Just to let you know that I’ve been interviewed by the award-winning U.S. middle grade fantasy writer, Cheryl Carpinello, over on her blog – Carpinello’s Writing Pages. Click here to read it:
http://carpinelloswritingpages.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/meet-mg-english-author-steve-griffin.html
This poem was written during a time when I did a lot of volunteering for wildlife trusts and other environmental groups. Amongst other things, I learned how to build a drystone wall, coppice woodland, and lay hedges, in some beautiful parts of the country. There was always something magical about being outside, working with a group of like-minded people, whatever the weather.
Hedgelayer
A man, a man I could have loved
starts to shade, to shade the morning mist.
He is beating stakes, stakes into the clay
forcing them past stones, stones and steady roots,
the things weak within the earth
and the things that hate to move.
As I approach he takes his shape assuredly
from the frail and wet white air,
a seamster weaving hazel whips through the hedge,
outwitting the final challenge of scratch and rip.
In defeat the hawthorn rests its useless claws
uneasily against itself, uncertain how to act.
Then feels the sap rise, rise again in its veins,
and knows that it is elect.
Hedgelayer features in my poetry collection Up in the Air, available here:
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Just a quick post to let you know I’m giving away a signed paperback copy of The Book of Life over on Goodreads. The Giveaway runs until Wednesday 7th September. You can enter by clicking below – good luck!
Giveaway ends September 07, 2016.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
I have already posted about the amazing ‘garden of rooms’ in Herefordshire that inspired The Secret of the Tirthas here. Now there are two more books out, I thought I’d share a few more photos of the garden, including some of the rooms that feature in those books.
ABOVE: The Wedding Cake Tree in the real Miss Day’s Garden. I’ve no idea who the real Miss Day was though – there’s no clues on the Garden’s original map, so she remains a mystery. In The Book of Life this garden is overgrown, abandoned by Evelyn Hartley when her cowardly brother fled the World War One draft through the tirtha to Louisiana.
ABOVE: The view that inspired the scene when Lizzie looks out of her bedroom window on her first night in Rowan Cottage and sees the criss-crossing hedges in the moonlight. The garden right below her is the Sun Garden.
ABOVE: Two South American gods who haven’t (as yet) featured in the stories. And BELOW a photo of them as they are now in a different garden – always pretty glum, but now somehow glummer!
BELOW: The Rill looking up towards The Tower – this place is going to get a lot more important later on.
BELOW: Excerpt from the original list of the Garden Rooms. The Edwardian Path features at the start of the forthcoming book, The Lady in the Moon Moth Mask. The Gothic Garden will come into its own soon, too.
BELOW: The plan of the whole garden is on the first post I mentioned above, but here’s a detail of the Sun Garden and area beyond. It includes the Gothic Garden, and the site where I imagined the Indian Garden.
BELOW: As I wrote in my previous post, the garden has sadly now been mostly grubbed up. Here’s one of the rescued Easter Island heads (the middle one, I think, that Lizzie jumped on to on her way to activating the tirtha…)
BELOW: Some of the garden’s lovely flowers and trees
And finally me, working on the first draft of The City of Light in the garden.
Here’s the final cover for The Dreamer Falls, the third book in The Secret of the Tirthas. I’m very happy with this. What do you think? I’m doing a final proofread at the moment and aiming for the book to be out in the next 3-4 weeks. A perfect read for the beach!
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I recently finished The Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell, one of my favourite children’s authors. Like Rooftoppers and The Girl Savage, this book is highly original and poetic, with a very driven heroine. Feo helps her mum re-wild the no-longer-wanted wolves tamed as status symbols by the elite of Tsarist Russia. The story takes a treacherous turn when a wolf kills a farm animal. Wicked General Rakov tells Feo and her mum that all the wolves need to be killed – something they are determined not to let happen.
Relationships between girls and their mothers are key to the set up in all three novels. In Rooftoppers, Sophie is hunting through Paris in the belief that her mother, declared dead after their ship sank when Sophie was a baby, is still alive. In The Wolf Wilder, Feo is similarly on a quest to St Petersburg to free her mother, imprisoned by the loathsome Rakov. The Girl Savage is different in that Will is not seeking her mother, but rather rebounding from the cruel actions of a controlling stepmother, who has sent her away from her carefree life in Zimbabwe to boarding school in a wet and miserable England, where she is bullied by other girls.
All three books laud the spaces outside of civilisation as bastions of freedom and joy, the snowy forests of Russia, the wide open spaces of Zimbabwe, and even the rooftops of Paris. Society, represented by the aristocrats of St Petersburg who treat wild animals as playthings or the oppressive routines of English boarding schools, is seen as crushing to the spirit and innocence of childhood. In The Girl Savage I’m not sure I really buy the message of compromise of the kindly grandmother of Will’s new friend Daniel. It seems a step too far in contrast to the majestic description of Will’s early life in Zimbabwe. It feels rather that British society has failed to make happiness an option for children.
What makes all three novels stand out is not only the characters and fabulous settings, but the awe and beauty in the language. ‘Once upon a time, a hundred years ago, there was a dark and stormy girl.’ Like Lyra Belacqua in His Dark Materials, Rundell runs the rooftops of Oxford colleges in her spare time. No wonder she’s a favourite of Philip Pullman.
Buy these books:
A little excerpt from The Dreamer Falls, due out within the next month or so (photo from Murchison Falls, Uganda):
“She must have dozed off for a while because when she opened her eyes again she found herself staring at something she recognised, lying on a bare patch of yellowy-brown sand, beneath the hanging fronds of a palm. It was something she knew very well, long and squat, a creature she knew from stories, right from childhood, and one that she had seen before in… zoos!
‘A crocodile! It’s a crocodile!’ she screamed. The boat lurched suddenly as she scrambled to sit upright.
‘Sit still!’ shouted Zuri. ‘We’re all dead if we go in the water!'”
Yesterday was the 72nd anniversary of D-Day. My grandfathers, Fred Griffin and Egon Korn, fought on opposing sides. Egon, a young German of sixteen, was captured shortly after D-Day at the Battle of Caen. He was aiming a bazooka at a tank when the tank commander saw him and fired his machine gun at him. My grandfather’s stick grenade was hit and it exploded, injuring him terribly and killing his friend. He was saved by the Red Cross, sent to Canada, then Scotland, and finally to Eastbourne where, working as a POW, he met my grandmother.
My grandmother died two years ago and I did her eulogy. She left me a note asking me to draw attention to the fact she had met mothers on both sides of the conflict struggling to come to terms with the loss of their children. That’s what made her a campaigner for peace. And, whilst many things might get lost in the detail, it’s worth remembering why Winston Churchill and the other Founding Fathers set up the EU in the first place.
This poem, about a group of veterans revisiting the Normandy beaches, was first published in Poetry Ireland, issue 56.
Last Time
he was here things were a lot more hairy –
invisible fingers were plucking cones of water from the sea
and everywhere the sand was bursting
like puffballs, struck by a flurry of sticks.
Machine guns smacked endlessly at the air
as if its sins were irredeemable,
and the air expressed its pain
with the cries of men, like children.
Lashed by hot grit he’d run like a boy
down the green suede of the Sussex downs, leaping
bodies like the cracked boles of hawthorns,
still fresh with a whorl of flowers
Now, here again after fifty years,
he can hardly believe this was the place –
the wind’s so soft and warm,
the sand and sea don’t glisten –
everything seems as banal as home.
He turns to remark to an old friend
but finds that he’s fallen several yards back
only to be swiftly enclosed
by a circle of kneeling veterans.
The Dreamer Falls, the third adventure in The Secret of the Tirthas, is now in draft and due for publication this summer. It’s set mainly in the jungle in Cameroon, where Lizzie has to go to save a local village boy who’s accidentally discovered one of the portals in her garden.
I decided to set The Dreamer Falls in Cameroon for two reasons: 1) I was keen to bring into a story a Nkisi fetish statue and some other interesting African artefacts I’d seen at an exhibition in The National Gallery and 2) I wanted Lizzie to experience the awe and mystery and hardship of traveling through the jungle. And particularly, I wanted her to encounter a few (but not all) of these beautiful creatures, captured on a trip to Uganda a few years ago:
And some of this magnificent scenery:
Lastly, I couldn’t resist including this photo of the group that went looking for gorillas – the rangers carried guns because of the danger from poachers and armed rebels.
A while back, whilst posting about the influence of painting on my poetry, I mentioned the artist Jocelyn Merivale who died two years ago, far too young.
Below is a sequence of short poems I wrote after visiting an exhibition of Jocelyn’s held at her home in Merton. I’ve included a few photos of her paintings, although I’m afraid they’re not the exact same ones that inspired the poems – but they give a good flavour of her talent. I would put all her paintings up here, they’re fabulous.
And a small point of clarification – these titles and sub-titles are my own, not those of the paintings.
Every Bird is Singing
I watch the painting
with its thousand yellow birds
all edged in black
and only some time later notice
that all their beaks are open,
that every bird
is singing –
Green Ghost Girl at No. 9
Who is this green limned girl
stood at No. 9’s red door?
Won’t they let her in? Are there
bundles of garlic
splashes of holy water
sprigs of wolfsbane round the frame?
Does some sudden memory
paralyse the will of the dead?
Or perhaps she rehearses her performance,
how with just the right moment and angle
she might make forever good her intent,
push her teetering target
over the edge
of a measureless chasm of fear.
Or maybe she just doesn’t have the power
to walk through.
After all there is only so much
the dead can do.
The Sea
is everywhere. We are made to think
of our edges, our rocks and shingle beaches
bee-sting Victorian lighthouses –
of hulls on tossed waters
whose fate is to break.
But the sea is also amongst us
dull green with algae host
sitting, seeping around buildings –
an urge to circumscription
we can entertain, or not.
*
– This is my favourite
he tells me, it reminds me
of the girl I fell in love with.
A beautiful, everything girl
full of treetop song –
with splashes of red
falling down gold beside her
*
And, found behind the portrait of the baby,
a mental hospital, rain, billowing trees
in iron-dark grey
This poem features in my poetry collection Up in the Air, available here: