Deep in Time: Poems by Cora Greenhill - Softcover

Greenhill, Cora

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0951482610 ISBN 13: 9780951482612

Publisher: Dreadful Work Press, 1999

Synopsis

Deep in Time is a strikingly beautiful book. More than a collection of powerful poetry, it is a work of art in itself. The poems are arranged to resonate with each other, often in groups around a theme and are set creatively on the page alongside original illustrations by the author Cora Greenhill, artist Pauline Rignall and other women artists.

The cover itself is a stunning photograph by the author, of a 'face' in a dead tree trunk, having an impact comparable to Munch's The Scream. This image resonates with the title, Deep in Time, to convey a sense of emotion wrought by, and trapped in, the natural processes of life. We are thus already primed by the cover for the poetry, which is intense, earthy, with a strong and unashamed sense the feminine cyclical consciousness of life.

Here are deeply personal, honest and sometimes raw poems about both the pain and redemptive potential of life's archetypal dramas, including childhood, puberty, sex, marriage, miscarriage, and aging. Nothing is sentimentalised, and there is humour and life affirmation even in the most poignant events. For instance, in Part of October's Dying, as the ritual to commemorate the passing of an unborn child comes to a close, there is a sense of real completion due to the ability to joke, and accept the gift of life even though it has been lost:

'I'll be mother, I say, as I pour.

Your spirit has somehow put stars in our hair, Each May, forget-me-nots crowd your ring of stones, self-seeded, and we have been rich in missing you for another year.' Here are poems about the human body not only as partaking in natural cycles but as part of natural landscape, as in 'Dancing in a Place of Power':

'skin pricks with sweat like fur
I feel the turf of me tough pads of hands make fists
the roughened rocks in me
hurl a stamping rage
for power snatched from me
the power of growth in me
the space to be in me
the place that gives in me

I lift my eyes and see
steam veiling morning-watered furrows
and oh! That never-ending stretch of sea
the ceaseless sweep of waves
draws great draughts of breath to me
quenching an ancient thirst
till sobs and groans are song of me
streams of tears pour from me
the sweet salt snot of me
the strong long song of me

anchored in the old straight tracks of me
arms wingspun in dance
breaking the postures of apology.

Dance, as both reality (the author teaches intuitive dance, see author biog.) and metaphor for creative life, is a unifying theme throughout the book. Man Dances begins with the lines

'You demonstrate the iron musculature
of arms, shoulder, back,
used to imitating a fork lift truck
or JCB.' And ends
'chest and belly slacken
like a quivering sail
tacking and turning
re-turning, bellied with breath,
taut with it...soft power...dynamite...'

This poem also illustrates the author's tender, even reverential feelings towards men, while others, not eschewing the reality of subtle and overt oppression of women,

'No man can compose
with a pram in the hall
she once heard
-or words to that effect.
And so the cannon has been built.'
search, sometimes whimsically, for creative solutions,
'Perhaps we should make velvet tasseled cords
strung with silver hearts
to hang across our stairs'

she muses, in the poem Mending from the sequence The Strength of Cups.

This is Cora Greenhill's second, self-published collection. Both books make the case for self-publishing eloquently and elegantly: bold poetry, beautifully illustrated between fine covers. Small and major presses take note! In the decade that has passed since the first collection, Dreadful Work, the sensual passion for life, and unflinching honesty has not been compromised by a marked maturing in her relationship to her subject matter, and her poetic range. She steps more boldly into the spiritual dimensions, alongside the open relishing of the sensual and sexual that characterised the first collection.

Many of the poems in this second collection have previously appeared in reputable anthologies, UK poetry magazines such as Writing Women, Staple, and The New Writer, as well as in radical US women's publications such as Writing for our Lives and We'moon. This is poetry on the edge that may not please everyone in the fastidious poetry mainstream this country, but has been recognised as a remarkable and individual voice by many poets, critics (see review page) and people who 'don't usually get on with poetry', for its freshness, vitality, musicality, and grit.

About this title

Review:

As for Cora Greenhill's Deep In Time, there are serious insights and beautiful moments here, and two or three poems achieve near-perfection.

There is a group of moving poems about the poet's miscarriage, and a sequence (The Strength of Cups) on the difficulties of combining love, work and privacy. Of other poems, I particularly like The weaving of a gate... "you have in mind/a gate of woven willow. . . I!. . . I see gates as intentions/lifetimes in the making//. . . !/would we want our hearts' homes/knocked into shape/with nails?" But perhaps my favourite of these poems is Breathdance. "He breathes his songs through a short reed pipe./There is no knowing/What is his voice, and what the sound of the pipe.//'We don't have a word for music/in our language./Music is the same as life./ . .'/He does not smile, he is smiled,/and the light shines from us all/I am drawn to a space on the ground/danced by the songs/and the big moving airs of morning."

Greenhill has given a great deal of thought and care to the ordering of her book. The poems are set into a reasoned and satisfying progression, so that each resonates with its neighbours and in the whole scheme; as if each poem is a single line in the large-scale poem which is the completed book. It's an art in itself. -- Joanna Boulter - Second Light Newsletter VII, 2000

Cora Greenhill's poems are an earthy, visceral homage to our Wild Spirits. They are suf -fused with a tactile sense of the land; whether the seascapes of Crete, to which Cora has a spiritual and dynamic connection through her 5 Rhythms dance work, or the moors and dales of the Peak district where she lives. This is shamanic poetry, rooted firmly in the earth; it seeks, and finds, truth and meaning in vividly drawn details of nature. It is unflinchingly honest, sometimes painful poetry that invites us also to share the inner landscape of a woman's life; the aging, the losses, the dancing, the love and celebration. This is poetry which sings of ancient spiritual truths and yet remains firmly in touch with the reality of living our lives in connection with our selves and others. -- Rosemary Doyle

I am moved and fascinated by Deep in Time. I found the miscarriage poems particularly moving and powerful, especially Part of October's dying...Your wonderful exactness of language thrills me throughout the book, from your naming of flowers in 'Harvesting Long Meadow' to 'limpet's limey cloister' in Prayer on the Seashore. -- Catherine Byron, poet, author of Settlements, Samhain, The Fat Hen Factory etc.

The first thing to strike me about Cora Greenhill's second volume of poetry, Deep in Time, was the cover. A gnarled, shadowy face looks out at the reader, mouth open, as if to ask for something. This photo, of a strangely human-looking tree-trunk, is one of many by the author, used to illustrate her poems. The book also contains drawings and paintings by Pauline Rignall and other women artists, which complement the writing beautifully.

The subject matter of the work is wide-ranging, but is always connected to the experience of being a woman. The author writes with great richness about adolescence, menstruation, marriage, miscarriage and growing older. Although many of the poems have a sensitive, delicate quality, they do not shy away from the physicality of life. In 'Forty third spring', for example, aging is described earthily: "Relentless the blood aches from the shrinking womb! thrums on the slackening drum! of skin sagging dully." And in 'Prayer on the sea shore' the poet declares: "Let me receive life greedily! swallow the fat spaghetti! the rich gravel of gifts/ brought in to me on the tides."

If these poems can be seen as spiritual, which I think they can, then they are about spirituality which is very much connected to the body. As well as writing, Cora Greenhill is a dancer, and she runs dance workshops in England and Crete. It is in the poems about dancing that we see this spirit emerging from the page. 'Breathdance' tells how the poet is "drawn to a space on the ground! danced by the songs! and the big moving airs of morning." It is clear from her work, that dancing helps the poet to cope with the painful things in life, and it is with great honesty and clarity that she writes about this pain, and the liberating power of dance.

I recommend Deep in Time to anyone who loves poetry and who loves life - and if Cora is reading her work near you, then I urge you to go and see her in the poetic flesh! -- Elly Tamms - The Inky, June 2000

About the Author:

Born in 1947, an unplanned second child of the post-war baby boom, Cora Greenhill moved with her English family to Northern Ireland, where she grew up. She expresses mixed feelings about this displacement in the poem, Gone with the Fairies, 'This landscape marked me/indelibly as those who brought me here from England/ensuring I would always find my home/where I was stranger.'

She also found in the experience of rural life the seeds both of her passionate relationship to nature, 'I see a child of neither sex/wading brown bogwater/spiked with seeded rushes/metalled marigolds/and quilts of cuckoo flowers/-a distant place/where a soul could stretch awake.' And of her sense of the complexity of sexuality and gender: 'I ride in front of farmers' sons on tractors. My arms are smooth but theirs are rough with hair. I feel their squidgy things through overalls: I'd always known they're different down there. But men set snares for rabbits and boys know where.'

In the sixties Cora was at Warwick University with Germaine Greer as her tutor in romantic poetry. It was the latter's articulate passion for Shakespeare, Blake and Coleridge that Cora remembers, more than her feminism: The Female Eunuch was published a year after she graduated, but she feels that it was to be nearly a decade until she really 'got' feminism and 'almost gave up on men'. At the same period of her life she also gave up on the security of her teaching career, and embarked on a more precarious route of self discovery through writing and 'personal development work'. With her 9 year old son, she visited Crete for the first time with a tatty copy of Susan Evasdaughter's first draft of The Sacred Island, the first book she'd ever read about the Goddess. Everything changed, including her name, during that year. She moved to Sheffield, met her new partner (whom she married after a trial period of just eleven years), became a therapist, then a devotee and teacher of Gabrielle Roth's shamanic dancework. In the last ten years or so, she has visited Crete many more times and now runs dance and pilgrimage holidays there. She has written a novel set in ancient and modern Crete, published two volumes of poetry and many articles about her sense of the sacred, sexuality and creativity. She lives in the country which continually inspires her writing, but plans to celebrate her midlife crisis by finding a way to live in San Francisco for a year to study for an MA in Women's Spirituality.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dreadful Work Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0951482610
• ISBN 13: 9780951482612
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 76
• Illustrator: Rignall Pauline, Etc.