Well, did you buy it,the painting in Javéa,of close to a dozenoranges tippingfrom a straw basketonto a table, a glass jugof water close by?The shop being shutI had to squintthrough the lighton the windowto see it. Hardly biggerthan a postcard it held —in the darknessof a wooden frame —close to a dozenoranges tippingover a tablelike small suns.Since thena storm has comeand I write to youfrom Sevillewhere orangeshave been blownfrom the trees,falling onto pavements,plazas and roads,where tyres press theminto the cobbles — each onea perfection crushed.Last night,after rain, I tooksuch a cobbled roadby a small plazaand the smell of orangesboth sharp and sweetperfumed the air,as if their last giftwas to make itblossom time again.Oh, I hopeyou’ve bought it! — eventhough for thirty EurosI think its varnishmight intend to deceive.But close to a dozenoranges tippingfrom a basketfalling like suns …I can see you stilladmiring itas I can imagineyour invisible handstipping the basket.Oh, I do hopeyou went back for it!I know we’ll find a place for it.I think I already have.
Naranjas
Feature Date
- July 22, 2022
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“Naranjas” from NARANJAS by Tom Pow.
Published by Galileo Publishers in April 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by Tom Pow.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Tom Pow was born in Edinburgh in 1950. Primarily a poet, several of his collections have won awards and three of his poetry collections have been short-listed for Scottish Book of the Year. Dear Alice – Narratives of Madness won the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year in 2009, the same year In The Becoming – New and Selected Poems was published. In 2007, he received a Creative Scotland Award for a project aimed at responding to rural depopulation throughout Europe. In Another World – Among Europe’s Dying Villages was published in 2012. The Village and The Road – a theatre work with musicians The Galloway Agreement – has been selected for the prestigious Made in Scotland Fringe Showcase for this year’s Edinburgh Festival this August. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Association of Scottish Literary Studies. In 2018, he edited Barefoot – The Collected Poems of Alastair Reid (Galileo Publishing). The full collection, Naranjas, and the chapbook, Svetlana’s Dance, are his own most recent works. Read more at: www.tompow.co.uk
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire
England
Like all his work, the poems here are imprinted with landscapes, relationships and memories, but they also show how encounters with paintings, with reading and with history, through imaginative sympathy, can be transformed into personal lived experiences. The publication of Naranjas, marking Pow’s seventieth year, shows him still writing poems “alive to the sounds, smells, noises and ironies of life,” as Jim Burns commented of Red Letter Day (1996) in Ambit. But there is an urgency underlying the poems in this present work, as they seek better to understand how people live “in the green bone-yards of our world”.
"Tom’s poems have the power of rousing the sympathy of the reader by a loyal adherence to the certainty of nature, and the power of giving the interest of freshness by altering the colors of imagination."
— Rochak Agarwal
"In Pow’s world, it is never an option merely to pass by. There is no place for innocent bystanders here; we are all material witnesses, observing and appreciating each moment before it has passed....In these times of change and uncertainty when so much that appears to have been lost is just waiting to be rediscovered, this is precisely the poetry we need."
— John Glenday
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