Sudden Prose Reprints: Somerset Letters 5 by Frances Presley

5

Unpruned prunus.  The banging of doors, his.  Let’s not have too many of these frills.  Soon I will fold up my mother’s clothes and take them to the Red Cross shop, where, in February, she sent me with clothes that were not good enough for the bring and buy. More than nine inches of rain fell during the 24 hours following the evening of 15 August 1952, one of the heaviest rainfalls ever recorded in the British Isles.  Mrs Ellen Jenkins grasped Dilys’ hand and nightdress so hard in order to retain her hold on her daughter that her hand remained clenched for three days afterwards: Harriet Bridle. That series of abstract paintings is just exactly the clouds above the estuary until a seagull gets in the way on the sea wall, which must be a relief for the readers, as they have got it entirely.  Someone asks which are the clouds and which is the sea, and obviously the sea is up there and the clouds are down there.  They are so neatly folded that there is nothing to fold up, nothing at all, only things to take out of her handbags.  She kept everything.  Holland after the war.  All the old pens.  I am not really moving these objects around like a chess game, because then I would know their identities.  They have increased the land drainage level to allow for the flooding, and the Sedgemoor beef farmer lost 40 acres in the summer.  He thinks that without hunting we lose touch with ourselves, with nature, and our place in the food chain.  The new type of jig saw puzzle is a three dimensional mansion.  He’s been up there all day in his room with it and he’s got as far as the first floor.  The speed of discussion on the net is always a problem, but more than that is the anxiety that not enough has been said.  Perhaps it is better to go away and think about it, and remember this crossroads and a place to pick whortleberries.  A gorse bush had fallen across the narrow cliff path, and it was difficult to climb round it.  On the second day it was still there and I pushed hard on its prickly thick stem until the root shifted in the soft wet earth, and it stayed against the bank and did not whip back.  There was a pervading smell of earth and the lightning revealed 40 foot walls of silt. My father wants me to write in the memorial book and I resist and think only of clichés, who loved these woods.  But I imagined my mother seeing these oaks, and say that I will write something 'poetic and original' and he is glad that someone will.  He praises her calligraphy and she says that the entry can be as long as we like.  Those are the scars that were her eyes, on the tall slim trunks of the silver birches, up into a blue sky.  Always prune the rose bush so that the eyes are facing outwards.  The paintings are called 'Broken horizons: shattered dreams', but I think that she liked the yellow in it. 

Somerset Letters was originally published as a book by Oasis Books in 2002, with selections, including this one, later included in Paravane: New and Selected Poems 1996-2003 (Salt, 2004). Presley's last two books were published by Shearsman; to learn more about her and her work and read selections, please see her Shearsman author page here. 

Sudden Prose Reprints: "Seeing Oaks" by Frances Presley

Seeing Oaks

1

Her love of her mother. Her mother’s gift of language.  We were looking at dead or almost dead trees today, trying to decide where we could plant trees for my mother and what kind.   Mr Carslake offered two yews, but I don’t really fancy yews.  They were always in church yards.  There’s a very practical reason for that ....  to keep the cows away for their own protection.   And it was a very useful wood.   Not that they are really poisonous.  I remember Hanley, was that his name in Ruskington?    Hanwell     Yes, he ate a few berries just to show that they weren’t.  Because there were yews at the bottom of the school garden.....  Or walnut trees, he said we could have walnuts.  I’ve got nothing against walnuts, I suppose they’re native.  But I was thinking more of oaks, or maybe ash.  Don’t you think, oaks?  He examined  the branches of a great tree in a clearing that looked almost dead, snapping off some twigs.    They could clear this away.

2

pine needles

wish bones

these two must be separated

not in the same house

skin flurries

wind or the furies

sleep creases

he said that the two oaks will grow

and if they die

they will be replaced

and I imagine my mother

watching them

my eyes her eyes

these gaps of sunlight

between the shifting oak leaves

and that is true of any oak tree

"Seeing Oaks" comes from Somerset Letters, originally published as a book by Oasis Books in 2002, with selections, including this one, later included in Paravane: New and Selected Poems 1996-2003 (Salt, 2004). Presley's last two books were published by Shearsman; to learn more about her and her work and read selections, please see her Shearsman author page here.  

Sudden Prose Reprints: "Five Hundred Pound" by Tony Williams

"Five Hundred Pound" by Tony Williams

My growing up began in a pedalo at Carsington Water, when Granddad said to me, ‘I’ve left you some money in me will. Just so you know. I won’t be going for a long time yet, but when I do, there’s something for you. Five hundred pound.’

  We churned round among the swans without speaking. Drifting in near the bank we went under an overhanging tree, and I felt tiny insects or flecks of sap fall on my head and shoulders. I couldn’t speak; my head was full of five hundred pound.

Granddad was sitting there, his leg warm next to mine, the smell of his hair and coat. But I was thinking: Playstation. Mountain bike. Year’s supply of Haribo.

All through dinner all these ideas were tumbling through my mind. ‘You’re quiet,’ said Granny. It was sort of exciting but sort of painful too – how would I know what to buy? What if I chose the wrong thing?

He hadn’t known he was about to die. It was just chance that on the Monday I got back from school, mucky and cross after Games, and Dad was there, home early, in charge, and Mum was crying and hugging me. They sat me down and told me, and the first thing that came into my head was, ‘Digital camera. Playstation. Portable DVD.’ The second thing was, ‘Granddad’s dead,’ but the damage was done.

On the day I was wearing this dark suit. The collar chafed my neck, and I was glad. I wanted to cry. I looked out of the window of the black car at the rain. My fingers were drumming in my pocket, though. It felt like I had a secret.

At the crematorium I sang along although I didn’t know half the words. I tried to listen to what everyone said about Granddad, but all the time I was thinking how sad I had to be, and not thinking about the other thing. Then I found out I was crying, and it was OK.

Everyone went outside and stood about. Boring. Some of the men were smiling, and then some of the women too. They were talking about drinking. I knew there were tables of sandwiches and sausage rolls waiting at Granny and Grandad’s, and I really wanted to eat a plateful, but I didn’t think it was right. But Dad started rounding everybody up, and I went anyway, sitting in the car next to Mum, her cuddling me too tight.

It was the summer before the money came through. I’d twigged that Mum would make me save it, but she said we could go into Nottingham and spend some of it on something I wanted. We went and stood under the stone lions, and then to Dixons. I got an mp3 player. Then we had burgers at this posh ‘joint’, as Mum called it. They were massive, these burgers. I didn’t like the gherkins. When we were waiting for pudding I got the mp3 player out and had a go on the buttons, tried it out, looked at the instructions. It was OK, but I knew I’d failed.

"Five Hundred Pound" appears in Tony Williams' just-released collection of short stories, All the Bananas I've Never Eaten: Tales of Love and Loneliness (Salt). His stories have appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Horizon Review, Fuselit and Under the Radar. His most recent poetry publication, All the Rooms of Uncle's Head (Nine Arches), was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet choice. He lives in Northumberland and teaches at Northumbria University.

Sudden Prose Reprints: Somerset Letters 4 by Frances Presley

4

I need a grammar that will link the channel tunnel to the need for an extra groin in the sea wall.  I mean groin, depression between belly and thigh.  The minimum number and size of groynes necessary to economically contain the beach material is reassessed by the design architects who realise they will have to see things in the light of October’s storm, for which they were not prepared.  The park warden is urging the sea to break through the shingle ridge and create new openings and lagoons, which look lovely from above.  You cannot economically contain the beach.

Swallow the sun before it sets.  Short moment.  Yellow grass and mounds of sawdust.  The old life.

I am reading Brenda Chamberlain’s account of her life on Bardsey Island (Ynys Enlii), and the strong dark lines of her drawings.  She says that the nature fancier is the town dweller with a sentimental view of things.  Her sentiments are wild and believed to be archaic, but, like the boat to the island, they cannot always hold water.  Nature leaks through excess diction.  The seal’s nose is nobly aquiline.  She listens for a tongue still vocal in the dust of the island, when we know from a long way off that the dust is still vocal in the tongue.     

Frances Presley

Somerset Letters was originally published as a book by Oasis Books in 2002, with selections, including this one, later included in Paravane: New and Selected Poems 1996-2003 (Salt, 2004). Presley's last two books were published by Shearsman; to learn more about her and her work and read selections, please see her Shearsman author page here. 

Sudden Prose Reprints: "Anya's Complaint" by Tony Williams

"Anya's Complaint"

Anya’s beauty was in her hair. She had it tied it up most of the time, sitting in The Plum Pie drinking a gin and bitter lemon, reading her copy of English Folk Tales with a faraway look. But everyone knew that when she let it down, for instance for the river-swimming at the summer festival, or at her father’s funeral, it reached down past her knees, almost to her feet. In that brown bough of frame her pale face, freckled and elfin, could not help but upset the young men of the village. She was a living rebuke, a medieval picture of innocence. In the water, it spread out in a vast circle so that they couldn’t approach her. It was like the stinging fronds of an anemone.

Geoff arrived and they fell in love. He had a job delivering veg boxes for the organic grocer’s. At first he smoked roll-ups, but he soon gave that up after he got together with Anya. His hair was the same colour as hers, but wilder. It lay in tufts over his shoulders. He had a bushy beard, and such a quiet voice that it was almost impossible to talk to him at all. But it was the right volume for whispering in Anya’s tiny white ears.

She took to wearing her hair down more often, and Geoff grew his hair too, and they walked in the fields outside the village, hand in hand. Anya’s hair fell down around her like a priestess’s robes.

One afternoon they went to a secluded spot amongst the beech trees. If anyone had been watching from the hedgerow he would have seen them taking off their clothes and walking, naked, on the crisp remains of last year’s leaves. He would have heard Anya say that her breasts were cold. She used that word – breasts – and the watcher would have reflected that that’s how it was when your girlfriend was ethereal. Perhaps he would have thought that they would put their clothes back on, but instead Geoff reached out his arms and drew her towards him.

He sat cross-legged in the clearing and sat Anya down facing him, then drew her closer so that their faces and bodies became invisible inside a tent of hair. Anya’s reached down past her buttocks and lay in pools on the grass and sticks, and she wrapped it round Geoff and over his shoulders, which were fairly well concealed already. (It had turned out, to nobody’s surprise, that he had the most tremendously hairy back.) They sat like for a long time. For a while Geoff talked about the seasons on a theme suggested to him by Anya’s complaint: natural materials he might use to warm her body or which were suggested by it; locations for a future paradise; and activities therein. Then Anya told him the most secret fears of her childhood, and described in detail the moments when, in her intimacy with Geoff, one by one, each of these fears had been finally laid to rest. Then they sang together for a while, in low voices which were comfortable in their slight tunelessness.

The watchers outside the hair-tent could hear only a low murmur, and none of what was said between Anya and Geoff. They felt ashamed, that they had gone there to see what was not meant to be seen.

In the beer garden later that summer, Briggsy set fire to them for a laugh. It wasn’t funny. Geoff managed to slosh his cider over his face and that saved him from the worst of it – it had to be shaved off later, but he wasn’t burned. But all of Anya’s fabled hair was gone in a second. She had to go off to the county hospital. That wasn’t the worst of it – the worst of it was seeing her suddenly bald head, a charred almond, the fear and humiliation and madness in those eyes. It was sickening to see her hauled through the centuries like that. They had to take off her blouse – that was burning too. And Geoff went and tried to hold her, but she was burned so they wouldn’t let him, and all he could do was to stand round with the others, crying and cooing. That white skin, marked with red burns.

Everyone condemned what Briggsy had done, and it was right that he went to prison. But we were a bit grateful too. We see Anya in The Plum Pie and ask how she is. She wears a scarf with her velvet jacket, but she doesn’t try to hide the scars. Sometimes Geoff’s in there on his own, and he’ll have a drink and a game of pool. He’s alright, a Thin Lizzy fan. We all saw what happened, we see what’s underneath now that the hair has gone. We pummel them with friendly gestures. And now they have to share the love.

"Anya's Complaint" appears in Tony Williams' just-released collection of short stories, All the Bananas I've Never Eaten: Tales of Love and Loneliness (Salt). His stories have appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Horizon Review, Fuselit and Under the Radar. His most recent poetry publication, All the Rooms of Uncle's Head (Nine Arches), was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet choice. He lives in Northumberland and teaches at Northumbria University.

David Gaffney's The Half-Life of Songs

Salt Publishing has brought out what looks to be an interesting collection of flash fictions by David Gaffney. To read more about the book and a delightful selection from it, please see this entry at Tony Williams' blog.

An online journal reviewing short story collections

The Short Review is a monthly online journal that publishes reviews of short story collections and anthologies as well as interviews with short story authors. They also have regular competitions and book giveaways. It's edited by Tania Hershman, author of The White Road and Other Stories (Salt, 2008), a collection of short and short short stories which was longlisted for the Orange Prize.

Forthcoming books for Sudden Prose at Bath Spa

These are to improve our holdings in prose poetry and have just been ordered. I'd be glad for suggestions for short-short story collections beyond what we already have.

Jamey Dunham, The Bible of Lost Pets. Salt, 2009.

Gary Young, Pleasure: Poems. Heyday Books, 2006.

Ian Seed. Anonymous Intruder. Shearsman, 2009.

Peter Riley, Greek Passages. Shearsman, 2009.

Lesle Lewis, Small Boat. Iowa University Press, 2003.

Charles Simic, The World Doesn't End. Mariner, 1989.

Charles Simic, Selected Poems 1983-2001. Faber, 2004.