All Change!

Welcome to my new look blog! 
Blogger sent an email announcing the options on offer, I thought, 'what the hell!' and here we are! 
Here's another Katherine Pierpoint poem from 'Truffle Beds' to celebrate diving in!


Diving Board
Brand-new girlish breaststroke up and down the town pool,
A cool pearl button through silk-frogged buttonholes,
An elision fluid and oval as a French vowel;
You are proud of your chlorinated otterings.
A haze of talc, wet hair and hot Bovril from tiered orange seats
Floats bellyup to a streaming glass ceiling abuzz with neon.


The tough oilsleek diving board stands dark as a pithead crane,
A pointing steel gundog straining for the falling star.
Room for another flea on its back.
A long black tongue is ready for your feet.


Leg-up the ladder onto the board? - Dare you to.
Warty and tense underfoot,
It's like walking out along a great toothless gumline.
With small, rude leaks and poppings from your bathing suit,
You're a kipper gone cold in its cleaving bag.


This is a rock-face swaying in a high wind.
A concrete trampoline.
Judge it wrong and you break your jaw on the toffeehammering end,
Or burst like a fig, swooping from the kindly tree onto tarmac.


Walk back to the safe end, firm on its silver rollers.
Just let the loud boys go through first.


Go.


A dull spong and a few metallic knockings, like a dying engine
Flip you up and over.
Sweet as a perfectly-served tennis ball;
Murderous, invisibly aflame with topspin.
Then a pebbledashed implosion,
Shrugging down like a dynamited building
In the suddenly spanked and yelling water.


Katherine Pierpoint

Learning to Swim on Dry Land

Today I've been reading Katherine Pierpoint's 'Truffle Beds' - the collection from which Going Swimmingly in an earlier post is taken. She is a great poet, her poems are full of surprises: striking sensory imagery and a quirky way of viewing life. She describes the natural world brilliantly and I strongly recommend the book. Here's another swimming poem from it which I love.


Swim Right Up to Me


I first learnt to swim at home in my father's study
On the piano stool, planted on the middle of the rug.
Stomach down, head up, arms and legs rowing hard;
I swam bravely, ploughing up the small room,
Pinned on a crushed stuckness of stomach to tapestry,
The twin handles hard on my elbows on the back stroke.
A view down through four braced wooden legs
To the same thin spot in the rug.
My mother faced me, calling rhythmic encouragement,
Almost stepping back to let me swim up to her,
Reminding me to breathe;
And wiping my hair and eyes with her hand
As I swam and swam on the furniture against a running tide,
Pig-cheeked, concentrating on pushing and pushing away,
Planning to learn to fly next, easy,
Higher than the kitchen table, even. The garden wall.


Katherine Pierpoint

Going Swimmingly

My last swim was almost two weeks ago as I've been under par - not completely laid up, but not quite up to the joy of swimming either. I spent today with a group of friends whose shared experience is our work. One of these friends swims on a regular basis in Llyn Tegid - Lake Bala in Wales. Talking with her and seeing the weather forecast - 'bright and milder' - made me want to dust off the wetsuit and jump in. Well, getting back in a swimming pool will be a move in the right direction...

And, as for swimming in the great outdoors, I found this fascinating link. It's a memo by Roger Deakin in a House of Commons debate. He cites a passionate, lyrical piece by Kate  Kellaway about outdoor swimming and writing!!

Continuing with my theme of poems by women in International Women's Week, here's the swimming poem by Katherine Pierpoint that Kate Kellaway refers to in her piece: 

Going Swimmingly

The blue-rinsed pool is full of rhythmic, lone strokers.

It drew us in from the edges as though it were blotter-dry and we were rushing liquid.

Swimming, an occasional, unseen toe contact

Seems to come long after the other solemn face bobbed by;

The body lengthens, a pale streamer drifting out under a Chinese lantern.

Standing in the pool,blinking and pinching your nose, brings

A strange, slewed perspective down to the wavering floor -

Firm, cream shoulders, telescoped to no trunk,

Standing on skewing, marbled shimmypuppet legs,

Fatdappled with fallen blue petals of curling light.

Swimming, everything is simplified.

The eye level so low, a baby's out along the drunken carpet.

A rhythmic peace, of rocking and being rocked,

Plaiting yourself into the water,

Ploughing an intricate, soft turtle-track along the undersurface,

Each stroke a silver link in the chain that melts behind you.

Sheer weight and size of water!

Remembering some geography and its clean, cross-section diagrams -

The sea is an upside-down mountain of water,

An up-turned yogi

Alive with pulling, fluid muscles;

A pressing city of water; a universe;

The town pool is an inverted block of flats, something

Gathered and gently milling. Container for a small revolution.

Hands trying to pray. Legs slowly trying to fly.

Simple, straining juxtapositions -

Waterbuffalo! Hovercraft! Starfish!

The water on fire in volcanoes and set in earth in amber!

The swimmer broaches a strange but yielding density;

Leans quietly into a huge, enfolding flank.

Reaches over, forward and out; to re-test the limits,

Smooth the limbs,

Of a rediscovered lover.

Katherine Pierpoint

From 'Modern Women Poets' edited by Deryn Rees-Jones, Bloodaxe

Beautiful, isn't it!!