Tuesday Poem: Cowarral Sequence iii—A Summer Storm by Joanna Preston
Jul
13
2010
Cowarral:
iii A Summer Storm
At first light the sky tore open.
I padded barefoot through a maze of boxes
to close all the windows.
I opened the curtains and curled up on the sill
as I used to curl up on Great Grandma’s lap
to watch storms sweep down
from the mountain
named for a man
she’d been widow to most of her life.
From the ark of her armchair
we’d spell our names between thunder
that rattled the china and knocked out the power.
mist on the mountain means rain on the way
Light grew rich and heavy
until the horses blazed like molten bronze.
Once, lightning blasted a mountain oak
halfway up the red-clay ridge,
sent shrapnel of timber out eighty feet.
The stump burned through two nights of rain –
I could see the glow from my bed.
Rain falls almost silent against a slate roof,
and two panes of glass keep weather at a distance.
Those storms roared on corrugated iron,
and ended the world at verandah’s edge.
But when I went out and stood
on the lawn in my nightshirt, mud
welling around the pale of my feet,
I offered my face to the English rain
and she was behind me,
one hand resting on the verandah post,
waiting for me
to close my eyes, to step back.
—
(c) Joanna Preston
Cowarral is one of two main sequences in Joanna Preston’s first collection The Summer King (Otago University Press, 2009). A fellow Tuesday Poem poet, Joanna won the inaugural Kathleen Grattan Award, currently NZ’s richest poetry prize, in 2008 and has just received Australia’s Mary Gilmore Prize 2010, which is conducted by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and presented every second year to a first book of poetry by an Australian writer. Both awards were for The Summer King.
Comments
There is so much in this poem, Helen, Joanna. I can feel the static, the thunder breaking, the temperature of the rain and of your grandmother’s hands on your shoulders. I can almost feel the press of eye lid on eye ball… Thank you. And congratulations on your award(s), well-deserved. Claire
Claire–I agree, the use of language is rich and compelling, and there’s loads of emotional power but it’s restrained: I think the ending is the clincher: the understatement that delivers the emotional punch.
A strong, powerful evocation of weather and atmosphere. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Thanks for this Helen – and of course Joanna! (Will pop across and congratulate Joanna on her site).
All the Cowarral poems are favourites of mine inThe Summer Kingbut this is possibly my favourite (although it can shift around ‘on the day’.) And am sure Joanna will love to hear from you on her site, too.
This is phantasmagorical news for Joanna! So richly deserved. (Of course I have been known to be a tiny bit biased at times), but when prizes of such luminance are bestowed you know that you immense enjoyment has been appreciated, also, by those more discerning than oneself. ‘A Summer Storm’ was one of my favourites from first reading of the book, which I have been toting around again in my ‘mobile selection’ for the last few weeks. Line for me ‘face to the English rain”.
Ian, I have so many favourite lines I find it hard to choose, but “Light grew rich and heavy//
until the horses blazed like molten bronze” is right up there, plus “storms sweep down//
from the mountain//named for a man//she’d been widow to most of her life.”
And I’m delighted to be interviewing Joanna for the radio tomorrow and will put the podcast link on this blog after the interview has aired.