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Lachrima Vecta

出版	Independently Published, 2019-01-30
主題	Poetry / General
ISBN	17945255489781794525542
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=QwzMwQEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋'These are poems of the soil: not any soil, but the soil of the Isle of Wight. Sea laps the soil and goats wander on it, but it is the soil that speaks: indeed, in these poems soil becomes language. Words are compacted into soil so that it may be cultivated. "Wordploughs" turn up its depths and it speaks of history, the particular history of this Island as in this: "bowels of earth/ secreting bright/ the Saxon song/ of dearth and plight". Neolithic, Saxon, Norman - it is all here. And the scent of the soil is sacred: it knows the orisons of the souls that have been here, it remembers it all from "the shaman's ire" via "the Roman interlude" to its own transformation into "this Christscape of ours". It is turned over by religious upheaval, by "apostles burning nightly/ the deeds of Odin's craft". Yet nothing is lost: "all will change, stay the same" as "Woden names/ their wooden Christ". It is simply that another layer is added to the soil. The landscape observes and absorbs as the new religion comes: "Reeds keep watch/ as Cistercians sleep,/ and men of Stone/ drown in clay." The soil is marked by the Spirit.These poems do not simply unearth the past, however. We cannot be separate from the soil: we came from dust and to dust we shall return. So the sensitivity of their author is alert to more: the spiritual state of our present. In solitude and in silence he hears what the clamour and concerns of our age would trample down: the deeper layers not just of soil, not just of history, but of our spirit. "The tremors of Golgotha" continue to reverberate on this Island and in this world. Our "tear-rich" time may yet come to feel them' - Luke Bell O.S.B