Natural Waves

The next section in the Spectral Poetry Book is Nature/ The Sea. This, to my mind, is a perfect progression from Joy (although I don’t get out in nature anything like as much as I used to – or should – these days and, while this isn’t the furthest I’ve ever lived from the sea, it’s still a lot further than I was for most of the first three decades of my life. Very few sounds strike right into my chest on a curl of homesickness and I’m-in-my-right-place-ness as the sound of gulls, let alone the crash of surf. Nature poetry isn’t something that I thought I did, right up until I started compiling this and realising that there was a lot less sea and a lot more nature in my back catalogue than I’d assumed. I blame my Fenland poetry pals for this...! There is a fine and long tradition of poets writing about both – as lovely, terrifying, wonderful, immense, tiny, untouchable, intimate things of themselves and also, of course, as allegory.

As if I’d do something like that...!

As with Joy, these poems are generally quite short, so you get more of them in this section, I think, than any other except the last. You think I’d know by now! As with the previous sections, the poems run through a range of vibes, in order to transport you from the previous to the next theme. How well this works for every reader is yet to be seen, obviously!

The section is started and represented by these hands here:

Unlike the others, I had a fair idea of what I wanted to depict here. Although it, too, has shifted away from the hands holding a verdant island in the sea to the above – less fanciful, but still quite fantastical. This image also marks the first where I was drawing things I could not see to copy, which made for an interesting initial panic, slowly overcome when I realised how much fun I was having. Is the image perfect? By no means. Does it convey what I want it to? Well enough. Did I learn anything making it? Loads, my friend. Loads. Including some fascinating facts about the mechanics of climbing plants…