{"id":25,"date":"2014-02-17T16:51:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-17T16:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.sites.cf.ac.uk\/scintilla\/blog-page\/"},"modified":"2020-09-02T16:25:23","modified_gmt":"2020-09-02T16:25:23","slug":"scintilla-16","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.cardiff.ac.uk\/scintilla\/scintilla-issues\/scintilla-16\/","title":{"rendered":"Scintilla 16"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Table of Contents<\/h3>\n

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\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Author<\/strong><\/td>\nTitle<\/strong><\/td>\n#<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
<\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
<\/td>\nPreface<\/td>\n7<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Robert Wilcher<\/td>\n“Thalia” and the “Father of Lights”: Nature and God in the Works of Henry Vaughan and Thomas Vaughan<\/td>\n9<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Alan Payne<\/td>\nHigger Tor<\/td>\n37<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Greg Miller<\/td>\nFrom Fire by Fire<\/td>\n38<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
<\/td>\nKing David<\/td>\n39<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Andie Lewenstein<\/td>\nLeaving Iona<\/td>\n41<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
<\/td>\nEvening Blues<\/td>\n42<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Christopher Meredith<\/td>\nNothing<\/td>\n43<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
<\/td>\nGuitar<\/td>\n44<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Alexander Barr<\/td>\nLetters to my Daughter<\/td>\n46<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
John Freeman<\/td>\nBrought to Mind<\/td>\n49<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Peter Finch<\/td>\nBoots<\/td>\n50<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Alison Brackenbury<\/td>\nThe Price<\/td>\n51<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Christopher Hodgkins<\/td>\n“We Split!”: Divided Consciousness and Redemptive Space in Hakluyt’s Mexico and Prospero’s Isle<\/td>\n53<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Stevie Krayer<\/td>\nSunbrick Burial Ground<\/td>\n68<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Ruth Bidgood<\/td>\nFrom Time to Time<\/td>\n70<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Rose Flint<\/td>\nAngel With Glittering Hands<\/td>\n71<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Carol Devaughn<\/td>\nA Meeting of Angels<\/td>\n73<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Marina Sanchez<\/td>\nBefore Birth<\/td>\n74<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Mario Petrucci<\/td>\nmonitor i<\/td>\n75<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Paul Matthews<\/td>\nTongues of Fire<\/td>\n77<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Joseph Sterrett<\/td>\nThe Dynamic of Despair: Evolving Toleration for Cain in Herbet and Vaughan<\/td>\n81<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Aled Jones Williams<\/td>\n1<\/td>\n92<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
<\/td>\n2<\/td>\n92<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
<\/td>\nLitwergiau\u00a0<\/em>(Liturgies)<\/td>\n93<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Charles Wilkinson<\/td>\nHidden<\/td>\n94<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Philip Gross<\/td>\nConversations with the Taff<\/td>\n96<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Helen Moore<\/td>\nOn Sitting for Christopher Twigg<\/td>\n103<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Kate Foley<\/td>\nA Tree Thinks<\/td>\n105<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Katerina Vaughan Fretwell<\/td>\nHope<\/td>\n106<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
<\/td>\nMary’s Parlour Trick: 5<\/td>\n107<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Ivy Alvarez<\/td>\nCasglu Afalau\/Apple Picking<\/td>\n108<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Alyson Hallett<\/td>\nThe Sound We Make Without Having to Make It<\/td>\n110<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Jeremy Hooker<\/td>\nReflections on the lyrics “I”<\/td>\n111<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Dileys Wood<\/td>\nA Russian Poet at the British Museum, 1926<\/td>\n119<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Neil Curry<\/td>\nTo: Antonio Vivaldi, Ospedale della Piet\u00e0, Venice<\/td>\n121<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
David Greenslade<\/td>\nAddicted to Verse<\/td>\n123<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Jay Ramsay<\/td>\nIn the Aber Valley<\/td>\n124<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Eileen Dewhurst<\/td>\nMartha’s Way<\/td>\n126<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Ric Hool<\/td>\nThe United States of Time<\/td>\n128<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
<\/td>\nBy a Single Leaf<\/td>\n129<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Oliver Comins<\/td>\nGetting Tuned In<\/td>\n130<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
John Powell Ward<\/td>\nPraying<\/td>\n131<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
<\/td>\nOne Afternoon in a Church<\/td>\n132<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Erik Ankerberg<\/td>\nPoetry and “practic piety” in Herbert and Vaughan<\/td>\n133<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Kenneth Steven<\/td>\nCalvinism<\/td>\n153<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
John Killick<\/td>\nOn Harris<\/td>\n154<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
John Barnie<\/td>\nThe Stone Man of Cardigan Bay<\/td>\n156<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Se\u00e1n Street<\/td>\nAvebury<\/td>\n157<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Phil Maillard<\/td>\nUn \u00cddolo Prehist\u00f3rico<\/td>\n160<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Hilary Davies<\/td>\nSlender as Aspen, Slow as Peacocks<\/td>\n161<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Anne Cluysenaar<\/td>\nFrom a Diary, February 2012<\/td>\n162<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Myra Schneider<\/td>\nThe Thing<\/td>\n164<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Joan Poulson<\/td>\nAnd if I saw a toad<\/td>\n165<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
<\/td>\nAutumn morning<\/td>\n166<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Meredith Andrea and Fiona Owen<\/td>\nSinging the Green Between Us<\/td>\n167<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
David Hart<\/td>\nAnd vanishes<\/td>\n179<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Chris Hall<\/td>\nA journey<\/td>\n184<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Colin Moss<\/td>\nThe Traveller<\/td>\n187<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Frank Olding<\/td>\nMynydd Du – Black Mountain<\/td>\n188<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Steve Griffiths<\/td>\nThe first Chinese spacewalker wanders off-message<\/td>\n194<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Patricia McCarthy<\/td>\nFrom a sequence: Trodden Before<\/td>\n195<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Jeremy Hooker<\/td>\nFrom “With a Stranger’s Eye”<\/td>\n197<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Mike Jenkins<\/td>\nLife-line Black<\/td>\n200<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Paul Groves<\/td>\nLate Ruralist<\/td>\n201<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Graham Hartill<\/td>\nAfter Hokusai<\/td>\n202<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
<\/td>\nHot Summer Evening<\/td>\n203<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Roselle Angwin<\/td>\nChagford haibun<\/td>\n204<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Lyndon Davies<\/td>\nThe Wood and the Cave<\/td>\n205<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Tony Conran<\/td>\n“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, A meditation between thumb and forefinger<\/td>\n208<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Sebastian Barker<\/td>\nThe Orange Tree<\/td>\n211<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Victoria Field<\/td>\nWalking to Rosslyn Chaplin<\/td>\n212<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
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<\/td>\nContributors to this Issue<\/td>\n213<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n
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Preface<\/b><\/h2>\n

Scintilla 16<\/i> continues its tradition of crossing the critical-creative divide by bringing together literary scholarship, creative prose and new poetry (both long and short poems). Scintilla was first published in 1997 by The Usk Valley Vaughan Association (now The Vaughan Association) founded in 1995 by a group of poets and literary scholars to mark the tercentenary of Henry Vaughan\u2019s death, 23 April 1695. Since that time the journal\u2019s distinctive combination of poetry, criticism and prose has been committed to exploring the interests and themes of its tutelary spirits, Henry the Poet physician (1621-95) and his priest-alchemist brother Thomas (1621-66). Identical twins, they seem marked by their Breconshire birthplace amidst the hills and groves, creatures, herbs and stones, history and myths of their river valley \u2013 a magical landscape imprinted on their imagination.<\/p>\n

All too soon Civil War, regicide and republican revolution cut down the institutions of Church and State. Both brothers fought in that war and the discontinuity and alienation that followed were traumatic. Defeated, the twins reinvented themselves, Henry as \u201cSilurist\u201d and Thomas as \u201cEugenius Philalethes\u201d. Their writings reveal the connections between identity, adversity and the creative process, connections which remain central to Scintilla<\/i>. This journal exists to explore such conjunctions, crossing boundaries between past and present, place and vision, the material world and our inner lives, between metaphysical experiences and language, between science, poetry and healing.<\/p>\n

Scintilla 16 <\/i>will be the first issue published in simultaneous paperback and Kindle e-book editions. Over the last several numbers the journal has expanded its focus to take a broader look at the metaphysical tradition, including articles on major figures (Shakespeare and George Herbert among them), and other metaphysicals and contemporaries such as Thomas Traherne, alongside later writers including Blake, Levertov and R. S. Thomas. The journal nonetheless remains rooted in the Vaughans, witness RobertWilcher\u2019s opening piece on Thalia, the Greek pastoral muse invoked by Thomas Vaughan, as the embodiment of the vitalism that lay at the heart of both brothers\u2019 vision of creation as \u201cthe divine Breath\u201d that animates and inspirits all things. Colliding with \u201cthe mechanistic materialism of the European Enlightenment\u201d, the Vaughans\u2019 vitalism was much more than an acquired theorem: it was, rather, something rooted in their childhood fascination with the mysterious beauty, energy and complexity of nature.<\/p>\n

Christopher Hodgkins explores a case history of another kind of encounter with God and the natural world in Hackluyt\u2019s famous publication (a source for Shakespeare) of two sixteenth century English slavers\u2019 narratives of their unsettling first-hand experiences of the New World of Mexico. We are confronted with polar opposites. Miles Phillips records an interior journey of personal transformation, enlarged human sympathy and a growing awareness of colonial oppression. Job Horton, as if traumatised, remains in denial and \u201cimmune to any soul-making possibilities\u201d. Together these \u201ccolonialist ur-texts\u201d demonstrate, on the one hand, human fallibility and incipient brutishness and, on the other, the capacity for life-enhancing wonder and the possibility of spiritual redemption and forgiveness \u2013 the very strands that Shakespeare weaves into The Tempest<\/i>.<\/p>\n

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Forgiveness and redemption figure, too, in Joseph Sterrett\u2019s examination of the imagery of Cain in George Herbert\u2019s poetry, and its place in the theological debates triggered by English Arminianism. Cain, commonly understood as the quintessence of extreme wickedness to whom the fearful justice of eternal damnation is meted out, is for Herbert an embodiment of the pain and anguish common to all sinners, great and small, whose despair the coming of Christ dispels. Not even Cain, the first murderer and fratricide, is beyond redemption. That shift in Cain\u2019s status, and the deeply-felt emphasis on redemption and forgiveness are central, too, to Henry Vaughan\u2019s struggle to come to terms with the traumatic anguish and anger of his experience of Civil War bloodshed which he poignantly (and for his enemies, perhaps, pointedly) compares to the spilling of Abel\u2019s life. Vaughan\u2019s spiritual indebtedness to Herbert went deep. That crucial creative relationship features again in Erik Ankeberg\u2019s exploration of holiness (and the ongoing, often contentious debate about its true nature in the period) in what he calls the \u201cincarnational\u201d poetry of George Herbert, designed, like prayer, to translate the Christian to Christ. For him and for Henry Vaughan the writing and reading of \u201ctrue verse\u201d was instrumental to the pursuit of that \u201cpractic piety\u201d which they saw as the goal and hallmark of authentic holiness.<\/div>\n
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Jeremy Hooker is, of course, very much of our moment, a denizen and deep explorer of the borderlands we all, perforce, inhabit. He is not, in any formal sense, a writer of religious poetry embedded (like Herbert\u2019s and Vaughan\u2019s) in doctrine and scripture. But his long engagement with the natural world and sustained pondering the nature of lyric poetry and the limits of language is essentially a spiritual questing. For him, lyric verse is \u201ca way of seeing that should reach beyond the eye and \u2018I\u2019\u201d: it must venture beyond quotidian discourse and the language of reason \u201cto a new way of knowing\u201d. Something of what might be involved in such an evolution is broached in Fiona Owen and Meredith Andrea\u2019s personal dialogue on the processes of poetic discovery they experienced through a collaborative writing exchange over a period of time and at a distance. Certainly they remind us that poetry may not spring simply from the observing eye or a fixed ego but takes shape and speaks from somewhere \u201cin between\u201d.<\/div>\n
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The poems in Scintilla 16<\/i> open with what was a dominant theme in this year\u2019s submissions: the experience of death and loss (particularly of a father) that leaves the poet negotiating a borderline where the living and the dead, past and present, convergence and separation meet. So Alan Payne\u2019s opening poem \u2018Higger Tor\u2019 sets for us the theme of \u201cwinter\u2019s dislocations\u201d, while in Greg Miller\u2019s moving poem \u2018King David\u2019, though the father is \u201ca king of a man . . . He could not shield us\u201d from his own death. Several poets employ the technology of our own day to represent this world of feeling. \u201cEvery death is a world\u2019s end\u201d, asserts Christopher Meredith, \u201ca synaptic powercut\u201d. \u201cIldiaf! Gadawaf \/ i\u2019r geiriau \/ fy nghornio\u201d, cries Aled Jones Williams in Welsh, \u201cYield! Let \/ the words stetho- \/ scope me\u201d. Language itself is the bringer of news. \u201cYou are the universal router\u201d asserts Oliver Comins, \u201cearthbound, \/ sky bound, a water-thralled presence awash \/ with minerals and slow liquids, living for news\u201d. Ghosts and angels, the fragility of this creaturely world, birth and rebirth abide in these poems. \u201c[T]hey are ever returning to us, the dead\u201d, W. G. Sebald reminds us in \u2018The Emigrants\u2019. Location and dislocation, journeying, music, meditations on place and the \u201cI\u201d all contribute to the poems in this issue. Despite life\u2019s toughness and transience, relationships and love are celebrated, with Victoria Field\u2019s \u2018Walking to Rosslyn Chapel\u2019 providing a closing benediction.<\/div>\n

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Available from Amazon! Table of Contents   Author Title # Preface 7 Robert Wilcher “Thalia” and the “Father of Lights”: \u2026<\/p>\n

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