1.
The baby was baptised in ice which was broken and swimming about in the font.
There was awkward-
ness, but he broke the ice-
crust delicately as a
brûlée;
these, he said, the sweet
shards and bergs
that save our souls.
2.
At Rhos Goch Lane House no one was at home so I stuck an ivy leaf
into the latch hole.
Improvised, so
you’d know I’d been:
a dying trefoil calling-
card, my meaning
veined on green
vellum pushed
into interior space.
When you come
in, press it between your
pages so it stains.
3.
Her pretty portrait still on the dining room mantelpiece . . . On the bookshelves
stood two cases of stuffed birds . . .
He thought they’d please
her. She thought it
cruel, that embarrassment
of birds, that parliament
of fowls between Hansard
and Hazlitt, posed
passerine, wired for flight.
So early dead,
she said that one close
day she heard them cry for
air in the evacuated cases.
4.
It was the first time I had seen clergyman’s daughters helping to castrate lambs . . .
they carried it off uncommonly well.
They held them like cellos,
the kneeling hands
bent to their relieving
work. It was
wrong all round. Still,
they played beautifully,
drawing something like
music from the bleating
between their legs.
Notes on this poem
With illustrations by Lucy Wilkinson
I came late to the famous diary of Francis Kilvert (1840–79). Published 1938–40, it was immediately acknowledged by readers as a classic. Valued for its detailed observations of nature and social life, it is an important social document; it is also resonantly lyrical. I found it disturbing. Kilvert’s brilliant writing betrays a fascination with the darker side of rural life, and the entries are charged with suppressed desire. The borderland location of Clyro, Radnorshire, amplifies the oddnesses recorded. I was drawn to these vignettes. Something in the writing suggested the need for amplification, and the ‘Kilvert’ sequence enters into dialogue with its subject, responding to short quotations from the diary with poems that both extend and crystallise. (Two other so-called ekphrastic enterprises come to mind: Geoffrey Hill’s response to lines from Cesare Pavese’s diary in Without Title, and R. S. Thomas’s The Echoes Return Slow, in which autobiographical poems and prose pieces fascinatingly play off each other.) I chose entries that worried me; they sit above the poems as both epigraphs and epitaphs. The poems function as a ‘commentary’ – replying, excavating, developing. I aimed for a spareness of language in tune with Kilvert’s economy. The voice shifts, and the line-breaks are meant to cut open and reveal – which, I hope, adds to the strangeness of the portraits of barely contained desire (numbers 2, 4, 5, 6, 9), violence (4, 5, 10, 12), madness and death (2, 3, 7, 11).
