The Turpentine Tree

By Lynne Hjelmgaard

The Turpentine Tree?is an enduring symbol of memory, fragile but enduring the passage of time and still persisting: in the title poem,?Lynne?Hjelmgaard?describes it a coppery faux god / with wildly twisted branches' . It might slip into the void, but here it is for now flying into the eye of the storm.' ?Hjelmgaard?employs strong, sensuous imagery to capture moments from across her remarkable life. ? These are portraits of family, friends and relationships of?Hjelmgaard' s uprooted life, including a life at sea, the subsequent displacement, widowhood and search for connections.?Often the remembrances in poems are sweet-bitter, recalling friends and lovers lost, including the writer' s late partner Dannie Abse. These explorations of loss are extremely moving, but the poems also communicate the value of a rich bank of memories which range around from spectating on a girl being punished at camp ( Summer Camp' ), a Florida roadtrip with friends ( 1969' ), or an Evening Flight from Copenhagen.' Very often the speakers are in transit, travelling through, and so the poems hold onto intense, lucid or epiphanic moments. ? Out of?Hjelmgaard' s experiences of solitude come landscapes of silence: atmospheric, rich in emotion and personal detail, exploratory and questioning. Her poems reveal uncertainty, loneliness and longing but also celebrate the lost; they take solace from ocean journeys that still inform her present from people and places loved and left behind and from what is garnered from the natural world. ? There' s an honesty, easiness and at times humour about the language. Vulnerability and strength walk side by side to give an extraordinary depth of experience for the reader. There' s a visitation from her dead lover; her husband' s spirit is safe in her wardrobe in a plastic bag; her father' s ghost is on a?WWII?battleship in Norfolk Harbour and later waits for her in a crowd of strangers at Miami airport. ? These snapshots are sometimes based on real photographs, or at other times are imaginary photographs;?Hjelmgaard?questions Did?we?really exist? Yes / the photograph answers' ( The Photograph Answers' ). Threaded throughout all these memories is the gorgeous vividness of nature the sea, animals, and creatures which take speakers out of human concerns to a more connected relation with the world.?The Turpentine Tree?is about intangible presences which open up memory and move beyond it, towards a universal interconnectedness. ? How far back does grief go? What is lost, what can be found?? Is memory transferred between us without words, years later, is the unsayable felt? ? (from On the Atlantic Coast of Spain' )

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jan 3, 2024
• ISBN: 9781781727157

Lynne Hjelmgaard

Lynne Hjelmgaard was born in New York City and lives in London. She taught Creative Art for children in various schools and institutions before she started writing poetry. She left the States in 1990 for the second time and has been living permanently in the UK since 2011. As a result of crossing the Atlantic in a sailboat with her husband she wrote the poems that were collected in Manhattan Sonnets (Redbeck Press, 2003) and was later released in CD format. After her husband died in 2006, she received a residency grant for the Danish Academy in Rome where she wrote poems that later appeared in her second collection The Ring  (Shearsman Books, 2011). Her third poetry collection, A Boat Called Annalise, was published by Seren in 2016 and accounts for the journey Lynne took with her husband by boat across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and Europe.  This was followed by A Second Whisper  and most recently The Turpentine Tree.

Book preview

I

Something Of You, Something Of Me

That Summer In Maine

There was the dramatic ferry voyage over

to the island, the shelter of my father’s shoulder

against a brisk wind and sea; the enjoyable way

he bit into his apple, an extra large bite.

Never seen anyone’s head touch a ceiling

until the young doctor arrived.

Lying in bed with fever I was apprehensive

but curious. His tall, kind presence filled the room.

Don’t step on anthills! I was running away

from a goat who was sniffing in the woods.

Ants were crawling up my legs. It was a dream

standing still, invading ants consumed me,

the goats my enemy. I was the centre of the world’s

discomforts. My sister came to the rescue, not without

laughter and tears. It all happened: my mother

caught in a thunderstorm, sunlight breaking

through the pines, the long shadows

in the cabin, waiting for her return.

Stuyvesant Town

Father mellowed

into sweetness

in old age. Gentleness

has such power.

Mother forms lonely

fragments

in memory.

I think of her mostly

with questions, sometimes

as a child,

seeing them

from some great distance,

but knowing

the care I needed

was there.

How to describe

this confusion,

at the same time

who were they?

How did I come

to belong

to them, as a child does?

Yet they opened

a way forward,

gone from me

a long time before

they were

gone from me.

And I left them also.

Little Landscapes of Silence

Certain pebbles are just the right shape

for skimming across water,

a universal past time,

like walking up and down the same streets

over and over again,

greeting the neighbours when you have to.

I used to walk with him on the lower East side,

try to keep up as we searched

for his grey Studebaker Packard.

Where’d I park the damn car?

I felt a presence on the edge of my bed,

early in the morning, just before they called.

I’d never heard the noise the moon makes,

does the moon make noise?

There was the push to get there in time,

slipping on ice after landing in D.C.

My father’s body is lying on the table

in a dimly lit room

already out and about,

making its way in the universe.

Father Naked

Father naked. That first embarrassment

as a child, of seeing him in the shower,

not daring to look, confused and excited

but also afraid. I used to meet him

at the top of the subway stairs at 6pm –

wait for his ghost-like face to emerge