John Glenday is the author of three collections. The Apple Ghost won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award, and Undark was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation (both Peterloo Poets). His most recent collection, Grain, was published by Picador in November 2009 and shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Prize for Excellence in New Poetry. To read an interview with John about the collection on the Scotsman website, click here

Click image to visit the Tennyson Page; for the Poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.

Click image to visit the Yeats Society Sligo website; to read a selection of Yeats' poetry on Martin Hardcastle's website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.

Click image for pages on Eliot on the Modern American Poetry website; to visit the What the Thunder Said website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.

Click image to visit the Richard Brautigan Pages; for a selection of Brautigan's poetry on the DivineNTD website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.

Click image for a biography of MacDiarmid on the BBC Writing Scotland website; to read MacDiarmid's 'A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle' online, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.

Click image to visit the official William Soutar website; for a biography of Soutar on the BBC Writing Scotland website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.

Click image for pages on Strand on the Modern American Poetry website; for an interview with Strand on the Bold Type website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.

Click image for an interview with Burnside on the Guardian Unlimited website; for a profile of Burnside on the British Council's Contemporary Writers website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.

Click image to visit Don Paterson's official website; for a profile of Paterson on the British Council's Contemporary Writers website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.

Click image to visit Simon Armitage's official website; for a profile of Armitage on the British Council's Contemporary Writers website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.

Click image for a profile of Gorecki on the Polish Music Centre website; to read Bruce Duffie's interview with Gorecki, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.

Click image to visit the Story of the American Gothic website; to listen to Melissa Gray's report on the American Gothic on the NPR website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.

Click image to view paintings by Brueghel on the WebMuseum Paris website; to visit the Pieter Brueghel Gallery website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.

Click image for an overview of Rothko on the NGA website; for a biography of Rothko on the Guggenheim Collection website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.

Click image for a profile of John on the BBC Wales website; to view a selection of John's paintings on the Telegraph website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.

Click image to read Antonia Shanahan's essay on Fellini on the Senses of Cinema website; for an interview with Fellini on the Bright Lights Film Journal website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.

Click image to visit the Akira Kurosawa Database; for a profile of Kurosawa on the BFI website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.

Click image to read Antonia Shanahan's essay on Fellini on the Senses of Cinema website; for an interview with Fellini on the Bright Lights Film Journal website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.

NACREOUS CLOUDS

Leave a message for John on the SITE
FORUM

SELECTED POETRY

by
John Glenday

FROM THE HUNGARIAN OF SANDOR FOLDALATTI

I - BLUE

Blue: sweet colour of far away,
the colour of farewell, the colour
I remember from your eyes.

A childhood blue once trembled
where the city stutters
into dusty scrub and empty

marshalling yards.
The last grim veil of innocence
was blue.

If I were asked to construct
a world that wasn’t there,
I’d make its every surface

scrupulously blue
and you, the only
resident.


II - TODAY, I AM A NEW MAN

Today, I am a new man,
a stranger in the town that bore me.

How simple it is to become a ghost -
just one word, one gesture, and we slip

through the fretwork of other people’s lives
as easily as water through a stone.

Gradually, my heart sheds its weight,
this once familiar rock has hatched a swallow.

Just for today, if I were to pass myself in the street,
I wouldn’t even raise my hat, or say hello.


III - A WHITE MOTH FALLS, DYING

A white moth falls, dying,
like a torn scrap of paper,

or paper burned to ash,
or dogged summer snow,

or a petal from a mountain rose
discarded by a love-sick village girl,

or a diploma of little worth,
that holds not a single word,

being the blank sum of all words in itself.
Look, poor thing, even as it passes away

it tries to read, opening and closing
the empty pages of its life.


IV - HOW HOT THIS SUMMER WIND BLOWS

How hot this summer wind blows
trailing the scent of somewhere far away:
the smell of the beech forests, of the great inland sea,
of glass-white Siberia or farthest America -
that fictitious country, guarded by the blind giant
Freedom, with its green hands and white, white heart.

The crickets trill their dusky lullabies,
the willows by the roadside droop and doze.
How hot the summer wind blows through me,
so why do I hug myself this way,
and why do I tremble so?


V - SILENCE THE COLOUR OF SNOW

Silence the colour of snow,
settles against everything we love –
the late, startled flowers, the roadside stones -
all edges softened, all calamities blurred.

Why do you accuse me of never talking with you?
You know, they used to say that
if all the tongues in the world were stilled at once,
their common silence would translate itself

to a snow that even the summer winds
could never drive away. Hush now, not another word.
Look! High over the frozen manger,
my answer hangs and falls, that six fingered star.


VI - REMEMBER THOSE WILD APPLES

Remember those wild apples
we would gather in the autumn, stained
with a half-faced blush, or the viridescent
shadow of a vanished leaf?
They clung to the early cold like a young girl’s heart.

Grandfather said they were all seeded
from that first tree God espaliered in Paradise;
its fruit so bitter, even Adam felt compelled
to spread softened honey on the flesh
before he could savour exile, and the world.


Author Note:

Sándor Foldalatti was born in Budapest on March 29th 1952. Since graduating from the University of Pezs with a combined Honours Degree in Fruit Husbandry and Applied Transport Mechanics, he has worked as a ticket collector on the Budapest underground. He is the author of two collections of poems: ‘The Straw Clock’ (Sobor Press, 1989) and ‘A Bicycle of Feathers’ (Ferihegy Books, 1995). He lives in a one bedroomed flat in central Budapest with his German wife Erika, five children, a large black dog, a three legged cat and a dwarf ocelot.

The translator would like to thank Janos Kukorelly, Director of Traffic Flow with the Hungarian State Subterranean Railways, for providing the literal translations from which these English versions derive.

© John Glenday

---

GENESIS

that at any given moment God demolishes the world,
only to rebuild it instantly, altered and oblivious.

Everything from our first formlessness
to the final blare of light stands witness
to this infinite substantiation of His love.

Their bible consists of just the one book,
predictably named Genesis.
Here we may read of that strange bush consumed

in a terrible caul of silence; and the lost garden,
without fruit and without serpent,
where the hopeful naked wait with the hopeful innocent.

© John Glenday

---

LANDSCAPE WITH FLYING MAN

His father fixed those wings to carry him away.

They carried him halfway home, and then he fell.
And he fell not because he flew,

but because he loved it so. You see,
it’s neither pride, nor gravity but love

that in the end will pull us back down to the world.
Love furnishes the wings, and that same love

will watch over us as we drown.
The soul makes a thousand crossings; the heart, just one.

© John Glenday

---

A FAIRY TALE

She had been living happily ever before,
waltzing through imagined ballrooms in the arms
of a handsome young prince. Then, one day, they kiss
for the first time, he takes back the word love

and suddenly bloats to an idle, wounded beast
that stoops above her in its unfamiliar, thickening hide.
She trembles before his yellow breath and white, strange eyes.
Each night from her solitary bed, she overhears the echoes

of unimaginable rages which transform their castle
to a ruin of shadowy rooms with a cursed and sleeping heart.
At last she understands him poorly enough to be terrified
and run a gauntlet of scattering wolves to the arms of her sick father

who greets her with a tearful goodbye. They subsist
forever after on a diet of simple gruel and vague desire.
When passers-by ask her about her life, she waltzes the laundry
to her heart and answers with a distant smile: Once upon a time.

© John Glenday

---

ETCHING OF A LINE OF TREES ON A HILL ABOVE AUCHTERHOUSE

I cut away the fabric of the trees
and the trees stood shivering in the darkness.

When I had burned off the last syllables of wind,
a fresh wind rose and lingered.
But because I could not bring myself

to remove you from that hill,
you are no longer there. How wonderful it is
that neither of us managed to survive

when it was love that surely pulled the burr
and love that gnawed its own shape from the burnished air
and love that bent that absent wind against a tree?

Some shadow’s hands moved with my hands
and everything I touched was turned to darkness
and everything I could not touch was light.

© John Glenday

---

MORE OF JOHN'S INFLUENCES AND FAVOURITE THINGS

I divide into deid, aff the legs and living.

Deid influences in roughly chronogical order of influence are: My Mum, my Dad, Tennyson; Yeats; Eliot; Richard Brautigan, Hugh MacDiarmid, William Soutar.

Living Influences: Mark Strand, John Burnside, Don Paterson, Simon Armitage.

Favourite Things: (this changes from month to month, mood to mood)

Favourite Place: That gap in the birch woods just beyond Keenie, Glenesk, especially in late spring.

Favourite Music: Gorecki's Third Symphony

Favourite Painting: Grant Wood 'American Gothic' (How many pitchfork echoes can you find? And doesn't he just look like the dentist he really was?) or maybe its not American Gothic, maybe its Brueghel's 'Massacre of the Innocents', or perhaps that Rothko that looks just like the TV screen a few seconds after you hit the off button; or almost anything by Gwen John that isn't a Nun.

Favourite Meteorological Phenomenon: nacreous clouds.

Favourite Film: Fellini 'La Strada'/Kurosawa 'Dersu Uzala' (dead heat)

Favourite non-posing Film: The Matrix

Favourite Axiom: 'Write a little day, without hope and without despair.' (Karen Blixen)

Favourite Last Words: 'Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees.' (Stonewall Jackson)

© John Glenday

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