last update:
11th Feb 2020
poetry feature:
Ian Caws – A Mystical Elegance of Form
poetry favourites:
Acumen
Acumen: First Sixty
Handwritten Poems
and in the shop…
collections –
“ISCA – Exeter Moments”
The Ember Press;
“Namaste: Poems of Nepal”
Hearing Eye;
“Sunlight in a Champagne Glass”,
“Poems Antibes”
and
“Reclaiming the Lyre: New and Selected Poems”,
Rockingham Press;
autobiography –
“No Accounting for Paradise”
Rockingham Press
William Oxley (1939 - 2020)
Breakfast at the Basin
(Exeter Quay)
The cobbled waterfront
medieval surface like watered boils
but a sweet, healthy sun
sweeps majestic rays
across miles of still water
long as memory. Yes,
memory, memory, memories
of this Anglo-Roman-Norman city.
And if you love it like me
you, too, shall inherit memory
that many strata’d encirclement
like Exeter’s time-trapped wall:
memory of things you cannot know
as that memory, a once-time
I drew a finger over stone,
cathedral stone, and the yellow dust
that fell, fell from an angel’s wing
a sort of dry dead sunlight
the colour of the invisible.
And this harboured water
with its gossiping crowd of ducks and swans
is really a welcome pool of infinity
the source of life and idea.
William Oxley
in coffee-table collection, Isca – Exeter Moments, photographs by Barry Davidson,
2013, The Ember Press, ISBN 978-1-8731613-7-1
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