A Green Thought in a Green Shade
"In the beginning was a garden. And a poet to write about the garden" Sarah Maguire
For centuries the garden has been a hotbed of inspiration for poets, providing a rich source of ideas. A Green Thought in a Green Shade: poetry in the garden is a collection of essays by poets Sarah Maguire, Gerry Loose, Alice Oswald and Eleanor Cooke, who have all recently worked in a garden environment as part of the Poetry Society's inspired Poetry Places project. Each of the poets leads us down a different path to explore the relationship between poetry and gardens.
Sarah Maguire, who was based at Chelsea Physic Garden, explores the ways in which even the language of gardens and poetry - 'posy and poesy' - share the same roots. Working with the often overlooked Order Beds, she 'planted' poems amongst the flowers. This cross-fertilisation of words and plants saw the coupling of poems such as John Clare's 'Hedgehog' with the spiny Echinops and Wilfred Owen's 'Asleep' next to the Valerian plant. At the end of the residency Sarah was "...thrilled with the results..." and delighted "...that Keats and Owen and Blake and Clare, as well as countless other poets old and new, have found a new home, a new poetic paradise to inhabit and to name".
Sound was the focus of Alice Oswald's venture into the gardens at Heale. As she explains, "I don't know anything lovelier than those free shocks of sound against the backsound of your heartbeat. Machinery, spade scrapes, birdsong, gravel, rain on polythene, macks moving, aeroplanes, seeds kept in paper, potatoes coming out of boxes, high small leaves or large head-height leaves being shaken, frost on grass, strimmers, hoses..." Alice's residency was part of Salisbury festival and involved writing poems that would provide the basis for a number of installations by different artists. Alice's desire to put text back into the landscape bore fruit and she wrote a poem based on a Japanese Noh play, which was recorded and placed at the bottom of a well. The poem is whispered to the listener who can look back across the gardens that inspired it. A line from another poem, 'The River' has been carved in stone by a local sculptor and placed in a stream.
The effect of gardens on children and the magic they find within them is looked at by Eleanor Cooke. "If you can take children to a Botanical Garden, the magic is almost guaranteed. The Botanical Gardens in Birmingham is one such place, an out-of-time experience, the horticultural equivalent of walking on the moon."
A botanical garden was also the location for Gerry Loose's residency, this time in Glasgow. The diversity of languages spoken and written in Glasgow - there are more Urdu speakers than Gaelic - was something Gerry wanted to reflect, and poems in English, Chinese and Urdu are scattered all around the gardens. Gerry also held poetry readings, book launches, workshops with visiting writers, produced a poetry flag in collaboration with a local textile artist and hung ribbons with declarations on love to a valentine tree.
A Green Thought in a Green Shade is a rich crop of gardening experiences, evoking memories and images of the garden.
Disclaimer | Credits