Ellen Cranitch's Crystal reviewed in The Observer and Irish Times
Crystal reviewed in The Observer, The Irish Times & on Nick Hornby's blog; podcast interview with Ellen Cranitch & interview on RTE Radio 1's Poetry People.
Launch reading by Ellen Cranitch, Helen Farish and Brenda Shaughnessy
Ellen Cranitch, Helen Farish & Brenda Shaughnessy launched their April 2024 poetry books with a reading on our YouTube channel. Available to watch now.
Sometime before the revelations: travelling into the city by night, lights high to the left mark the hill of the Acropolis. I’m thumbing through my old copy of Cavafy and now I understand his poetry: how, like a crystal, where the smallest individual unit has an identical structure to the greater whole, the poems are microcosms that evoke a larger, parallel subject; his own sense of decline, and longing as he aged to regain a vibrant, passionate past, a symbol of Alexandria, now in decay but once fabulous, tumultuous, extravagant. Interiors, walls and shadows frame the verse but it’s shot through with lines of transcendent beauty; rhapsodies of tenderness for the bodies of the young killed in war, promises that all the blood and the dust will be washed away, the wounds of battle closed.
*
To Cavafy
Dusk falls in a room off Syntagma Square.
The shadows converge in the low winter light.
Your words are her balm; may they come to her there.
The lines from Cavafy recur like a prayer
pervading her mind when his anger ignites.
Dusk falls in a room off Syntagma Square.
A comb of pearl straightens the raven-black hair
of Sarpedon, dead; dark, those eyes of jadeite.
Your words are her balm; may they come to her there.
Let tears of ambrosia temper the air,
sunbursts of tourmaline hold off the night.
Dusk falls in a room off Syntagma Square.
The rooms where you found love were shadow-filled, bare.
Revived in your lines, they are legendary, bright.
Your words are her balm; may they come to her there.
The terror and hurt, the loss and despair
can be wholly transformed. Words have that might.
Dusk falls in a room off Syntagma Square.
Your words are her balm; may they come to her there.
*
Secrets
He tells me he is a drug addict, that he’s been addicted to cocaine for about ten years. This is true but it is also a lie because it is not the whole truth, which is that he is also addicted to crystal methamphetamine. He tells me that he is bisexual and that he had a relationship with a man before we married. He has not mentioned this through the years of our marriage. His face as I look at it is not the face of the person I know. He is receding, a stranger. At the same time, my sense of who I am is disappearing. He tells me he is seeing men for sex regularly and has been for several years. He does not tell me he is HIV positive. Neither of us yet knows.
As I move towards my bike, he tries to kiss me.
Seared onto my retina are sexually explicit images, the feel and smear of them; secrecy’s livid stain, its putrid stench. What has it tasted, the warm inside of his mouth that I have kissed?
I drag my bike upright, steer it away. Metal on metal, the chime of my ring on the frame.
Our rings are the only two of their kind. They are silver, inlaid with thin, diagonal stripes of gold.
*
Hope
Look out at dusk to the west of Bcharre,
from the small basilica with its red-tiled tower.
All is hushed around you. Mist on the vineyards.
Smoke rising from a few houses below.
A dog’s bark rings out across the gorge
and the great hollows of air, slung across,
catch the rebounding sound. The opening hills
are hands that waft you. There is so much hope
in the view. I would wish to be ushered
by the Qadisha valley which the cedars
of Lebanon call home: though it’s the sunset,
the day’s end, you gaze at, to all who are
harboured by this sacred landscape
its breath is refuge, its face is dawn.
Contents List
9 Bonnard I
10 Bonnard II
11 Bonnard III
12 C10H15N
13 Words
14 Strickeen
15 Actaeon
16 Metamorphoses
17 Io
18 Uplift
19 Tom
21 Athens I
22 Athens II
23 To Cavafy
24 Revelations
25 Secrets
26 Void
27 Betrayal
28 The Wishing Cup
29 Double Exposure
30 Heston Services
31 The Drive West
32 Kingsley Road
33 The Stars
34 Dan
36 How They Give Back to Me
37 ‘en las multitudes’
38 The Dream
39 Riverside
40 Fife
41 ‘lente currite’
42 ‘Relapse’
43 Bypass
44 Trust
45 Some statistics on relapse
46 The Undertow
47 Reactions
48 Kinship
49 Praed Street
50 Prayer
51 The Beaked Ships
52 To Forget
53 Kryos
54 The Empty Space
55 Church of St Michael and All Angels
56 The Colour of Blood
57 Chez Camille
58 Degrees of Separation
59 Panic Attack
60 Antiphon
61 Tributary
62 The Question of Intention
63 The Parable of the Emerald and Dark Water
65 Theories of addiction
66 Crystall
67 Judgement
70 Definition of enabling
71 Living with Uncertainty
74 Addiction interaction disorder
75 Dissonance
76 Addiction and pleasure
77 ‘Against Hurt’
78 The Ascent
80 Beauty
81 Radical
82 What Held Me
83 If Ever
84 Hope
85 Maple-serrated
86 The Dance
87 Grey
88 April 1794
89 Love
90 December 1574
92 Minerals Gallery, Natural History Museum, London
