps in the fence that keep on opening up.
More and more clouds are racing towards you.
There is still that odd sensation though, of "I am",
That hovers at the edge as if waiting
To greet somebody - the figure in mid-distance
Perhaps, who might yet succumb
To the fascination of so much surrounding absence,
The way when, a child being compelled to sit still,
You would watch the light spread its silence over stone
As if you were waiting to become that everywhere -
Because somewhere it's all still there, and
Enormously more sky.
poem by John Welch
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