POETRY TEIGNMOUTH
“POETRY MATTERS”
  • Home
  • Events
  • Festival 2023
  • Competition 2023
  • Poetry
  • Poetry Archive
  • Links
  • Readings
  • Festivals Archive
  • Email Opt-in
  • Veronica Aaronson
  • Graham Burchell
  • Ian Royce Chamberlain
  • Virginia Griem
  • Jennie Osborne
Picture
Poet, author and workshop facilitator Roselle Angwin leads the ‘Fire in the Head’ creative and reflective writing programme. As an eco-poet and eco-psychologist, she also leads ‘The Wild Ways’ outdoor workshops and retreats; both programmes take place on Dartmoor, in Cornwall, on the Isle of Iona and France.

She's passionate about wild places and the natural world, as well as the meeting points between inner and outer geographies: relationship, connection, land. She has been described as 'a poet of the bright moment... whose own sources of creative inspiration are her native Westcountry, the Scottish islands, and a highly individual blend of Celtic myth and metaphysics, archetypal psychology, shamanic and Buddhist thinking'. Her ten books include poetry, novels and non-fiction.

Roselle is leading a half-day workshop for the Teignmouth Poetry Festival on Friday 20th March (‘Leaf and Cosmos’)

www.fire-in-the-head.co.uk
www.thewildways.co.uk

She blogs on her various passions at roselle-angwin.blogspot.com



 Chagford haibun

In the lilac tree
chiffchaff sings
thiswaythiswaythisway

The head says ‘choose’ but the heart knows there are many paths. In the end the sacred mountain is right here; 
sometimes the fog rolls in, sometimes the way forward is clear, sometimes all you can do is stand still and wait 
for the mountain to find you.

Here in a chill wind
the tiled terrace
meets my feet with warmth

though the sky is flocked with cloud. The hill is tonsured with trees, newly green. At the dinner table we talk 
about the season, and which we need to hide from, how an exuberance of light can drown us as much as the dark.

I think that my friend’s smile
as much as his tears
can break my heart

The small wind is getting bigger, the prayer-flags straining to leave.

Below, in the valley
individual drops lost

still the river is constant


Roselle Angwin; published in Scintilla

going into the meadow after the retreat

in the meditation hall
we interrogate the silence
for a way of being human

then later again
barefoot and slow on wet spring
grass in the wild dervish storm

and back
picking twigs, ash, feathers
out of the ‘no inside no outside’ teachings

later, home
the horse’s light breath on my cheek
the way he delicately politely

only just
meeting my eyes reads my face
hands hair with his gentle muzzle

as if he smells
questions, as if I were an event
blown in on the whirling wind

as if
from within the zero
of Zen in which he dwells

he barely
recognises me, each thing wholly
new, every encounter the first

Roselle Angwin. Published in Bardo, Shearsman 2011


Such a small space between

Last night when I couldn’t sleep I got up and looked
at the stars, and that light that accrues
on horizons even at night. Birth and death
seemed such small concepts; and what’s between

squeezed like breath, and so arbitrarily; and we all
think we’re so malnourished in the realm of the heart.
Still, in this morning’s brilliant sun before this salt
dusting of sleet, I watched three white egrets

paddle in the bullocks’ mud like hunched dwarf
angels, and the fibre-optics man climbed down
from his thrumming cab and smiled as he let me through
even though I’d moved the ROAD CLOSED barrier –

perhaps because of the sun, or because I’m
a woman; or maybe because the earth’s still
spinning, and we haven’t yet fallen off.

Roselle Angwin. Published in All the Missing Names of Love, IDP 2012


postscript

it’s not the words that count
it’s what flickers in the
quickening ground
between them

Roselle Angwin, in Bardo (Shearsman 2011)