EMAIL INDIGO DREAMS
Loud Voices in the Quiet Child
Dawn Bauling
110 pp
ISBN 978-0-9553589-3-7
£7.99
Jigsaw
Don’t squander what you have
in holding only dreams.
Take dappled days
and sunburst seasons
and, with scattered pieces, place them
in the picture with the rest.
Some parts are more interesting.
Celebrate each one as it fits.
Seek your different sections
with patience,
unhurriedly finding
each new shape and colour
something to marvel at.
And in those parts
that are the hardest,
the skies and seas
and lawns and trees of this life puzzle,
keep looking.
There will be bits that connect
eventually.
Protect your corners,
whatever they may be.
Secure your straight edges between them.
Protect from breakages
and year by year
build something beautiful
that only you will truly know
and recognise.
Enjoy the process
and let others wonder at this creation
for it is fearfully and wonderfully made!
Your poetry moves me with its humanity and love, and the love of being alive, its mix of celebration and poignancy, and the generosity of spirit.
It's hard to pick out just a few from so many I loved but these are some of my favourites: In The Wave Lace, for the hands motif, that wealth of exclusive experience of those past years, and the limitless ocean stretching before the daughter; Barefoot, because it makes me want to dance, with its expected and unexpected rhythms; On Black Head, for the feeling evoked; and Jigsaw, which brought tears to my eyes - a poem that should be on everyone's wall.
Thank you for sharing your self and your vision and voice with the world. I wish you plenty of time and space to continue tending your poetry. I'm really looking forward to seeing the future second collection.
Frances Galleymore
Dawn Bauling was born in Sheffield, England although spent much of her early life like a briar in the fields of Leicestershire. English graduate, librarian and unashamed book-sniffer, she has lived in Derby, Nottingham, Leeds, Leicester and Bedford, working in schools, universities and for the public library service in community libraries and for the mobile library service. She has now returned to rural Leicestershire where she works as a publisher (editing The Dawntreader and Sarasvati, which she co-founded with Ronnie Goodyer) and as a doctors’ receptionist.
Her love of young people led to over fifteen years working as a volunteer youth worker, setting up after-school clubs in Bedford and nearby villages. She recently spent two years as Librarian at Sharnbrook Upper School, in the village where she lived, doing unusual things with books and encouraging young people to read great words and write even greater ones – a time she is incredibly proud of.
Dawn started writing seriously in 2000 and enjoyed quick success with short stories and poetry, winning the Bedfordshire Prize and the Joyce Searle Prize for Poetry in 2004, doing readings at Bedford Corn Exchange and in libraries across the county. A regular contributor to Reach magazine, she has been included in many anthologies and poetry magazines including The National Poetry Anthology 2006, Bluechrome Anthology 2005, Boho Arrival, Bringing it all back home, The Interpreter’s House, The Dawntreader, Countryside Tales, In Country Heaven, Ice Blue Mornings, and again last night… and By the Winter Fires. One poem has been included on Solo Survivors’ ‘Poetry Off The Page’ CD, another has been made into a short film.
Her heart is on a small cliff top Cornwall. Tread carefully...
LOUD VOICES IN THE QUIET CHILD
DAWN BAULING
This is a particularly attractive production from Indigo Dreams Press: Dawn Bauling's long-awaited first collection brings together some excellent poems which will be known to readers of Reach Poetry and The Dawntreader alongside many new and unpublished pieces. It’s a winning combination. All the poems are powerful, honest, beautifully crafted, and filled with the spirit of woman. The book itself is also a beautiful production, with its subtly-coloured cover, perfect binding, and teasingly spare illustration with black-and-white images. Full marks to Ronnie Goodyer and the Indigo Dreams imprint, set, I believe, to become even more of a force in Independent Publishing.
On one level, the collection appears to chart the poetic and spiritual awakening of a woman through encounters, memories, family development, and other relationships, but as Dawn writes in one of her poems, it is never as simple as that. Here we have a very rich tapestry that will repay close re-reading and a gentle osmosis of the poems into our own beings, allowing Dawn's revelations of her own experiences to illuminate ours. Throughout flows that spirit of woman, her life demanding she must always juggle sensuality with responsibilities. The woman who longs to run barefoot over the moors and down to the sea also knows the restrictions of jobs and urban life. While the wind of freedom loosens her hair, she is also tugged by duty. Her quest for the ideal relationship must be tempered by motherhood and family responsibilities. These concerns are universal, and frequently the stuff of women's writing, but will rarely have been addressed with such subtlety or so admirable a lightness of touch.
Dawn doesn't go in for much formal verse (although a few haiku flavour the collection with sparse elegance). Hers is poetry with its own balance, where every word is made not only to count but to resonate. There is frankness, poignancy, frequently a stir of the unexpected, sometimes a dash of wit. I could quote a dozen extracts which are going to stay with me. I shall choose 'Full lives. Starving hearts' (Busy Lives) just one example of the essential subjects this collection is about. There is no doubt that this once-quiet child has found her voice!
Roger Harvey
Early morning on Sam’s Quay
She’s with him early these days,
with the first gull call
closing the stable door on her slender now,
becoming easy as the wind.
She blows unnoticed
through the sleeping eaves and rooftops ,
past hollow shops and over dozing pathways
dripping dew, to lie with him.
He tastes of fish, beer, bacon
with a twist of yesterday’s ice-cream
familiar on her tongue tip.
They talk of deep things -
dark blue not sea-shore,
cold rock and stone once buried under sand,
now hauled to the surface.
He woos her with a lap of extravagant words
eager, generous with loving,
covering her skin in slight salt kisses
white from the years she has waited
faithful and anchored to him.
Tenderly he takes her,
with opened eyes,
wide and wet, glistening
spring gulled shimmering,
whispering ‘come’
to the gentle chink of boat chains.
Later, another unimagined lover looks
into the far distance of her face,
makes her tell him where she’s been.
Blushing, she tells the sometime truth
“to the quay.”
Sorcery
Because you are a sorcerer
you have a pulled a word
from under the tongue of a pagan god
and used it as a spell.
Because you have written it
the runes have become mythril
and I am strung to you, inseparate,
unable to break its silvery coils.
Though I had looked for its shape,
its definition in my pale days,
the blessing did not come -
magicians proved too weak.
Though others, eager, took the quest,
they were too slight, too fearful,
placing the bone’s long whisper
carelessly on a list, like a chore.
Its pulse is loud.
The blood is hot.
Lightening will strike deep.
And you, who keep alchemy,
have conjured measurements of
cinnabar, antimony, orpiment, tin
and mixed my plainer metal in
to an unfamiliar with a throwaway charm.
See it has patterned a tattoo,
an immortality
stitching my dull bedrock with flowers.
Champagne
Champagne
in the morning,
before love and after,
blurs the day’s sharp edges, leaving
sweet burps.
Lopsided
Today I will pick up my stick
and tell them I am fine,
smile at strangers, and stand straight.
I will dress in lime,
dispense better, comfortable words
to dazzle people,
lying like a professional
all day until the soft click of the door
is mine.
Then I will fall sideways,
into the real, slanted world,
bent by the absence of you
who had promised to be there
to hold me upright.
In The Wave Lace
My gorgeous girl
stood at the waters edge and beckoned.
‘Come. Hold.’
Not her first blue, unmoving fingers,
or the later pink, baby carrots
occasionally splintered or grazed.
Not the bitten ones either,
snapped accidentally by happy fights
or ingrained with inconvenient schoolgirl mud,
but four, long, Cleopatra fingers
tipped in raspberry red,
polished and dripping August.
Invited, I grabbed them quickly,
intertwined them with mine,
plaited and tied them to me,
inseparable for the moment,
two proving better than one.
Together we went into the wave lace
she and I, beginning and ending,
Mummy, girl, Mother, daughter, friend,
mixed and ageless,
exclusive.
Our shared faces played,
loosed to hedonistic pleasure,
irresponsibly wet with the day
and each other,
marbled together,
holding on tight.
The sun sank and the tides drove us apart,
but we still know how to find that place.
Stoned
Stones sing
to the tide’s tune,
whisper to the lonely,
and shout rebellion to those who
listen.
On Chynhalls Point
I will always be on Chynhalls Point
breathing the deep air of smugglers –
there, by the grass-filled groove
and rocky back that was my comfort seat
whilst you were sleeping.
I will be waiting for you again,
with the arguing gulls and inscrutable cormorants,
with a pair of fumbling lovers, surprised sheep,
looking for the dawn to rise
and the boats to come home full.
You will hear me in the wave falls
and wind whispers, in the singing stones,
in the quiet passing of a wakened adder,
in the joy of an early morning dog
or the whistling traveller.
So do not put up a seat or a stone,
nor sing me a sombre song,
just sit on the point a while and wait,
watch tankers and minutes pass, smell gorse
and notice beetles balancing on thrift stalks,
listen to clouds and wind surf
as the horizon curves and Coverack winks.
Know you will find me in the richness
of this piece of Cornish earth.
Know that I am, still.
A day of small things
It’s not in the lavish bouquet,
the large celebratory banquet
or the extravagant display of fireworks.
It’s not in the breathtaking sunset either
or the perfect sunlit panoramic view.
It’s in something smaller
and more magnificent -
in the ironing of everyday creases,
the cleaning of wounds,
the washing away of troubles in a bowl,
in the plaiting of flyaway worries,
the quiet minutes sitting with you
sharing the same air and
removing dust until you gleam.
It’s in the snail in your pocket,
the way we hold hands,
the smell of you sleeping,
the tiny, lost toy rabbit,
the sound of your key in our door.
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