Reviews for Rain-charm for the Duchy

The average rating for Rain-charm for the Duchy based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-12-15 00:00:00 Gregory Krause After the five-month drought My windscreen was frosted with dust. Sight itself had grown a harsh membrane Against glare and particles. Now the first blobbly tears broke painfully. Big, sudden thunderdrops. I felt them sploshing like vapoury petrol Among the ants In Cranmere's cracked health-tinder. And into the ulcer craters Of what had been river pools. Then, like taking a great breath, we were under it. Thunder gripped and picked up the city. Rain didn't so much fall as collapse. The pavement danced, like cinders in a riddle. Flash in the pan, I thought, as people scampered. Soon it was falling vertical, previous, pearled. Thunder was a brass-band accompaniment To some festive, civic event. Squeals and hurry. With tourist bunting. The precinct saplings lifted their arms and faces. And the heaped-up sky Moved in mayoral pomp, behind buildings, With flash and thump. It had almost gone by And I almost expected the brightening. Instead, something like a shutter Jerked and rattled - and the whole country darkened. Then rain really came down. You scrambled into the car Scattering oxygen like a drenched bush. What a weight of warm Atlantic water! The car-top hammered. The Cathedral jumped in and out Of a heaven that had obliviously caught fire And couldn't be contained. A girl in high heels, her handbag above her head, Risked it across the square's lit metals. We saw surf cuffed over her and the car jounced. Gates, gutters, clawed in the backwash. She kept going. Flak and shrapnel Of thundercracks Hit the walls and roofs. Still a swimmer She bobbed off, into sea-smoke, Where headlights groped. Already Thunder was breaking up the moors. It dragged tors over the city - Uprooted chunks of map. Smeltings of ore, pink and violet, Spattered and wriggled down Into the boiling sea Where Exeter huddled - A small trawler, nets out. 'Think of the barley!' you said. You remembered earlier harvests. But I was thinking Of joyful sobbings - The throb In the rock-face mosses of the Chains, And of the exultant larvae in the Barle's shrunk trench, their filaments ablur like propellors, under the churned ceiling of light, And of the Lyn's twin gorges, clearing their throats, deepening their voices, beginning to hear each other Rehearse forgotten riffles, And the Mole, a ditch's choked whisper Rousing the stagnant camps of the Little Silver, the Crooked Oak and the Yeo To a commotion of shouts, muddied oxen A rumbling of wagons, And the red seepage, the smoke of life Lowering its ringlets into the Taw, And the Torridge, rising to the kiss, Plunging under the sprays, new-born, A washed cherub, clasping the breasts of light, And the Okement, nudging her detergent bottles, tugging at her nylon stockings, starting to trundle her Pepsi-Cola cans, And the Tamar, roused and blinking under the fifty-mile drumming, Declaiming her legend - her rusty knights tumbling out of their clay vaults, her cantrevs assembling from shillets, With a cheering of aged stones along the Lyd and the Lew, the Wolf and the Thrushel, And the Tavy, jarred from her quartzy rock-heap, feeling the moor shift Rinsing her stale mouth, tasting tin, copper, ozone, And the baby Erme, under the cyclone's top-heavy, toppling sea-fight, setting afloat odd bits of dead stick, And the Dart, her shaggy horde coming down Astride bareback ponies, with a cry, Loosening sheepskin banners, bumping the granite, Flattening rowans and frightening oaks, And the Teign, startled in its den By the rain-dance bracken Hearing Heaven reverberate under Gidleigh, And the highest pool of the Exe, its coil recoiling under the sky-shock Where a drinking stag flings his head up From a spilled sheet of lightning - My windscreen wipers swam as we moved. I imagine the two moors The two stone-age hands Cupped and brimming, lifted, an offering - And I thought of those other, different lightnings, the patient, thirsting ones Under Crow Island, inside Bideford Bar, And between the Hamoaze anchor chains, And beneath the thousand, shivering fibreglass hulls Inside One Gun Point, and aligned Under the Ness, and inside Great Bull Hill: The salmon, deep in the thunder, lit And again lit, with glimpses of quenchings, Twisting their glints in the suspense, Biting at the stir, beginning to move. - Rain-Charm for the Duchy, pg. 1-4 * * * 1. X-RAY Forty years Invisibly The spine of a people. Pillar Of the scales Where Left and Right In alternation Tremble. The fulcrum Behind her eyes. Forty years Weighing The people. These equably British In two mind or Suspended Hover Bound by neither So free Upright Level - Envied. * 2. FALSTAFF Born Court Jesters tout their parts, Hire out their tongues, cash in their hearts To the tabloid howl that tops the charts. Falstaff's our only true-bred Fool, His belly-laugh the only school Where liberty guarantees the rule. Let Licensed Clowns grab ears and eyes. Britain, Falstaff in disguise, Laughs with the Queen and keeps her wise. * 3. THE UNICORN Forty years The Unicorn Has kept watch. Her Lion sleeps In the people. While the Hyena Laughing cries: I feed all Yet fare ill. Her Lion dreams. His colour runs Into her corgis To be near. They are his imps. But he will wake Only for War. * 4. A UNICORN CALLED ARIEL She leaves her horn to guard her crown. She sends her horse to gallop down. She walks as a woman into the town. Democracies and Tyrannies Are up in the air or on their knees - The globe's a trampoline to these. The Ape's brow bursts to reinvent What govern and bewilder meant - Madness comes where most thought went. Those oceanic tears are dry. Thermodynamic anarchy Boils the dream in every eye. Earth's solar fate is non-elective: This geopolitical corrective Puts power-junkies in perspective. Only in Albion a magic hand, A Unicorn's horn or Queen Mab's wand, Or Prosperp's word, holds all spellbound. The Island's Ariel reappears, Tiptoes the tightrope of our fears And franks our freedom forty years. Under the course's jumpy skin Yin gobbles Yang, Yang gobbles Yin. But her Favourite's cool, as if still to begin. Villains, disasters in the sun - How could such odds trouble one Who has done what she has done? The Unicorn can only win The race that she was born to run. If hearts are gold, the money's on. * 5. ENVOI Just come of age I met her eyes Wide in surprise To have been Just made a Queen On a front page. Forty years later Looking at her All see the Crown. Some, their mother. One, his wife. Some, their life. - The Unicorn, pg. 43-47

Review # 2 was written on 2011-12-31 00:00:00 Nickolas Ullrich Perhaps I have a blind-spot when it comes to Ted Hughes, but I fail to see the greatness of his poetry especially in this book. Nothing is actually bad, but I failed to become involved. It is interesting to see these less autobiographical works done as part of his brief to be Britain's Poet Lauriat noting national events, but aside from some interest in this contrast I could well have skipped it.