Little Silver

By Jane Griffiths

The recurrent themes of Little Silver are inheritance, loss, and the relationship between real and imagined lives. Moments of crisis – a near-drowning, a fall down a mine-shaft, the death of a friend – prompt reflection on the stories ‘we tell ourselves about our / selves’, and on the sheer strangeness of existing in our bodies and in time. The book’s title sequence responds to the recent demolition of Jane Griffiths’ childhood home, whose absence appears as ‘a little silvering between the trees’. Setting its absence against the memory of ‘Little Silver’, a small enclave of houses in Exeter that she passed on the way home from school (and whose name fascinated her), she considers the gap between the two as the space of the imagination: the origins of her writing. Other poems centre on the theme of childlessness and the relationship between that and other kinds of making; a sequence centred on conversations between an artist and her imaginary children concludes when the daughter asks ‘So if we existed the tree could stand alone?’ The emphasis in these poems is on inventiveness and endeavour, on lifelines and human traces.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Sep 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781780376134

Jane Griffiths

Jane Griffiths was born in Exeter in 1970, and brought up in Holland and Devon. After reading English at Oxford, where her poem 'The House' won the Newdigate Prize, she worked as a book-binder in London and Norfolk. Returning to Oxford, she completed her doctorate on the Tudor poet John Skelton and worked on the Oxford English Dictionary for two years. After teaching English Literature at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and then at the universities of Edinburgh and Bristol, she now teaches at Wadham College, Oxford, and is literary editor of the Oxford Magazine. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1996. Her book Another Country: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), which included a new collection, Eclogue Over Merlin Street (2008), together with large selections from her previous two Bloodaxe collections, A Grip on Thin Air (2000) and Icarus on Earth (2005), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her later collections from Bloodaxe are Terrestrial Variations (2012), Silent in Finisterre (2017), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and Little Silver (2022). She co-edited the study Architectural Space and the Imagination: Houses in Literature and Art from Classical to Contemporary (Palgrave, 2020) with Adam Hanna. She lives in Banbury.

Book preview

JANE GRIFFITHS

Little Silver

The recurrent themes of Little Silver are inheritance, loss, and the relationship between real and imagined lives. Moments of crisis – a near-drowning, a fall down a mine-shaft, the death of a friend – prompt reflection on the stories ‘we tell ourselves about our / selves’, and on the sheer strangeness of existing in our bodies and in time.

The book’s title sequence responds to the recent demolition of Jane Griffiths’ childhood home, whose absence appears as ‘a little silvering between the trees’. Setting its absence against the memory of ‘Little Silver’, a small enclave of houses in Exeter that she passed on the way home from school (and whose name fascinated her), she considers the gap between the two as the space of the imagination: the origins of her writing.

Other poems centre on the theme of childlessness and the relationship between that and other kinds of making; a sequence centred on conversations between an artist and her imaginary children concludes when the daughter asks ‘So if we existed the tree could stand alone?’ The emphasis in these poems is on inventiveness and endeavour, on lifelines and human traces.

‘Jane Griffiths is a poet attracted to the cross-hatchings of matter and spirit; inner and outer; air and water; foreignness and a sense of home…she has something of the Dutch still-life painter’s eye: the comprehension of solid form as nothing, finally, but the effect of light. Sensuously wrought and even, at times, subtly erotic, her poems simultaneously evoke another level of pure abstraction, with words in place of coils of paint.’ – Adam Thorpe, Guardian

Cover painting: Woman Sleeping by the Sea (2020) by Kate Montgomery

www.katemontgomery.co.uk

JANE GRIFFITHS

Little Silver

Say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

C.P. CAVAFY, ‘The God Abandons Antony’

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of Ash Magazine, Chough Books, ORB and http://plague20journal.com for publishing some of these poems.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Epigraph

Acknowledgements

Waking

Inscape

The Drowning at Porthcurno

Off-spring

The Amortals

Distance Lane

Foundling

Lifelines

Isolation

Grace

Out of the Picture

Negative Space

Snow and Privet

Moving the House

Little Silver

Charm

Tall Story

Homily

The Silence

From London far

Anchorage

Passage

Fugue

Life Sentence

Definition of Huer

Stet

Sometimes I forget you are dead because

Gone Fishing

Reading Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estatis on the Day of the Dead

Smokey Considers Hilton’s Cat

Cot Song

Ghost Rhyme

Abstraction

New Year’s Day

New Atlantis

Tailpiece

About the Author

Copyright

Waking,

the book you were reading called Night still

fly-leaved to your fingers, the bedside

light casting shadows like bison running at full

stretch for centuries now, you know of course

you have been dreaming of the cave’s wide

mouth and a small boat negotiating

the underground stream to its receding source:

you have the word bark on your tongue,

the root of it twisted and solid