Channels of Clarity and Vision: The Poems of Bridget Joseph
A profile
When Bridget Joseph travels to Alaska and meets the Loon, she knows of ‘something primitive, something that speaks/ to the core’, and
The clarity of her notes is the channel for my vision;
For me, this line describes Bridget’s oeuvre as fittingly as she applies it to the song of the reclusive water-bird. Her poems always speak to the core. She is never disconnected from the haunting cries of the wild, whether in the environments she so closely observes (and absorbs) or within her own tragic family life.
Bridget experienced an early loss with the death of her father, Terence Horsley, in a gliding accident on Easter Sunday, 1948 (Poem for my Father). Bridget had accompanied him on previous gliding trips and could easily have been present in the cockpit on ‘that fatal Sunday’. Writing for South in 1993, she recalls being in the air with her father and feeling ‘the surge of something that could only be described as being poetry…rush through my solar plexus’. Horsley’s love of the outdoors, including sports such as fly-fishing, and his skills as a writer – he edited the Sunday Empire News and wrote natural history books – have clearly been passed onto his daughter. Bridget’s mother also wrote, and her uncle, Sir Peter Horsley, published his autobiography.
Not only did Bridget come from a family of writers but she has travelled considerably, deepening her poetic experience and vision. Born in Northumberland, she grew up at The Old Rectory in Hambledon, Hampshire (where Poem for my Father is retrospectively set) and the family continued life here after her mother’s re-marriage to Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Barratt. Known as ‘Ugly’, he was said to be the spitting image of W. H. Auden! Bridget attended two Scottish boarding schools before moving to a finishing school in Switzerland. As a schoolgirl she had won creative writing competitions: to escape her teachers she would descend to the riverbank, fancying that imaginary characters arose from the waters! For four years Bridget travelled alone across Canada, eventually pausing in Banff to run the highest tea-room in the Rockies. Imagination plays no part in her story of the grizzly bear, the animal attempting to join her one night in her mountain-top cabin.
No wonder, then, the immediacy of Bridget’s animal poems: we see her observational skills and precise vocabulary at work, and it is not just in Pygmy Shrew but in all these poems that we
explore
the detail
of fine art
– the unexpected closeness.
Supporting Bridget’s poetry is her strong factual knowledge and personal experience of working with animals. Her articles on creatures such as lions, frogs, and butterflies have been published by The Countryman and The Lady, and for many years she has run her own pet-sitting business: looking after dogs, cats, fishes, fancy mice, iguanas, bantams, and even a white rhinoceros, while the owners have been on holiday. Bridget is so close to her subjects that she can address them directly (Epitaph to a Tabby) and as equals: ‘you haunt the wild/ that haunts me, too’ (Leopard). Add to this her sense of drama and the freshness with which she orders her ideas (Vultures).
With her return from Canada and marriage to Derek, Bridget’s poetry entered another stage of development. Drawing on this period, her poems of place (Cuillins of Skye) are sensual, rhythmic (Port Isaac), and inherently personal. Whilst renovating three Cotswold cottages (all named after wild animals), Bridget and Derek gave audio-visual talks combining poetry and photography to describe their camping trips to Morocco and Scandinavia. Giving over a thousand acclaimed travel lectures for the British Commonwealth Institute, and working as a creative writing teacher for Hampshire County Council, Bridget further improved her communicative abilities. She describes her style as ‘ambitious, outgoing, and adventurous’, and says that ‘a poem must have some guts about it’.
Bridget and Derek moved south to have a family, and she joined Southampton Writer’s Circle for seventeen years, meeting my parents and becoming our close family friend. Nevertheless, it was at the Resthaven Home of Healing – a rural Cotswold retreat – that I believe Bridget really uncovered the poetic “third eye” which had started to open during her teenage years. Equipping her to describe and share the personal struggles to come, her summers there served to form her poetic philosophy. We can read At The Edge of Flight and see Bridget writing with total control of style, using refrain to lament loss: her son’s emigration to Alaska. No mere communicator, Bridget has emerged as literary magician, philosopher, spirit-medium, priest.
Sometimes God needs to be forgiven. (Elegy for Sorrel)
Among her poems of loss, most have been written since the death of Derek in 2001. These poems are compelling, prescient and – with their matter-of-fact maturity – strangely comforting. In the eponymous poem River, Bridget articulates her grandson’s death through the medium of a dream. Her mother’s death ‘is of no concern’ to the July wildlife, and ‘The forest has a waiting look’ when she takes her daughter and granddaughter to sprinkle her husband’s ashes. The Moose perhaps becomes the headstone her husband eschewed. Voicing many common fears, The Dust of Flowers was deservingly chosen by Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, for a National Touring Exhibition, and Epitaph to a Tabby has been read by Bridget on BBC Two.
It is a pleasure to introduce this inspirational poetry, which never stops colouring and capturing the channels of my vision. I leave you to read Tintagel: everything I have ever felt whilst sitting on a cliff top – sky, sea, mortality, destiny, oneness, absolution.
Acknowledgements to: -
Alpharos; Angel’s Breath; Anglo-Welsh Review; Animal Concern; Animal World; BBC Radio Solent; BBC Television; Counter-Currents; Digitally-Organic; Green & Golden; Gwent Poetry Society Anthology; Journal of Interflora; Mental Health National Touring Exhibition 2003 / Andrew Motion; National Poetry Anthology 2009; New Christian Poetry; New Forest Poetry Society Anthology; Night Balancing; Nova Foresta Magazine; Southampton Arts Council; South Poetry Magazine; The Countryman; Trees – Journal of the Men in the Trees; Wessex & Hampshire Life.
Page(s) 4-6
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The