Alan Taylor - Different Stones

This is a setting of three poems by Jean Sprackland, taken from her collection, Tilt, published by Cape Poetry, which won the 2007 Costa Poetry Award. I was attracted to the dry eyed attitude towards natural things reflected in the poems, combined with an element of mystery or menace, and chose to set these three poems since I felt that they were the three which would work best as songs.

The songs were written for Alessia Mankouskaya and Jose Manuel Gandia.

The Way Down

Forget the path.
Hack through gorse and blackthorn
and walk into the stream.

the thing about a stream is
it knows where its going, has a gift
for finding the shortest route.

A path can lose its nerve,
peter out into a bog or bracken, divide
inscrutably in two. I've stood at that place

and weighed the choices, weighed
and checked again, while mist crawls
over the mountain like sleep.

When the stream divides
both streamlets are equally sure.
Each plays its won game - the slick of moss,

the sudden race over a sill of rock -
and each, if you let it,
will carry you down.

Copyright: Jean Sprackland, Published by Jonathan Cape

Breaking The Fall

Imagine being that fluke of rock
that juts out from the face of the hill,

the rock that breaks the stream's fall,
day and night, for millennia.

The stream runs over, sleek as mercury,
has no choice but to strike you -

shatters into beads that fire away
at more or less predictable angles.

All that varies is the weight of water,
in drought, or after heavy rain;

the pace of the flow; the pitch
and volume of the shattering.

Imagine the deadlock,
the passion. Imagine the stars.

Copyright: Jean Sprackland, Published by Jonathan Cape

The Fenced Wood

The finger of sunlight points the way
over the floor of dead leaves.
I unlatch the gate and walk in.

I follow the signs:
an acorn
a notched twig
a word written in lichen.

At the centre
a flat stone for a bed.
I lie down to wait.
The cold receives me.
The net of light trembles overhead.

One branch touches the wrist of another.
The breeze catches its breath.

Copyright: Jean Sprackland, Published by Jonathan Cape