The poems

Dream Calendar

1.      Red neon burns
         on brickwork: Tyres & Exhausts.

         As if we didn't know.

2.      The hunt's livener
         outside the Tontine.

         A trail of port in the snow.

3.      A scarecrow's been out
         all night. This the revelation:

         all flesh is grass.

4.      On April's hillside
         houses from the river

         new-roofed like pagodas.

5.      In May's milder light
         old men, keeping an eye,

         let bowls run off and play.

6.      As daylight drains
         boys fling themselves from the pier:

         now, in eternity.

7.      Fair Saturday night. Clyde Square.
         A gap-toothed grin

         is strung between the trees.

8.      Shoulders red in the sun.
         White meat turned on the girdle

         like Saint Blaise.

9.      Rows of rotting timbers
         wading in, but summer's fleet

         has slipped anchor.

10.    Regulars snug with pints
         rolling their own

         metaphysics. Marine Bar.

11.    Cartsburn Street. An orange sky.
         The guy's nodded off

         in the inferno.

12.    The Royal at dusk:
         souls on top of souls.

         In the north, in hoc signo.

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Source

First published in Markings, No. 18. Reprinted by permission of the author.

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Author's note

'Dream Calendar' sprang from an émigrés's mailbag. Every January my mother sends me a copy of the Greenock Telegraph calendar. One year, when I was particularly keen on poem sequences, I saw the potential for a poignant project. Unlike most of my poem sequences, which collapse half way through leaving me with one or two remnants, this one made it to completion. One bonus of my perseverance was a drift away from the literal in the Tele's calendar to the more dream-like and resonant images of the poem.

I like the discipline and compactness of the haiku and since the sequence was based around the seasons I thought the form was even more apt. In the sourse of writing it, I began to hear rhymes, or rather dubious half-rhymes. I worked them up a bit more so that the haikus can also be read as couplets of sorts. For further information I would recommend a day out in Inverclyde and an evening in the Marine Bar, real or imagined.

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Editor's comment

Reading Raymond Friel’s poetry there’s the recognition of his acute observation, of his visual lucidity, and the kind of spiritual play he has with figures within a real but heightened landscape. Here the scenes are from a west coast Scotland, the Renfrewshire where urban and rural life are lived very closely together and where the seasons, as recognised in the calendar form (which also allows the iconic brevity), intermingle experience on the scale of Nature contrasted with the more built-up environs (with more than a hint of decline).

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Biography

Raymond Friel was born in Greenock in 1963. After graduating from Glasgow University he moved south and qualified as a teacher. His work has been widely published in reviews and magazines. His collections include Bel-Air (1993), Seeing the River (1995) and Renfrewshire in Old Photographs (2000). He co-edited the review Southfields and ran Southfields Press for a number of years. A selection of his recent work is forthcoming in the Painted, spoken series. He lives with his wife and three sons in the south-west of England. He is the headteacher of a comprehensive school in Bath.

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