“In the dark times Will there also be singing?” Yes, there will be singing, there will be songs of
longing, songs of love and loss. Listen, and you can hear a soft voice in the silence of the night.
The world sleeps, but even in the depths of the darkness, just before dawn, a poet speaks. 4 a.m.,
as the pale light grows stronger, a wordsmith weaves words, unpicks verse, sows dissent and
enfolds you in the warp and weft of time. Sings for you, across the moon-drenched hills and the quiet
streets of the sleeping town. In the distance, in the distance, you can hear a voice singing, feel the despair
and hope for redemption. Wake and you will hear music: elegies, prophecies and lamentations.
Abandoned on the borders of sleep you dream, you dream of blood and fire and ecstasy, and somewhere a
still small voice of hope calls to you.
And, as the dawn breaks and the blackbird sings from the tip of an apple tree. She doesn't know
how many others hear her song. How many people will carry that melody with them and think of
it in the lost moments of the day? All those listeners alone in the darkness share this secret.
Those who read ‘With Love, Grief and Fury’ will carry its songs into the world, they will hear
the echoes of its verse in their despair, singing its words in the depths of their hearts. And none
will know who shares this secret, who will also mutter these spells under their breath. Who in the
depths of the night will call out to the cold moon and get no reply, then turn on the light and open
this book.
So, I think I have a problem because I’m reviewing a book that outshines my ability to describe
its brilliance. And I am like a child watching the silver fishes play in the rockpools of the shore,
while an ocean of unfathomable depth surges and swirls, and crashes on the beach. The waters
drown the land and then retreat, as the tides are dragged by the distant sway of the moon.
And I thought I could write about Bowie and Prince and how their deaths seemed to diminish us
all. Prince is the subject of one of the poems. Bowie’s music was so important to so many people
and I was lucky enough to see him in London. I thought of Heddon Street, a man in a jumpsuit in
the harsh light of a telephone box, hand on hip or perhaps with a guitar under the K. WEST sign,
on a rain-soaked pavement lit by a street lamp. I look away and when I look back a woman in a
yellow kimono stands in the lamplight looking back at me. I thought of Prince playing for hours
at some jazz club after a big London show. Perhaps they came to mind because they meant so
much to me and seemed to mean so much to Salena Godden. Perhaps they too, were singing
songs about the dark times. I wanted to write about Bowie and Prince, but in the end, I didn’t.
So, daunted by the task before me. I put down my pen and read the whole of the book again,
instead of writing this review.
This collection is elegant and brutal, personal and political, passionate and witty, overwhelming,
wide-ranging, and wonderfully, profoundly wise. It is no slim volume of polite verse, it is as long
as a summer’s day, that you wish would never end, as long as the dark hours of St. Lucy’s
festival, when in December the stars burn so bright. It screams for justice and cries in pain and
then it whispers low so you have to lean forward to hear the truths told and the beauty, yes! The
heartbreaking beauty.
‘With Love, Grief and Fury’ is part memoir, part prophecy. It deals with loss and with illness. It
celebrates the wisdom that comes with time. It covers the fear of the pandemic and the isolation
of the lockdown. It examines the fulfillment of creating books and the sacrifices that are implicit
in producing your best work. A woman on fire walking through a world on fire. War rages, shells
fall and on a beach, a child’s body lies between the sandcastles and the deckchairs, washed up
amongst the plastic bottles, the cigarette lighters and the sanitary towels. And in the near future
will the dawn be silent, will people pile up the poetry books and douse them in petrol? Maybe the smoke will choke them.
They told you not to sleep in the moonlight, to keep your curtains closed tight, For who knows
what dreams the full moon may send? You might leave your door open, forget your old life and
run out into the night. And if you did, would you hear the ghost of a nightingale? Would you run
with the wolves through the empty streets and sing to the moon? Would you speak truths and
reveal the future, until Apollo spits in your mouth? Would you still howl your verse even if no
one listens? Is it not better to have run with the wolves and to have seen the blood moon rise
from a storm at sea than to lie at home in bed? Icarus should have flown by moonlight.
If one day I saw my younger self walking towards me on a busy street, I’m sure I would pass
him without any acknowledgement, too embarrassed to even ask how it was possible. When the
poet meets her younger self, watch their faces light up, watch them hug and hold each other.
Then push apart smiling, join arms and stroll away. As they pass, only you can hear the older
woman say: “I love the turquoise cowboy boots!”
“Have you still got them?”
“Of course I have.”
“And those tapes I made that October? When I recorded everything on cassettes?”
“Sealed in a box somewhere.”
Later, you pass a pub and they are sitting at the window, engrossed in conversation.
And, if we were to unseal that box of tapes? Let the voices speak, let the ghosts escape. Then,
then… would it seem less likely? If, one day when you walked into the kitchen you found a
young couple laughing by the toaster. Were we ever this young? And from the next room, Tom
Waits sings “They say that dreams are growing wild Just this side Of Burma-Shave.” And at that
moment, they are so close, so close, that you could almost reach out a hand…
And I think about Brecht, singing about the dark times and the burning of books, I think of
Bowie and Prince, of the last line of The Great Gatsby, of a poem on fame by Charlotte Mew, of
that quote from Nina Simone, Tom Waits singing ‘dreams are growing wild Just this side Of
Burma-Shave,’ Blakes’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Langston Hughes, the moonlit
magic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Philip Larkin.
its brilliance. And I am like a child watching the silver fishes play in the rockpools of the shore,
while an ocean of unfathomable depth surges and swirls, and crashes on the beach. The waters
drown the land and then retreat, as the tides are dragged by the distant sway of the moon.
And I thought I could write about Bowie and Prince and how their deaths seemed to diminish us
all. Prince is the subject of one of the poems. Bowie’s music was so important to so many people
and I was lucky enough to see him in London. I thought of Heddon Street, a man in a jumpsuit in
the harsh light of a telephone box, hand on hip or perhaps with a guitar under the K. WEST sign,
on a rain-soaked pavement lit by a street lamp. I look away and when I look back a woman in a
yellow kimono stands in the lamplight looking back at me. I thought of Prince playing for hours
at some jazz club after a big London show. Perhaps they came to mind because they meant so
much to me and seemed to mean so much to Salena Godden. Perhaps they too, were singing
songs about the dark times. I wanted to write about Bowie and Prince, but in the end, I didn’t.
So, daunted by the task before me. I put down my pen and read the whole of the book again,
instead of writing this review.
This collection is elegant and brutal, personal and political, passionate and witty, overwhelming,
wide-ranging, and wonderfully, profoundly wise. It is no slim volume of polite verse, it is as long
as a summer’s day, that you wish would never end, as long as the dark hours of St. Lucy’s
festival, when in December the stars burn so bright. It screams for justice and cries in pain and
then it whispers low so you have to lean forward to hear the truths told and the beauty, yes! The
heartbreaking beauty.
‘With Love, Grief and Fury’ is part memoir, part prophecy. It deals with loss and with illness. It
celebrates the wisdom that comes with time. It covers the fear of the pandemic and the isolation
of the lockdown. It examines the fulfillment of creating books and the sacrifices that are implicit
in producing your best work. A woman on fire walking through a world on fire. War rages, shells
fall and on a beach, a child’s body lies between the sandcastles and the deckchairs, washed up
amongst the plastic bottles, the cigarette lighters and the sanitary towels. And in the near future
will the dawn be silent, will people pile up the poetry books and douse them in petrol? Maybe the smoke will choke them.
They told you not to sleep in the moonlight, to keep your curtains closed tight, For who knows
what dreams the full moon may send? You might leave your door open, forget your old life and
run out into the night. And if you did, would you hear the ghost of a nightingale? Would you run
with the wolves through the empty streets and sing to the moon? Would you speak truths and
reveal the future, until Apollo spits in your mouth? Would you still howl your verse even if no
one listens? Is it not better to have run with the wolves and to have seen the blood moon rise
from a storm at sea than to lie at home in bed? Icarus should have flown by moonlight.
If one day I saw my younger self walking towards me on a busy street, I’m sure I would pass
him without any acknowledgement, too embarrassed to even ask how it was possible. When the
poet meets her younger self, watch their faces light up, watch them hug and hold each other.
Then push apart smiling, join arms and stroll away. As they pass, only you can hear the older
woman say: “I love the turquoise cowboy boots!”
“Have you still got them?”
“Of course I have.”
“And those tapes I made that October? When I recorded everything on cassettes?”
“Sealed in a box somewhere.”
Later, you pass a pub and they are sitting at the window, engrossed in conversation.
And, if we were to unseal that box of tapes? Let the voices speak, let the ghosts escape. Then,
then… would it seem less likely? If, one day when you walked into the kitchen you found a
young couple laughing by the toaster. Were we ever this young? And from the next room, Tom
Waits sings “They say that dreams are growing wild Just this side Of Burma-Shave.” And at that
moment, they are so close, so close, that you could almost reach out a hand…
And I think about Brecht, singing about the dark times and the burning of books, I think of
Bowie and Prince, of the last line of The Great Gatsby, of a poem on fame by Charlotte Mew, of
that quote from Nina Simone, Tom Waits singing ‘dreams are growing wild Just this side Of
Burma-Shave,’ Blakes’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Langston Hughes, the moonlit
magic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Philip Larkin.
“In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark
times”
When the Regime ordered that books with dangerous teachings
Should be publicly burnt and everywhere
Oxen were forced to draw carts full of books
To the funeral pyre, an exiled poet,
One of the best, discovered with fury, when he studied the list
Of the burned, that his books
Had been forgotten. He rushed to his writing table
On wings of anger and wrote a letter to those in power,
Burn me, he wrote with hurrying pen, burn me!
Do not treat me in this fashion. Don’t leave me out. Have I not
Always spoken the truth in my books? And now
You treat me like a liar! I order you:
Burn me!
I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlour
Drinking milkshakes cold and long
Smiling and waving and looking so fine
Don't think you knew you were in this song
You don't have to be rich to be my girl
You don't have to be cool to rule my world
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past
Yet, to leave Fame, still with such eyes and that bright hair!
God! If I might! And before I go hence
Take in her stead
To our tossed bed,
One little dream, no matter how small, how wild.
Just now, I think I found it in a field, under a fence—
A frail, dead, new-born lamb, ghostly and pitiful and white,
A blot upon the night,
The moon’s dropped child!
“I'll Tell You What Freedom Is to Me. No Fear”
Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now:
I see the island
Still ahead somehow.
I see the island
And its sands are fair:
Wave of sorrow,
Take me there.
Just a nickel's worth of dreams
And every wish bone that they saved
Lie swindled from them on the way
To Burma-Shave
And the sun hit the derrick
And cast a bat wing shadow
Up against the car door
On the shotgun side
And when they pulled her from the wreck
You know she still had on her shades
They say that dreams are growing wild
Just this side
Of Burma-Shave
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which falling in the land
Have every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents:
The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard;
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
We had five years left to cry in (cry in)
News guy wept and told us
Earth was really dying (dying)
Cried so much his face was wet
Then I knew he was not lying (lying)
and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
And yes, I wish I could have written a review, but this book is better than my ability to describe
it and it's much better that you read it yourself.
It's 4 a.m. as I write this and I can hear the blackbird’s song, can you?
It's 4 a.m. as I write this and I can hear the blackbird’s song, can you?
It's 4 a.m. as I write this and I can hear the blackbird’s song, can you?
Guy Thornton
With Love, Grief and Fury by Salena Godden
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 9781805303510
Number of pages: 240
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