Welcome to 3rd London Poetry Festival 2007

Briony Dennis comes from Hampshire, England, and is interested in exploring mythology, science and different personas through her poetry. She recently completed a Masters Degree in Critical and Creative Writing at Winchester University and one day hopes to have earned enough to be able to afford to do a  PhD with a thesis on the relationship between science and poetry.

Briony has been published in Poet's Letter and through her enthusiasm and commitment to poetry she became part of the Poet's Letter Team being the Literature Editor of the Magazine.  

Poet in Residence at Poet's Letter Programme

Briony Dennis

I aim to draw the reader in through their senses

I was born in 1979 in Hampshire and grew up in the beautiful city of Winchester.  My poetry really started to develop while studying at St. Mary’s, Twickenham and then during my Masters at Winchester University. I am interested in exploring mythology, time and science through poetry.

I started writing poetry 15 years ago, although it was often very obscure, as I believed a reader should work hard for the rewards.  After being taught by writers such as Marion Lomax (Robyn Bolam) and Amanda Boulter, I realised the error of my ways and now try to untangle the images for the reader!  The music of Bob Dylan has been an influence on my work his Last thoughts on Woody Guthrie being one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I have heard. I studied Eliot’s Four Quartets eight years ago, and even now I still see something new every time I read it, so echoes from this will always haunt my writing.

I believe that as a creative art form, poetry provides the opportunity to view our world in a different way and that it should be used in conjunction with empirical methods of study.  The world is an intensely complex place, so we need to use every method possible in order to understand it.  My writing process itself always involves music in some form and I find it hard to write without the other layer this can provide.  If I could I would always ask a reader to listen to the music I wrote the poem to.  Maybe in the future!

My poetry explores various themes in particular an individual’s place in time, I aim to draw the reader in through their senses.

I have been lucky enough to be published in a number of publications including: 

Canon’s Mouth, Deep Cleveland, Fire, Voices, Fourth Order, Astropoetica, Poetry Now, Forward Press, United Press, Poet’s Letter.

Silence steps across the grass, stippled blue.
Chilled dawn ripples over.
Sips the dark air…
smoky, singed by the impending light.
Space shaded in its own selection
in the absence of spectators.
Flickering.

Listen to silence
the wisdom of the vacuous
falling cool onto muted lips.

Shootlets
slide upwards
feeling chalky splinters.
Sound.
The waking of spectators
in the darkness
of the day.
Silence retreats,
under the trees
the light on hawthorn.

Listen to the silence
you will hear the defense of years
deceitful
steel
built by tears.

II

Metal grimaces,
screeches into fluorescent day.
A menagerie of suits and coats,
heading to the wrong job,
shackled by the wrong marriage,
suffocated by the wrong way.

Walk next to the hawthorn in
the darkness of the day
the beauty of the quiet

the sublime of the simple
the silence
the light on hawthorn
amidst the clamour.
If you listen to the silence,
it will tell you a second
the waking eternity.

The dusk reclines against the day
inhales the dusty sunset…
draughty with retracting light.
Plump with contentment
in the absence of spectators.
Flickering.

Four Reflections - on Eliot's Four Quartets

Heart of Light

I

I tread over the dust.
The moon drops onto the earth
drawing the waves and the wind.
The levanter lures its tales,
a whispering cloak for the water.
These stories cannot be spoken, cannot be heard,
they may only be known.
Known by those who quiet their minds
silent.
Long enough to feel their chatter, to see through a mist…
the other.
The other who stands on a shadowed shore
expanding
with the sounds of the sand drinking the sea.
The other on a peninsula of calm
eyes gazing across miles.
Boundaries shiver, insubstantial in this place.
I reach the sea's edge
streams of light lick over and…
I am home.
Far from that place. Far from those faces. Those things.
Yet…
I am home.
It cannot endure, it is merely a reflection but,
in one pure, painful second…
I am home.
But this home, does not belong to me.
It's not mine.
Not yet.

II
And turning from the fading sounds of hushed footsteps
the other, another
drinks down the…second
savoring its aftertaste before it evaporates
in reality's heated breath.
Never to have existed.



III

And walking across the lazy earth,
the dry, stretching earth, yawning its limbs across the years.
The other.
Another, gazes across the walking moments… of a waking eternity.


IV

You can never be whole, until you are broken.
Never be one until you lie, a fleck,
a grain on the skin
of the endless
expanse of eternity.
Sinking
into the earth.
Sinking
with the weight of a drift of seconds
that accumulate
as a deep drift of leaden snow.
And the galgos steps across the paper strewn stone
Down into the city
down onto the shrinking world.

Idle time is the best time
it's the time you appreciate the most.

It's the delicious slow morning dropping
when you have no pressing tasks.

It's the space between having to do something
and needing to.

You can sink a coffee, slow-walking around
the exhaling house. The backdrop of idle noise:
birds, someone else elsewhere climbing into a car, the whistle of the postman,
the click of the kettle and the hum of the sleeping refrigerator.

Dip the cups gently into sleepy suds, fluff a cushion, idly flick through the paper.
The morning fritters its time rolling along- on the heels of dog walkers and
pram-pushers, meandering along half-full streets.

You can find idle time almost anywhere between the hours of 09.15 and 11.45
it's there in the aisles of the chemist leaning on the shelves as you browse,
breathing apple-air around the shopping centre as you walk.

Idle time is good for you, it's the unexpected day off work after a power cut, the indulgent "sick" day, the week between jobs, or the time before the family gets home.

Every soul needs idle time. So hard to be in. When found it gladly washes over you, freshening dusty hearts. Unmoving as you are in motion.