s h e e t b e n d

 
 

First, the cover

which is meant to be touched; which is made up of three different layers, textures, (paper, linen, ink), and is crafted and light and at the same time emphatic.  Heading North in bold capitals, Helen Rickerby in a finer, thinner font.

And inside

the ink that's pressed firmly into the paper.  That's meant to be read with eyes shut, with fingers running over author's name, title, press, place , time and thereafter,

fifteen poems

beginning with 'Setting Off', and it was now, ending with 'Home Stretch', and to the other.  Because Heading North is a road trip, or a pilgrimage, or a northwards meander, which is lightly reverent, and wry and humorous, and quiet and assuredly observant. There are Indian takeaways, hotels, hoteliers, road signs, camping, mosquitos, flat tyres.  There are moments of intimacy and reflection and indolence.  Roads, forests, varying shades of light, this is also a trip down the motorways of relationship, time, memory, rest

and return

and the line and we're so close now - to home, or to each other, or to an end of something - like uncertainty, or the curiosity about what else might be.

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Time's Fool is about a man who is a ghost on a ghost train, who is not dead, but fixed: to his age, to his state.  He sees his friends wrinkle, his parents shrink, and only once every seven years, on Christmas Eve, can he get off at Hartisle and take a walk about the place.  Time's Fool is a verse novel: tight, inventive, sheer; rhythmical and rapid and clever and keen.  It is an essay in opposites, and the still moment, (of waiting, wanting, wondering, relenting), against the course of seconds that run into hours, that run into years - of metamorphoses, of ends.  Speed, slowness, passing-ness.  And here, eight lots of neat, discrete visitors through the door so far.  Edmund Lea or Hartisle or neither.  The mirror hangs over the radiator; over the accidental light sculpture which doesn't have an on/off switch but seven different settings of fade in/out.


XXVI

The seventh year was hills seen from afar,
the mistiest of blue, its weeks and days
all estimates.  A keeness in the air

I took for autumn in a pinewood place
we glided through forever, and the frost
I called No-temper, I required ice

on every pane and from myself a mist
at every breath before Descender came,
and then my joke was 'under train-arrest'

Maxwell, Glyn. Time's Fool. Picador, London, 2001

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We rent an apartment in Gràcia, ten minutes walk to Fontana through Plaça de la Virreina, or a five minutes to Joanic, and the most direct route down to the Arc de triomf. On the first night, we eat noodles on Plaça del Diamant, or Plaça de La Mercè Rodoreda, where Rodoreda set The Pigeon Girl in the Thirties, and where the skateboarders skate and the activists under forties drink their digestives. I've been reading I love You When I'm Drunk by Empar Moliner, and lines like, 'my wife has put lipstick on and sits with her legs tightly pressed together'; which makes me think Empar is a man, but she isn't.  She is wry and smart and I read three of her stories, 'The Invention of Aspirin', 'Getting Rid of Pests', 'The Great Wall', on the sidewalk outside that Gaudi must-see, La Pedrera, and feel a partisan. Then, on Monday, it pours and we are caught without jackets or umbrellas. We have to hang our drenched clothes all over the furniture and jump in the shower and boil up some water for tea. But only after jiggling the key in the lock for five minutes, or is it ten, and satisfying the passing Gràcians that we're breaking-in for a quick squat.

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Tying in 09/16/2010
 

The Sheet

from OE scaeta, piece of cloth: orig. a large piece of fabric used to propel a sailing vessel

1294: rope that determines the angle of the sail in relation to the wind

1510: paper used for writing or printing

1592: any broad, thin, expanse or surface

1697: come down, as if in sheets; or cover with a sheet, as if by wrapping

The bend

from ON benda, to join, strain, strive, bend: orig. Nautical. To fasten.

then

to bring into a state of tension

then

to apply the mind closely

then

after 1400: a curve, as in a bend in the road.

The sheet bend

is a bend, or knot, that joins two ropes together.
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This is my first post/sheet bend.
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