Rowlestone Revisited

Winterreise catalogue cover

This is the catalogue for an exhibition of landscape photographs taken in Wales and Cumbria by Oswald Jones, exhibited in Canterbury Cathedral in 1982, which features poems by Frances Horovitz and Roger Garfitt, including the Rowlestone Haiku, which were published by Five Seasons Press in an exquisite and now very rare letterpress pamphlet. They remain uncollected because that book was so beautifully produced, with exquisite and delicate illustrations by Alan Halsey, that it seemed right to keep them as one item.

The Five Seasons Press edition is pretty hard to find - I couldn't see it on Amazon or Abebooks when I looked - and the only other printing of these beautiful poems is in this catalogue, which I discovered a well-wrapped stash of in my attic a few months ago.

What the six haiku lack thanks to the absence of Alan Halsey's beautiful brushwork they make up for richness of image, both in the poems and in Oswald Jones's photographs.

I remember these haiku being written, in the car up to Sunderland, back from a holiday in Rowlestone, near Hereford. It had snowed late in April - we were snowed in for my 11th birthday and the start of the new school term. When we finally managed to leave the remote Bakehouse we were staying in, my mother and Roger became terribly absorbed in batting haiku back and forth as they drove, taking it in turns to write things down.It is impossible to tell which line or image belonged to whom. They were blizzarding ideas back and forth the whole way up to Sunderland.

I remember it clear as a bell because I felt so excluded, bored rigid in the back seat, watching them build words and rhythms and the sharp, clear musics of snow and blossom. I may have sulked and pouted and stropped and tried to get their attention, but it never worked. The poetry took over and I still hold intense details of the trip; my mother snapping at me to be quiet (a rare thing) before slipping rapidly back into creation; the roar of the road; the dissatisfaction with toys and books, knowing that something better was going on that I was not quite part of.

Of course, it is consequently a very big part of me - I witnessed an intimate creative process and remembered my mother's laughing rules of excision; the way that their shared syllables glided into place like falling blossom; the fire in their eyes and the compression live on their tongues. This memory, the creation of these poems, has helped me to write more than any other experience, and increasingly so as time goes on, and yet I still cannot write a poem about that journey. Hence this bare, inadequate prose; a working towards something.

If anyone would like a copy of the catalogue, I have discovered enough of them to sell a few. I'm charging £10 for them, plus £1 p&p. If you love my mother's work and have not read these haiku, it is well worth it. It was a form she adored, often writing notes for poems in haiku.

The catalogue also has an introduction by the late playwright and novelist Michael Hastings.