Norman Garstin - A View of Mount's Bay with the North Pier (c.1920) Penlee House Gallery & Museum
This poem was inspired by Norman
Garstin’s painting of the building of the north quay of Newlyn harbour in
Cornwall. As a child, I spent all my summers in Newlyn, and so the harbour was
a place I knew well – a haven in so many senses of the word.
Two arms –
enfolding calm
waters within.
Newlyn, Cornwall (c.1906) National Maritime Museum
As with Leaf 111, this is
another poem inspired by the work of science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke.
I’ve written in greater depth about my fascination for Clarke’s scientifically
optimistic and oddly mystical visions of the far future on my other blog, along
with my first, slightly hair-raising reading of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968) during
the first Coronavirus lockdown of 2020 (see here). I’ve since read all the
other books in the series as well. I think the following haiku/senryu, which was actually prompted by seeing Eimei Machida’ s print, ‘When We Arrive at the Jupiter ...’ (2003), perhaps manages to go some
way towards distilling that enormous and ultimately unfathomable sense of
possibility which comes with a profound and prolonged contemplation of
astronomy.
This linked sequence of verses
is a meditation on maps, partly inspired by a geography field trip to the
Chiltern Hills, which I went on while I was at school. Maps have always
fascinated me. We are very lucky in the UK to have very good maps of the
country, provided by the unceasing work of the Ordnance Survey, who have been
mapping the landscape since the late 1700s.
For two years, between 2021 and
2023, I lived just around the corner from Westminster Abbey and the Houses of
Parliament. It was an eventful time to be living there – with the Queen’s
Platinum Jubilee; the Queen’s funeral; the King’s Coronation; plus, a quick succession
of Prime Ministers, hurriedly coming and then, just as quickly going. During
that time too, after a period of silence which had lasted several years, the
restoration of Big Ben was finally completed.
During my undergraduate days, I used
to haunt the Thames riverside with a close friend of mine. And many years later,
I lived in the same locale, hence for me it’s a place of many happy memories.
Raymond Depardon - Tourists at Universal Studios (Magnum)
There’s no doubt that having
digital cameras in our mobile phones has made it much easier to record all aspects
of our lives, but how often do we look back at those pixellated memories?
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