Category: Poetry

Rye Books

Daniel Greenwood1 Comment

I’m really pleased to say that you can now buy my poetry booklet I am living with the animals at Rye Books in East Dulwich, London. Rye Books is an independent bookshop run by Alastair, a brilliant bookseller with, from my experience, a particularly good understanding of natural history and nature writing literature.

They also run excellent talks and book events, most recently a book signing by local filmmaker Richard Ayoade.

Rye Books

45 Upland Road

London

SE22 9EF

www.ryebooks.co.uk

https://twitter.com/Rye_Books

Daniel

I am living with the animals

Daniel Greenwood2 Comments

Poetry book

WP_20141011_003

I am living with the animals

I am living with the animals is my first collection of poems, self-published in October 2014. It is 34 pages long and has 21 poems in it.

The poems were thought of and written whilst in places as far apart as urban south London, the mountains of northern Spain, the highlands of Scotland and the Norfolk and Dorset countryside. It was started in 2011.

Nature is everywhere in our lives and is intrinsically linked to our own well-being and existence. I hope you like nature more after reading some of these.

The cover illustration is by Henrietta MacPhee

To buy a copy in the UK for £3.50 (inc. P&P), click here.

To buy a copy in continental Europe for £4.90 (inc. P&P) click here.

Thank you,
Daniel

The sound of ravens

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Exmoor 10

 

On the moor we peer

Down into the fields,

Gorse hedges like

Shaven sideburns,

 

Small yellow pea flowers

Greet us. In the valley,

The sound of ravens

Carries, their voices

 

Meet us on the road,

Never their shape.

The inner-life of the

Moor is a little croak

 

From a big crow:

Kronk, kronk,

Kronk.

© Daniel James Greenwood 2013

Nettles

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I watch the nettles in the garden,

Moved by the mercy

Of a heat-wave gust,

Holly blue blown into sky

Like petals to sea.


Stinging nettles, to shake

The stems with my fist,

Touch the new tips,

It’s hot agony,


A pain known to children,



Accepted as a given –

Where people lay their

Bed sheets, nettles walk.



Dreadlocks of cream seed let

Out puffs into the August

Air, faint as smoke

Or perfume,


Never letting wind burst the casings,



This a release of the

Stinging nettle’s making.








Brockenhurst

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The hotel garden,

where the man hocks the moon

from the back of his throat,

below a dying yew sending out

final needles from its pollarded elbows.




Brockenhurst.





The boredom of the night field,

ponies tasting the cricket green,

wet between their teeth,

the dew brightens their goofy enamel.





For us: the big bat darkness

of oak woodland,

lichens ogling from tiny

ovals of eyes –





the air here is clean.

 











Poetry: Smoke and darkness

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The fire was built in

the embers of song

thrush, the tilt

of stars and

overflowing April

moon.




Smoke and darkness,

left out somehow

from the image of

fire’s mystery, its

coming and going,

killing and scaling,




of landscapes,





smoke can also

mean hurt.





A curly-headed mass

of hair reveals

pan-pipes, a swooning

tune of a young

man, brought here





to judge the pull of

the people.





I confess I bow,

mostly, to the

call of the tawny.





As with fires, as

with light, people

fade into night

and sleep, and caverns





of orange appear

between logs,

chambers of nature’s

tinsel.





A roe deer darkness

is one of atavistic

terror for the city-dweller,

the plodding white tush

in leaf litter.





So I stare into fire and I wonder,

which part of the wood,

will the flames kindle under.








Swifts screeching

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Swifts spread across

the sky and stop,

part starfish

brought by a retreating

surf, pigeons bolting

from a setting,

behind cloud.

 

Always, always,

the world is a

painting.

 

I listen to the tits

pleading from the nest

box, one bird out

and the other bird

in, a single note

between them.

 

Hawthorn flowers

are a tree lit

by snow in the

middle of May,

but is spring or

winter late?

I worry that the

old tree is dying,

that a part

of my youth might

not outlive me.

 

Happiness is the sound

of swifts screeching,

the migrants testing

the evening,

spring’s ending

 

brought on

by the declining

surf of sky,

or sea?

 

 










Positano Poemas

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‘Bronze-breasted women’

Bronze-breasted women
gazing at crystals,
in Positano shop windows.
And, in the vines
entwined overhead,
blue butterflies,
warming their wings
in the boiling
morning sun.

‘A swallowtail fell’

A swallowtail fell
onto the terrace,
a banknote,
slipping through the railings.

‘In the night’

In the night the forest
burned, a clutch
of smoking orange groves.

By morning
helicopters ran drills
from the sea to the sky,
pouring fish

and blue water,
into the flames.