Triune was published in Shearsman 75/76
[Freya Stark, 1893-1993, travel writer, essayist, photographer, Arabist, adventurer, autobiographer. In Traveller’s Prelude she wrote of sitting in the bay of her bedroom at her father’s house on Dartmoor, looking through the window and imagining her future travels. At Last Arabia is the title of one of Stark’s ravishing accounts of her travels to the then most exotic places on earth; she is drawn to the Orient and her twenty travel books include maps of uncharted regions of Arabia.
Francis Bellerby, 1899-1975, poet and fiction writer lived at Clearbrook on Dartmoor from 1951 1955. Early in marriage a cliff fall left her with a permanent back injury and in 1950 Francis was diagnosed with breast cancer. In her poem “It is not likely now” she looks west from the bedroom window of her cottage: “a great fleet jewels the sky tonight”. Beatrice Chase (Olive Catherine Parr), 1874 -1955 writer, especially of books on Dartmoor. Her most famous book, The Heart of the Moor was written in 1914. Beatrice added what became a famous window to an extension of the cottage she moved into at Widecombe in the Moor, in 1901. She loved to sit and look through this window whilst writing; two titles reflect this: Through a Dartmoor Window and The Dartmoor Window Again.]
The following photos are of Clearbrook, where Frances Bellerby lived for a while and Widecombe, (Beatrice Chase's grave is here).
Triune
You can see them shaped in the frame looking through the window they are on the threshold at the projection of this Devonian land: she stares eastward over into her own future; her concerns only in the west with those that have passed; between the both catching the thread, she’s for ever sitting in the window, completing her book, without end …
Freya
is Artemis attuned to earth
new land cone-shaped a volcano
opens every morning over the eastern brow
of Meldon Hill nose to peat ground
she’s discovering buried cities in the husks of silt
and sand yet curiously oblivious to lost voices
of invisible fates she’s immersed in this landscape
the source of the starting points of life’s journey
a future for travel yet grounded in moor
and steeped with its bones Stones
in her pocket weigh forever her way
salt to dust-earth Moor is her playground Prelude
Treasure later she will make her own map
text uncoiling in a long ravishing italic sigil
over shadier foreign lands At last Arabia!
Frances
How aware she is of hushed voices
warning of those future years of wracking pain
Her house desolate unsettled as the now rare texts
but in her mind a bijouterie of words
She knows of those in mist they sift
with early ghostly shifts on water
notes voices listening on stone and
light’s gaze through grass from the brink
of moor thus found she can’t write
her soul’s on a trip somewhere
else assailed by death and its intricate choice
of paths Herself one of the undead dead
she’s saved by those she’s always
comforted wild animals of earth
tortoise cat owl moth
lampyridae blaze their singing trails
Her poems are encrypted
where her mind’s a lark
over Roborough Down
She’s watching sunsets
quivering on the shafts of light
Lux eterna Lux eterna
Beatrice
at her window describes the rainbow high behind Hound-Tor back
Afternoon she climbs Bonehill Down her high-laced boots
Spring
on peat beneath
Shadows limestone caves an age when mammoths roamed
She is and will be remembered Matriarch of the Moor
now her girth surmounts an east to west moorland circumference
heavy that gait solid the texturing green tweed overskirt
sweeping boulders and brooks watch her squat
over bracken purple moor the sweet vernal grass
crossleaved heath a-swirl of sigils on rock
her belly a crevice
the issuing wound of words
Slow Eternal
this rich fermentation
the textual ground.
[Freya Stark, 1893-1993, travel writer, essayist, photographer, Arabist, adventurer, autobiographer. In Traveller’s Prelude she wrote of sitting in the bay of her bedroom at her father’s house on Dartmoor, looking through the window and imagining her future travels. At Last Arabia is the title of one of Stark’s ravishing accounts of her travels to the then most exotic places on earth; she is drawn to the Orient and her twenty travel books include maps of uncharted regions of Arabia.
Francis Bellerby, 1899-1975, poet and fiction writer lived at Clearbrook on Dartmoor from 1951 1955. Early in marriage a cliff fall left her with a permanent back injury and in 1950 Francis was diagnosed with breast cancer. In her poem “It is not likely now” she looks west from the bedroom window of her cottage: “a great fleet jewels the sky tonight”. Beatrice Chase (Olive Catherine Parr), 1874 -1955 writer, especially of books on Dartmoor. Her most famous book, The Heart of the Moor was written in 1914. Beatrice added what became a famous window to an extension of the cottage she moved into at Widecombe in the Moor, in 1901. She loved to sit and look through this window whilst writing; two titles reflect this: Through a Dartmoor Window and The Dartmoor Window Again.]
The following photos are of Clearbrook, where Frances Bellerby lived for a while and Widecombe, (Beatrice Chase's grave is here).
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| Clearbrook Photo Julie Sampson |
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| Widecombe in the Moor Chase's grave |
