Alan C. Brown poet and translator, his group Tyneside Poets meet in old George Pub Coth Market 
Newcastle on Tyne 1st on 2nd and last Tuesday each month at 7.30pm. Married with tow daughters. 
Allan has published several including The Rag Doll People. He has transations of poems 
from Russian by Maya Broisova (From Stoney Shores also Glass Zoo by Galina Gamper). 

Alan recently celebrated his 80th birthday. A gifted, staunchly individualistic poet with a prolific output, 
during his long career has made a lasting contribution to the Tyneside Poetry scene.

A translator all his working life, Alan encouraged cultural exchange between poets from numerous 
Europian countries. By single-minded cultivation of these links he assisted many local poets 
to expand their own litarary horizons beyond Newcastle's walls.

Alan's poetry has appeared in both English and foreign magazines and he has produced many books, 
his most recent success being Golden Girl, an anthology of poetry and illustrations to 
celebrate the City of Newcastle in the Millennium.


 

AFGHAN HOUNDS

THEIR hairdo is vintage Hollywood!
Like Veronica Lake’s it flows loose.
They’ve deep sad eyes and ostrich tails
And a mind that’s quite abstruse.

They move at about the speed of light
In their prime as if telegraphed ;
A line from nose-tip to tail
Goes straight as a loosened shaft.

Come on a far high place looking out they pause
With green light locked in their eyes;
Dust is held - by a look – and leaves stilled
As if their gaze - petrifies!

Unlike otters they scorn to dive – but two feet
On a verge freeze to drink. They’ll leap a brook at
One bound, as if they’d confirmed beforehand
And carefully chosen – one landing spot.

They are darkly, aristocratically wise:
Train one to come to your call – like Heloise
She will perhaps  once – in five hundred times!
Like cats they come and go as they please.

The dance they prefer – to sex. A unicorn
Their leap is as white as a waterfall! 
Some find their way home –on their own; 
But most need a search party – with lights! 

Angel and child – their own sort they hate!
Prefer mongrels with twitching tails –all that
Moves, flies, runs, or shifts like dead late
Leaves in the wind – these they rush doggedly at! 

In a scabbard of innocent joy they hide
A sharp, double-edged lust for the hunt.
Chronic gamblers – they chose to stake all 
On ONE throw, win or loose – Why? That’s how they’re made! 




FAULTED BUT FAVOURED 

“If you want the kernel, you have to break the shell.” 

		Meister Eckhard 


Bimbi’s bistro where one cup of coffee is

Measured in endless enthusiastic gossip

At small round tables by elderly women,

Where one can smoke a fag held in curled fingers 

Which elsewhere all across town is verboten; 

An oasis not to be found except outdoors 

In Russia, as under Gorbachev’s Perestroika: 

Remember how smokers exiled to crowded toilets 

Filled up small spaces with sulphurous clouds of smoke,

Or stood in sad groups smoking in cafι doorways,

You can’t keep an addict down by legislation, 

They bounce back, with humour explode such pressures  


Winter sunlight shafting through Bimbi’s windows 

Like God, observes His loved but faulted creatures 

With the same smile as the un-seasonal sun.

Perhaps being bare as blank stone, alone, naked,

The many, not the few, would be graced, included?



FRINGE BENEFITS

My love-boat feels seasick tonight: Jacktars in
Bellbottoms, cabin boys with bedroom eyes,
and moist cooks, on deck or below it, yearn 
for charred chicks, bruised olives, egg-white heat 
O dirty portholes allow them to freak-out.

My Love Boat has learned to hate
Blue-dark bitter aloes, dead sunsets, fringe benefits,
Wafer thin clowns, with dusty eyelids; cold kisses;
Cinder passions; a dry cascade of Dutch anchors!
Please come favour it with your strawberry mouth!” 

My love boat, a winter insomniac like a bear in
A snow-cave chews on its paws, like ardent honeycomb;
Like a quiver of threadbare birches, bouquets 
of white roses, snow’s luminous altars, 
fragrant birch bark smelling of Greek vases.
Please pelt them with your melting rainbows! 

My Love Boat, has no need of crystal cobwebs,
Drab hovels, landscapes of limp wet trees,
The smell of old apples left in a drawer
Cellophane back-lanes, or anything but 
Your diamond quick-sands, your 
Transparent regalia - your neat harbour.

My love boat…O in spite of all look!
Night becomes cosmic! Odd numbers, monsoons,
Feral graves- mimosa, licking their wounds
Sail out towards you like albatrosses,
Like fruit-sacks bursting with seed! PLEASE
Be a lazy lagoon for them. And for my silly
half-distanced, bespangled, perky 
clinker-built love-boat! 



NAKED VOLTAGE

To Emily Dickenson 

Though you resist I think you back earth-side: 
Amherst - soil-smell, breathing buzz if bee-sound;
Life-fever in your living veins – enough joy;
Absence – a presence, fractured light behind woods.

I grow in the heat of your shadow, comforted.
My bones stitched to Naked Voltage – yours;
White absence under my hands, earth-heat and home,
However late by owl-light I yet return,
As you did – Wayward Nun - to holy ground. 

Rooted in arid earth you’re still answering gold.
Groomed for death – no-where abandoned by God.
See how your words – small children – each one in turn
Held heavily in the crook of one bent arm,
Dazzle like liquid light, being re-born.

Did you taste death before them? No, you’re alive!
Un-menaced by the world; by whirling cinders 
Of love; you balance equally – heaven and earth
With inexhaustible tenderness, shouldering still 
The numinous in everything – low or high.
Back of you fields of grain - vast as the sky.


OPAGUE FLESH 

“I do not disapprove of anything”
	Daphne du Maurier  

Shy one, nourished by mildewed stone, dry branches,
Masts in a white harbour masked by acid time
Who are you? A surface full of glassy myths?
Chisel-cheeked rock – an out crop?
Gull cries, sea-tide, sand-pebbled heart-beat?
Blood surge, a weather-cock titled sideways?
Moon-pulled lusts – white words, a bright downpour?

Shy one, arriving at rusted gates, unable to enter.
Bracketed with your books; but always other
In and outside them. Roofed by tongued Cornish houses. 
Abandoned to stone’s pungent smell, blanched language,
Early humiliations, sex and its absence,
A vacant stage, inhabited by thin, walled-in ghosts.
The more we know - the less. Masked one Why’s that?

Losses met everywhere. Leaf-shadowed, the war years.
A landscape searching for childlike love, aloneness.
Heart beat of sea-shells, smells of tarred rope, raw iron,
Cornwall’s antique dark, long hill-walks at sunset,
The stone house and your dogs, re-establishing love
And meaning where little was, but the task of writing-
your first love and your last. God’s help un-headed. 

A wood hut among trees, where you encounter
Memory in the dark; make private legends,
This most of your life was all you needed
No other knot of needs. These you met beaming
Until chill age iced your skin and left you
Unstable, dependant. At last almost word-less.
How can one eat an elephant? Bit by bit slowly.
You did so, leaving us all your poignant gold.


VISITING NEVERS  

The winged chair, you sat in

 unable to sleep at night

Remains.Glows beneath protective glass;

But now you are not there.

The rose-beads on a snapped chain,

The rusted crucifix discoloured by time 

are those you fingered once in prayer.

The frayed old books 

Their pages yellowish-brown with age, 

survive out-spread, untouched, unread;

closed off from your hands


But we are aware, of them, and of 

what you were: something

 taken up by God And laid aside, 

like a broom. And also of what you are 

Beyond these left things.

glittering like a white star

undimmed by time Not frayed 

or rusted, broken or unused 

Your prayer – takes wings!