David Hart (1) (1940–2022)

Very much a record of a moment, written up from a short series of interactive sessions at the Hay-on-Wye Literature Festival in 1990. Contributors (British and international) include Nina Cassian, Ewa Lipska, Jeremy Reed, Glyn Maxwell, Peter Porter, John Agard, Gillian Clarke, and many others. The initial theme was "Border Country", extended for the later sessions with the addition of "Motherland/Fatherland".

For a practising poet this may be of interest, with notes of discussions and working show more drafts. My own response to other people's poetry is generally rather superficial, and having plundered the collection for some lovely isolated phrases, I passed it on.

Walking the beach
we felt the black grains give,
and the sun stood
one moment on the sea
before it fell.

Gillian Clarke

The sea writes on the sand
in a scribble of weed and gullbones
binder twine, coke cans, torn nets,
fish-hooks, broken glass, bladderwrack...
It discards, draft after draft,
each high tide a deadline.

Gillian Clarke

His mother, calmly and nobly dying,
asked on her last day for champagne
which she had never tasted. She wet her lips,
and in the evening called into her room
someone unseen. 'Who would have thought it,'
she said, very clearly, and crossed the border
for which all others are a preparation.

Leslie Norris

MB 12-ii-2013 show less