Linda Anderson, "Against Falling"

 

Linda Anderson is Emeritus Professor of English at Newcastle University where she founded the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts (2009) and the annual Newcastle Poetry Festival. She has written extensively about autobiography and feminist theory but more recently has published widely on Elizabeth Bishop, including the monograph, Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection (Edinburgh University Press 2013), and has co-edited a collection of essays on poetry archives, The Contemporary Poetry Archive: Essays and Interventions (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Originally from Scotland, she was an editor of Writing Women for many years, has worked to establish innovative poetry archives at Newcastle University, including the Bloodaxe Archive, and has published a poetry pamphlet, Greenhouse, with Mariscat Press, 2013. She is currently Chair of Bloodaxe Books. Her first poetry collection, The Station Before (2020) was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney first collection prize.

About Against Falling, by Linda Anderson 

At the heart of Linda Anderson’s second collection is an exploration of time and of ageing. Time is pressing, urgent, in relation to both the individual and the planet. However, underneath, there is also something unfinished, whether that be in relation to memory’s ability to revise the past and take on different shapes and meanings, or in relation to writing itself which has a materiality which links it to the body of the writer. The collection contains an interrogation of the poet’s notebooks where chance and randomness have an important part to play, forging surprising links, and directing attention to the surrounding bloom of uncertainty, the ‘diaphanous, unwritten poem’ that lurks behind any finished poem. The fragility of the body also undermines certainty, and while much of the collection draws on visual imagery, derived particularly from the natural world, the loss of sight is folded into acts of careful observation, making seeing itself both more problematic and more precious.

You can read more about Against Falling on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From Against Falling

Near 

          1.Blanchland 

          For A.S.

Pause in this proximity, 

in the flare of beech trees 

alight with green, 

the canopy of birdsong. 

Now is what we live over and over.

 

Even in this place that feels ancient, 

where our memories come back to us, 

something new is forming, 

an indentation in the surface of things 

a shape making itself felt. 

Listen and it’s as if there’s a note 

almost too high to hear, the merest touch on the strings, 

and we don’t know if we’re imagining it, 

fence and blossom and light 

pierced by singing. 

It takes only this hair-crack in time, 

mid-stride, mid-sentence, 

a bated breath, 

for all the winged creatures suddenly 

to rise up and fly through us.

Dustman 

           (After the painting by Stanley Spencer) 

Everything depends on dust, 

the particles of everything. 

Look closer it tells us. Never 

despise the slightest thing. 

Time is a drift of heaven-knows-what, 

silted into memory. 

Coal-dust, vegetable-dust, 

bone-dust, crockery-dust. 

The dust he noted in the long bare studio, 

warmed by the radiant stove. 

Or the dustmen clattering the bins 

in the street, a paean of bells. 

Life evicts us from our homes, 

yet live we must. 

Fustily, he will resurrect it all. 

The miracle of cabbages 

and teapots and skin. 

Dust to dust 

crowded with yearning 

for how it begins.