I'll be picking bird cherries...

Ripe bird cherries (Prunus padus). Novosibirsk, 24 July 2019.

[Image source: https://vn.ru/news-pervaya-cheremukha-sozrela-v-novosibirske/ .]

From Wild Berries (Ягодные места  - Yagodnyye Mesta, lit. Berry places, 1982) by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1984 translation by Antonina W. Bouis. 

It begins up in space, and from this opening my only (unnecessary) advice to the reader is, just go with it. In other words, without stopping to worry about what kind of novel it is or whether this or that section is good or bad. At any rate readers in 1981 can't have been bored and I don't think it would be any different for a reader today. 

'Along the midnight sky an angel flew. . . .'

The cosmonaut recalled the poem and smiled sadly. 'Some angel I make!' His face, reflected in the porthole of the capsule, was tired, no longer young, yet animated with childlike curiosity. He had never been beyond his country's borders before, And suddenly there were no borders; the striped barriers, no-man's-lands, border guards, German shepherds, and customs points all had disappeared. Now they seemed unnatural, ridiculous. Other things were difficult even to imagine: for instance, the idea of mandatory residency registration.

Below, the lights of Paris glittered, a handful of gold dust scattered across black velvet. ...

(Beginning of the Prologue of Wild Berries.)

Lermontov's poem "Angel", published in 1831 when he was sixteen, is mentioned again in the final lines of the Epilogue. Here it is in full:

По небу полуночи ангел летел,
  И тихую песню он пел;
И месяц, и звёзды, и тучи толпой
  Внимали той песне святой.

Along the midnight sky an angel flew

a silent song he sang

the moon the stars the clouds together

heard that holy hymn

Он пел о блаженстве безгрешных духов

  Под кущами райских садов;
О боге великом он пел, и хвала 
  Его непритворна была.

He sang the bliss of pure souls

under Eden's boughs

and he sang the greatness of God

intently, devoutly

Он душу младую в объятиях нёс
  Для мира печали и слёз;
И звук его песни в душе молодой
  Остался -- без слов, но живой.

In his arms an infant soul, bound for

this world's tears and sorrow

and his song remains in the infant soul

wordless but alive

И долго на свете томилась она,
  Желанием чудным полна,
И [звуков]1 небес заменить не могли
  Ей скучные песни земли.

The soul lingers long in this world,

lost in yearning for

the song of heaven that passes

all earth's dull strains

The novel's title hints at two things about it: its accent on youth/freshness/ripeness (the really young, like Lermontov, and the young in spirit, like the cosmonaut); and its setting in the Siberian taiga, at any rate the setting of its central narratives. For (like the cosmonaut, again) Wild Berries has a strongly centripetal temper; it isn't a "local" novel as we normally conceive it. Indeed you might reasonably call it a global novel, though I feel the limitations of "global", the way it's deployed in news media. The novel goes a long way beyond that. 

The novel "Berry Places" (1981) is fascinating and unusual, multi-layered and multi-character. This is a novel about Russia and the planet Earth, about humanity and man, about history and modernity. "Where is the world heading?" - this main question is always relevant, and the literary skill of the author simply cannot but surprise the attention. Yevtushenko remains a true great poet even in prose.

I'm quoting an unpretentious description from https://avidreaders.ru/book/yagodnye-mesta.html , because it saves me the donkey work. And this description seems quite accurate, unlike Google Books talking about "the tale of Soviet scientists on a search for rare ore in the far northern taiga" (the main locations are about the same latitude as York or Hamburg, admittedly a latitude that would feel pretty northerly in Canada).

Anyway I think the description is quite right to see Wild Berries as basically a novel of ideas: that's what makes it all hang together. And yet, maybe paradoxically, it's unquenchably narrative in form. There are no authorial discourses, its chapters never stop telling stories, the Prologue and Epilogue just as much as the rest. 

*

And, of course, the title also means what it says, so let's get ethnobotanical.

"His cheekbones were prominent, like those of many of his fellow Siberians. The teeth were white and strong, probably thanks to 'sulfur' -- a Siberian chewing gum made from leaf resin" (Prologue, p. 10). 

Actually made from the gum of conifers, such as the Siberian Larch (or here, at Zima, the intergrade with the Dahurian Larch). It can also be made with the gum of the Siberian Pine (see below). 

*

"Then he'd send his daughter, Ksiuta, the only other living creature around besides Charlie, down to the cellar for red bilberry juice." (Ch 3, p. 39)

"...the crimson sprays of red bilberry, hardening on dark lacquered leaves..." (Ch 9, p. 116)

I'm guessing this means Cowberry or Lingonberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea). From what I can see, Siberia has similar berry resources to Sweden: Lingonberry, Bilberry, Northern Bilberry, and the old-world Cranberry. (But Red Bilberry is a western N. American species (Vaccinium parvifolium).) 

*

When Tisha was leaving, Dasha ran out into the yard after him to hold the dog, which had been let off its chain. Unexpectedly she whispered in his ear, 'Come to Crooked Hill tomorrow at noon . . . I'll be picking bird cherries . . .'

The bird cherry trees were a marvelous sight on Crooked Hill. The bushes were weighed down by the black fruit, sprinkled with last night's rain. You could pick a big bunch, toss a handful of berries into your mouth, and using your tongue to separate the flesh from the pits, cover your whole palate with a tart, sweet film. Tisha bent the bushes down to make it easier for Dasha to pick,and she squealed like a child when the rain from the branches showered down on her, creeping in under her neckline and trickling down her back. Two baskets were quickly filled.

'Too many leaves!' Dasha sighed. 'I'll have to pick over them.'

And suddenly she strode over to Tisha, put her hands on his shoulders, and pressed up against him. Her malachite eyes were so close to his that he could see thin veins in them, as if they were real malachite . . .

They lay next to each other between the two baskets filled with berries. A clumsy movement of Tisha's turned over a basket, and the berries fell on Dasha's naked breasts. Tisha kissed the berries from her.

(from Ch 4, pp. 76-77.)

The Bird Cherry (Prunus padus) has a large native range, from Atlantic shores (including the northern British Isles) right across Europe and almost right across Russia. In Europe there's basically no tradition of doing anything with the fruit, but in Siberia it's a different matter. Check out ForagerChef's article on Siberian bird cherry cake. Out in the taiga, Kalya breakfasts on "bird cherry salad and soup with meat and dried potatoes" (Ch 16, p. 225).

Another post about Bird Cherry:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2014/06/bird-cherry-prunus-padus.html .

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[Uncle] personally spread his bear-fur coat for them in the haystack and conjured pregnancy with vagabond's gibberish. He gave them a magic cedar cone to use whenever they started arguing - each had to eat a seed, and the argument would cease immediately. He unexpectedly burst into tears and said he had been a scoundrel to his own wife, and that if his nephew followed his example, he would beat him in front of all decent folk . . .

(from the Prologue, p. 23)

Two pine cone collectors were industriously at work in the taiga ... The Buryat struck the cedar trees with a long hammer-headed pole. The cedar shook, groaning hollowly and reluctantly shedding a sprinkling of cones onto the grass.

(from Ch 20, p. 259.)

This is the Siberian Pine (Pinus sibirica). It has edible seeds which are marketed in Russia as "cedar nuts", and indeed the tree is often called Siberian cedar, to the confusion of translators. 

[Being as Euro-blinkered as I am, I had previously imagined that the only pine with seeds worth eating was the Stone Pine of the Mediterranean (Pinus pinea). However, there are also the "pinyons" of south-west N. America, a group of related species of great significance in Native American food cultures. (Pinus edulis is one of the most widespread species; another, Pinus monophylla is the world's only one-needle pine; and there's about ten others.) But the most important edible species, globally, is the Korean Pine (Pinus koraiensis), native to much of E. Asia; I've read that most of the "pine nuts" sold in Europe and the USA actually come from this species. In fact most pine species have seeds that are technically edible, just too small to be worth the trouble -- normally. Jacob Hunter's useful post explains what's involved.]

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Chronology

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933 - 2017). Wild Berries was published in 1982.

The date of the main narrative (taking that to mean Seryozha Lachugin's time in Siberia) is July-August 1973. We know this because of the abandoned Japanese radio (Ch 21), broadcasting news referring to the imminent downfall of Salvador Allende. What the radio announces in two sentences is also the occasion of the narrative in Ch 22. (Yevtushenko had been a good friend of Allende.)

After reading the book and being thrown around to so many scenes and times, I was surprised to find how many of its chapters are, at least nominally, set at this date: 1, 2, 4 (only the frame: the rest is Tikhon by the Lena river about forty years earlier, during the era of dekulakhization (1929-34)), 5, 7, 8, 9, 12 (though it also includes Sitechkin's early life), 16, 17 (though it's mainly war narratives from WW2 and Vietnam), 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23. 

To which list -- though it isn't explicitly stated -- you can reasonably add the Prologue (i.e. the cosmonaut in space), and Ch 13 (The Tails' first gig in Honolulu).

Yevtushenko himself was 41 in August 1973, so he (rather unusually) makes his young hero belong to a younger generation than his own; most novelists shy away from this. We think about the author a lot, of course. Young Seryozha sometimes embodies Yevtushenko's own experience (for instance in Kazakhstan); but so does the expedition leader Kolomeitsev, who is around fifty, that is, around Yevtushenko's age when he was actually writing the novel. And actually I suppose Yevtushenko himself makes a brief covert appearance, in the story about the "famous poet" that Gagarin unintentionally places in peril (Prologue, p. 8) -- besides being explicitly dismissed as "passé" by Kostya Krivtsov (Ch 10, p. 125; that must have been back in the mid-1960s). Yevtushenko is writing about, not just Seryozha, but Seryozha's whole generation (Krivtsov, Seleznyov, The Tails). That's why the novel becomes a question about who we can be, what direction the world might go in. Its optimism and idealism, not at all cheaply assumed (think of e.g. Chs 17, 22), is something to ponder, to envy, maybe even to be inspired by. Because, forty years on, it feels like the light reflected by Yevtushenko has gone, we pretty much need to start all over again, idealism and youth have been neutered and repurposed by technology, profit and exploitation. 

The other chapters:

3, at Belaya Zaimka the previous summer (July 1972). 

6, the mushroomer's biography, covering the whole 20th century up to the time of the novel. 

10. Leningrad: begins with Seryozha's parents marrying (c. 1933?) and his grandfathers, both presumably purged by Stalin before WW2; then shifts to Seryozha's adolescence (mid-late 1960s)

11. Kazakhstan, Seryozha's first geological expedition (c. 1970?)

14. Krivtsov and Leningrad's literature circles (several years up to, presumably, 1973).

15. Leningrad: Selezhnyov and his father, c. 1970.

Epilogue. Mostly set in Kaluga, concerned with Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857 - 1935). From his conversation with Semiradov (p. 294), it must be mid-1914, just before the start of the First World War. 

*

Geography

In the Prologue the cosmonaut comes from Zima; Ch 1 starts in Zima, and we revisit it in Ch 19.  Zima (Zima Station, Zima Junction) is a town in Irkutsk. It's the subject of Yevtushenko's most famous poem.  Yevgeny was actually born in Nizhneudinsk (3.5 hrs drive away), but the family moved to Zima soon after his birth and (when he was still only one year old) to Moscow. However, Yevgeny and his grandmother returned to Zima as evacuees for several years during WW2.

If you try looking for Shelaputinki or Belaya Zaimka (where Belomestnykh lives) you won't find either, but you can maybe take a hint from Belaya Zima, two days walk to the SW of Zima. 

It is around 40km from Belaya Zaimka (via Shelaputinki) to the expedition campsite (Ch 9, p. 113). 

"..sent to the upper reaches of the Lena River to rid the taiga of rich peasants, called kulaks" (Ch 4, p. 72). The river Lena flows north from L. Baikal. Its source is not far from Irkutsk, 180 miles SE of Zima. 

"During his first field expedition in Kazakhstan..."  (Ch 11, p. 143). This is based on Yevtushenko's own experience, though it would have been twenty years before Seryozha's. After being expelled from school, the young Yevtushenko joined a geological reconnaissance expedition to Kazakhstan where fifteen unescorted convicts turned out to be under his command. 

Sources: 

Yevtushenko's entry in ru.wikipedia.org:  https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%95%D0%B2%D1%82%D1%83%D1%88%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%BE,_%D0%95%D0%B2%D0%B3%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%90%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B4%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87 .)

This page, with biography and photos: https://uznayvse.ru/znamenitosti/biografiya-evgeniy-evtushenko.html .

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Love relationships and sexual behaviour

Naturally they play a large part in a novel about youth and ripeness. But not just youth: Kolomeitsev, leader of the geological expedition, is an inveterate womaniser even in his fifties. The trail of destruction that he and others like him leave behind is one of the book's recurrent concerns. Anyway, here's a list of some of the main entanglements, running the gamut from idyllic to horrific. 

Prologue: Uncle's infidelities; the cosmonaut and the girl he falls for and marries (both unnamed). 

Ch 1: The handsome Grisha and the hopeful storekeeper; Ksiuta and the unknown father of her child (Was it Grisha? Tikhon?)

Ch 3: Ksiuta and her one-time lover: it was Kolomeitsev. Her father (Belomestnykh) and mother. 

Ch 4: Tikhon (Tisha) and Dasha. 

Ch 7: Belomestnykh and his wife, again. 

Ch 10: Volodya and Irina (Seryozha's parents). Seleznyov and the village singer Tonya.

Ch 11: Seryozha and Grunya (the beekeeper). Nakhabkin and his wife. 

Ch 12: Kesha and Kalya. Kolomeitsev and Yulya Vyazemskaya. Yulya's marriage to the "sad-faced dentist" Dodik. Sitechkin's parents.

Ch 14: the drunken man (Vasya) and the woman (presumably his wife). 

Ch 15: Seleznyov senior and his wife.

Ch 16: Kesha and Kalya again; Kalya's many men (including Kolomeitsev).

Ch 19: Tikhon and Darya; and their daughter. 

Ch 20: The old man (February) and the woman he kills (in his story); his "old woman". 

Ch 22: Allende and Hortensia. 

Epilogue: Tsiolkovsky and his wife Varvara Evgrafovna. 

Sergei Yesenin

 

Tadpoles. Warminster, 2 April 2023.

Reading Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Wild Berries has reminded me how little Russian literature I really know, and especially Russian poetry. So this evening I picked one of the recurring names, it was Sergei Yesenin (1895 - 1925), and decided to read a little deeper. 

I was helped by finding this site: https://ruverses.com/sergey-esenin/ , an assemblage of all the translations it could find (with the Russian text opposite), mostly into English but also other languages. The texts are often a mess (the French ones, for instance, contain no accents). 

 (It also includes a quite informative introduction; an anonymous bit of soviet-style propaganda. "His grave is perpetually scattered with flowers left by admiring readers — taxi drivers, workers, students, and simple Russian grandmothers.")

They are drinking here again, brawling, sobbing,
to the amber woes of the accordion.
They curse their luck and they hark back
to a Russia — a Moscow — of other days.

For my part, I duck my head,
my eyes foundering in wine,
rather than look fate in the face,
I think of something else for a while.

There is something that we have all lost forever.
My dark blue May, my pale blue June,
that must be why the corpse smell
dogs this frantic carousal.

Oh, today’s a great day for the Russians
the homemade vodka’s flowing
and the noseless accordionist’s singing
of the Volga and the secret police.

They’re grumbling that bony October
caught them all in its blizzard
courage has gone back to whetting
the knife from its boot.

A hatred shifts in the eyes
rebellion grates in the raised voices
and they pity the young and foolish
whose blood flamed up and burned away.

Where are you now and why so far?
Do we shine brightly for you?
The accordionist’s on a vodka cure
for his clap caught in the Civil War.

No. the lost Russia will not be silenced.
On all sides the rot feeds a wild courage.
Oh Russia, my Russia,
rising in Asia.

(Poem source: https://ruverses.com/sergey-esenin/they-carouse-fight-and-sob-again-ere/9390/ .)

This was in 1922, three years before Yesenin took his own life. That's if he did; there's a touch of doubt he might have been murdered. The poems suggest, anyway, that the thought of suicide was no stranger to him. 

The translator here is W.S. Merwin, apparently... but it's far less obviously Merwinesque than the three others I've found. Here's one of them:

In the country of yellow nettles
the twig fences are brittle
the log houses huddle like orphans
into the pussy-willows

through fields over the hills’ blue
by the greenness of lakes
a road of sand leads to the mountains
of Siberia

Between Mongols and Finns Russia
is lost there before she is frightened
along the road men make their way
in irons

Each one has robbed or killed
as his fate would have it
I am in love with the grief of their eyes
and the graves in their cheeks

many have killed from pure joy
they are simple-hearted
but in their darkened faces
the blue mouths are twisted

I cherish one secret dream
that I am pure in heart
but I too will cut a throat
to the whistling of autumn

I too on the blown road
on these same sands
will go with a rope at the neck
to make love to mourning

I will smile as I go by
I will swell out my chest
and the storm will lick over
the way I came

(Source: https://ruverses.com/sergey-esenin/in-the-land-of-yellow-nettle/9386/ .)

I love this, but possibly more for its Merwin elements than its Yesenin ones. (On the surface such extremely different writers.) This poem is from 1915, quite early in Yesenin's brief career (the author just twenty). 

I think the "yellow nettles" are most likely Large-flowered Hemp-nettle (Galeopsis speciosa), a beautiful arable weed native from N.Europe to Siberia. Russian sources say that Hemp-nettles are poisonous, causing paralysis in livestock, but I couldn't find much detail about this on the Internet. An alternative might be Yellow Archangel (Lamium galeobdolon), also native as far east as Iran, but this is a woodland plant. 

Two more Merwin translations: 

https://ruverses.com/sergey-esenin/wind-whistles-through-the-steep-fence/ .

https://ruverses.com/sergey-esenin/i-am-the-last-poet-of-the-village/9389/

Yesenin, himself of peasant stock, wrote a popular poetry. His poems are mostly rhymed, and most of the other translators try to emulate this, with mixed results. It's perhaps a kind of poetry that intrinsically resists transplantation into another language. 

But, brought up by his better-off grandparents, he never really lived a peasant's life. The constant evocation of the peasant country where he was born (Konstantinovo, some 100 miles SE of Moscow)  is a torturing nostalgia for what he had left behind. By the time he was publishing poetry, he was hanging out with people from much posher backgrounds, such as his writer pal Anatoly Marienhof or, the second of his four wives, Zinaida Reich, who later became a prominent actress until she was horribly murdered, probably by Beria's people. 

He was a troubled soul, an alcoholic, and a rowdy. The later poems become increasingly fixated on his own disastrous trajectory. 

His third wife was Isadora Duncan, eighteen years his senior.  (He doesn't appear in My Life, which ends just as Isadora is setting off for Moscow, "the beautiful New World... the World of Comrades...") During their two-year marriage he travelled with her to Europe and the USA, but they didn't really have much in common except alcohol. 

*

'But Yesenin behaved like a hooligan sometimes,' the cashier added insidiously. 'And he even admitted it.'

The leader grew angry. 'What terrible things did Yesenin do, really? Turned over a dozen tables, punched a dozen faces, and -- who knows? -- all dozen faces may have deserved it. If he was guilty of anything, he repented and punished himself.  He punished himself too harshly, unreservedly. Some people will never overturn a table or punch anyone's face -- quiet, modest people -- but they'll betray you in a moment,  ruin you. And no-one calls them hooligans. Of course, you can write bad poetry and be a good person. But you can't write good poetry and be a bad person. '

'My opinion exactly, ' the director's secretary said, looking at everyone with great dignity, as if the last phrase had been meant for her.

(Wild Berries, Ch 14; Yevtushenko depicting literary societies in a time of denouncers and informers.)

*

I don't understand why the ruverses.com site omits the remarkable 1920 poem Sorokoust (prayer for the dead). Perhaps it's not as comprehensive a collection as I've assumed. There's a translation of Sorokoust, by Rose Styron, here: https://www.oocities.org/sulawesiprince/russpoets/yeseninpoetry1.html 

*

An interesting article about Yesenin's life and reputation by Alexandra Guzeva, with some great photos:

https://www.rbth.com/arts/334253-yesenin-russia-poet

TV and kerosene

 

Got a stinker, so I'm making things easy on myself with a few samples of what I'm currently reading.

*

I realized I had forgotten to say goodbye to my mother but, by the time I turned round, she had gone. I waved at the empty space she had left behind and followed the daunting Mrs Berwick into a room where twelve other girls were sitting on squishy sofas and beanbags. I sat cross-legged on the floor, as we used to do in assembly at Kingsclere Primary School.

"What's that pong?" I heard one girl with long hair scooped up in a scrunchie say to another, also with long, tumbling hair.

"I think it's coming from over thar." The other girl pointed towards me.

I sniffed at my clothes and realized that I did smell of Flossy. I tried to tuck myself into as tight a ball as I could, hoping I would disappear. Mrs Berwick looked down her beaky nose and told us all what we could and, mainly, what we couldn't do.

I was sharing a room with two other girls who were much older than me. Everyone was older than me by nearly a year and they all seemed to have been to boarding school before.

"What does your father do?" a girl asked me, as she wound her long blond hair round her index finger.

"My dad's a racehorse trainer," I answered.

There was a snort from one corner, giggles from another. I heard the word "Dad" being uttered with incredulity.

"You mean your father's a stable boy?" the blond girl said.

"No, he's a trainer. He trained Mill Reef." Usually, that was my get-out-of-jail card.

"Huh," said a girl whose father was a colonel in the army. "Mill Reef? Never heard of him. But if you were born in a barnful of horses, that explains why you stink of manure!"

The other girls started laughing hysterically, rolling around on the floor together. I got up and silently left the room.

"I can ride, I can ride," I said to myself.

It was the one thing I knew I could do better than anyone else at this school.

We were straight into lessons the next day, which meant wearing the uniform of green and white striped shirts, green skirt, red or green jumper and green blazer with red stripes. I chose to wear the red jumper as it was new, whereas my green one was second-hand. Everyone else had chosen green. My skirt needed to be rolled over a few times, as it was on the big side.

"You'll grow into it," my mother had promised me.

Mum had refused to buy me the burgundy penny loafers that were on the school uniform list because they were "ridiculously expensive". Instead, I had orthopaedic shoes that would support my arches. I hated them.

Clare Balding's first day at boarding school, from her irresistible memoir My Animals And Other Family (2012). (For non-UK readers, Clare Balding is a TV sports presenter. Initially her specialism was horse racing but she's doing Wimbledon this year.)

*

I stood on Brocken's sovran height, and saw
Woods crowding upon woods, hills over hills
A surging scene, and only limited
By the blue distance. Heavily my way
Downward I dragged through fir groves evermore,
Where bright green moss heaves in sepulchral forms
Speckled with sunshine; and, but seldom heard,
The sweet bird's song became a hollow sound;
And the breeze, murmuring indivisibly,
Preserved its solemn murmur most distinct
From many a note of many a waterfall,
And the brook's chatter; 'mid whose islet stones
The dingy kidling with its tinkling bell
Leaped frolicsome, or old romantic goat
Sat, his white beard slow waving. I moved on
In low and languid mood: for I had found
That outward forms, the loftiest, still receive
Their finer influence from the Life within;
Fair cyphers else: fair, but of import vague
Or unconcerning, where the heart not finds
History or prophecy of friend, or child,
Or gentle maid, our first and early love,
Or father, or the venerable name
Of our adored country! O thou Queen,
Thou delegated Deity of Earth,
O dear, dear England! how my longing eye
Turned westward, shaping in the steady clouds
Thy sands and high white cliffs!

My native Land! 
Filled with the thought of thee this heart was proud,
Yea, mine eye swam with tears: that all the view
From sovran Brocken, woods and woody hills,
Floated away, like a departing dream,
Feeble and dim! Stranger, these impulses
Blame thou not lightly; nor will I profane,
With hasty judgment or injurious doubt,
That man's sublimer spirit, who can feel
That God is everywhere! the God who framed
Mankind to be one mighty family,
Himself our Father, and the World our Home.

 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Lines Written in the Album at Elbingerode, in the Hartz Forest"; the poet feeling the alienating force of a nature that had no personal association for him, but intrigued too.The original draft of the poem (apart, presumably, from the one in the album at the inn) was sent in a letter of 17 May 1799 to Sara Coleridge, who was keeping the home fires burning at Nether Stowey.  "Not that they possess a grain of merit as poetry," he wrote (as was his wont). But this poem's thinking about nationalism and internationalism, about our relations with nature in a local context and outside that context, holds my attention.

Like many readers of our time, I'm discovering Coleridge's poetry (other than the half-dozen standards) through Richard Holmes' inspiringly-curated Coleridge: Selected Poems (1996).

I must say that my own experience of coming back on the Calais-Dover ferry is that the fabled white cliffs are at least as dingy as a kidling!

*

She passes right by many dense patches, leaving them to sway in the breeze. "It's our way," she says, "to take only what we need. I've always been told that you never take more than half." Sometimes she doesn't take any at all, but just comes here to check the meadow, to see how the plants are doing. "Our teachings," she says, "are very strong. They wouldn't get handed on if they weren't useful. The most important thing to remember is what my grandmother always said: 'If we use a plant respectfully it will stay with us and flourish. If we ignore it, it will go away. If you don't give it respect it will leave us.'" The plants themselves have shown us this -- Mishkos kenomagwen. As we leave the meadow for the path back through the woods, she twists a handful of timothy into a loose knot upon itself, beside the trail. "This tells other pickers that I've been here," she says, "so that they know not to take any more. This place always gives good sweetgrass since we tend to it right. But other places it's getting hard to find. I'm thinking that they might not be picking right. Some people, they're in a hurry and they pull up the whole plant. Even the roots come up. That's not the way I was taught."

From Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants (2013) by Robin Wall Kimmerer. 

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Grisha, completely forgetting who was boss, hugged the berry commissioner and, squinting at him slyly, mischievously drawled out:

An old tramp helped me escape . . .

And the berry commissioner sang, sighing as though the words had been written for him personally:

I came to life, sensing freedom . . .

Ksiuta came out from behind the wall, rubbing her sleepy eyes, and gently put her finger to her lips. Out of respect for the infant, they stopped singing. 

And then Ivan Kuzmich Belomestnykh said, "People should live together the way they know how to sing together. Everything would be all right then. And, people should start talking and not be afraid of their thoughts. For if you're afraid of your thoughts, you won't have any at all.

"Thank you, dear guests, for coming with this precious present -- my grandson. I'm often not kind enough, and there's no point in even talking about education. Forgive me for that. And you forgive me, Ksiuta. People fight against each other, mostly over trifles. If we stop fighting over trifles, then, God willing, there won't be another big war either."

"To peace!" the berry commissioner cried out ecstatically, hugging Belomestnykh. "Hey, Ivan Kuzmich, you and I . . . You and I . . . And all of us . . . I'm staying with you, my native land. Yes, staying! Where else can I go?"

And he offered a large tear in place of the innumerable emotions he couldn't express with words. And then fell asleep in the chair where he sat, his head in the sauerkraut. Grisha and the geologist lay down in the haystack. The night wind, penetrating the cracks, rustled the hay, and it moved, breathing as if alive, trying to share its thoughts with people, but unable. The pole over the well creaked in the wind, its long neck swaying under the tired stars, which continued to shine for all their weariness. And they would have to shine for a long time more, so that people, weighed down by the earth's gravity, could sometimes raise their heads, look at the stars, and think that besides funny things and sad things, besides meanness and kindness, besides life and death on earth there was a universal eternity.

The mushroomer was put in the side room on a creaking iron bed with nickel-plated knobs, and when Ivan Kuzmich lit the way for him with a kerosene lantern, Nikanor Sergeyevich saw, hanging over his bed, an oilcloth with swans. They even flew this far, Nikanor Sergeyevich thought, and laughed sadly. But he slept soundly, dreaming that he and Kuroda were in some extraordinary forest, where giant mushrooms grew taller than a man. They were using a saw to cut the stem of an agaric so gigantic that your arm wouldn't fit around it. They would take it in Grisha's truck to Hiroshima and show all mankind, to make them ashamed of that other, terrifying mushroom, invented by men. 

And the infant, probably, didn't dream anything, because he still had no past and, therefore, no memories to give birth to dreams. 

From Wild Berries (1981) by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, translated by Antonina W. Bouis. 

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despite the hopelessness of their position they didn't despair they were

not as hopeless as their           position         human beings do this fine

though you might say it's something they only do when the mood

takes them AS THEY SAY                  hey big spender despair is       quite

gratuitous and             never accurately quoted                    humanity is anti

-universe                     never curated Quixotically               do you know i

still don't really know what i'm made of not really i read the books         etc.

and watch Horizon but one day it will repeat itself too often to memorize

empty                                                                                            reminder

say 2 different words and the 2nd. will always be a repetition of the 1st.

sunlight                                                                                         labyrinth

see what i mean                       if only liars could be seen silhouetted against

the sun             white ash        black ash                        white lash blacklist the

star emerging from the wormhole                 rolling on quantum shingle an

empty reminder like a moth in the fist                      deluded into folly       by

the truth          the prisoners turn to dust                    visitors' book bleached

Extracts from two poems near the start of Tim Allen's Very Rare Poems Upon The Earth (128 Improvisations) (Aquifer, 2023). I only recently embarked on this, but I'm already hauling up treasures. (NB The extracts are the second half of "Intrusion", and the first half of "Modification".)

*

From tall rooms, largesse of peonies, 

the porches summercool, the bed upstairs

immaculate in its white counterpane,

to kerosene-lit evenings, the wind

an orphan roaming the silver maples,

sudden widowhood: to meaner comforts,

a trumpetvine above the kitchen door,

then one night her new husband didn't

come in from the milking: to the lot

she bought with what that place went

for, dwindlings in a doll's house: to

the high-rise efficiency condominium,

television on all day, to the cubicle

in the denominational home, to total

unprivacy of bed and bedpan, nurse shoes,

TV with no picture or else coming in waves,

a vertigo: to, one nightfall ...

The beginning of "A Winter Burial", from Amy Clampitt's Westward (1990). I had relished her three earlier collections when I first set about discovering modern poetry in English, but it wasn't long before I was focussing on kinds of poetry that were not so readily purchasable in Waterstones. Thirty-five years later, and closer to the poet's own age (she was a famously late starter), I now seem to hear different strands in the incredible weave of her verse. 

She died in 1994, just eleven years after the publication of her first book. I was actually surprised at how relatively little there is about her on the internet... She had been celebrated, so far as poets are ever celebrated, during that decade. But even celebrated modern poets drop out of public memory with staggering speed. (A thought that might also apply to Yevtushenko.)

Anyway, there's a couple of evenings of Amy Clampitt's poems here: https://www.amyclampitt.com/poems-main .

Bird Cherry (Prunus padus)

Here are some photos of Bird Cherry (Punus padus) when it was newly in bloom  (I took these on April 15th 2014 in West Swindon).

The trunk is smooth and grey. It does not look very like other Cherries - it lacks those familiar horizontal bands of lenticels. The racemose cherries (like this one, and Cherry Laurel, and Portugal Laurel) are a different group.

Lovely! But sometimes the Bird Cherry is spectacular in a different way, when the whole tree (and even its surroundings) become a grey-tented nursery for caterpillars of the Bird Cherry Ermine moth (Yponomeuta evonymella). Here's what I saw today (June 9th, West Swindon). Dramatic attacks like this are said to be more common in a warm spring.

The Bird Cherry Ermine moth is known as häggspinnmal in Sweden, where Bird Cherry (hägg -  Prunus padus) is valued in the woods and as a specimen tree in gardens. So it's all the more distressing when it's transformed overnight into a skeleton hung with webs. In the Finnish lyric Kanteletar 2:150, this is the nemesis that allows the humble birch to triumph over the flamboyant bird cherry:

          Tuli toukka, tuomen kaivoi,
                Kukat kaunoset kaotti.

          maggots gnawed the bird cherry
                destroyed its fair flowers...       (trans. Keith Bosley)

When the caterpillars have finished eating everything, they cocoon together in large swagbags like this.

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By midsummer, 12 days later, things have moved on a bit. From a distance the webby trunk looks as if it's been decorated with Swan filters. These of course are the emerging moths.

They hung around, feebly fluttering onto our hands, clothes, hair and cameras, while we took useless pictures of them.

Meanwhile, the upper canopy is full of fresh new leaves. Looking skywards, the trees are almost back to normal.

*

The Bird Cherry Ermine isn't usually so devastating, though that's when we're apt to notice it. Below are a couple of overheads showing a typical low-level attack. (Photos taken June 3rd, 2015)

Here's an older post about the related Spindle Ermine.

And another post about the Orchard or Cherry Ermine.

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Prunus padus 'Colorata'. Swindon, 16th April 2019.

Here's something I didn't know existed. This is Prunus padus 'Colorata', a variety discovered by chance in Sweden in the 1950s. (In Sweden it is called "blodhägg".)

It's propagated clonally as it doesn't come true from seed. Here in Eastleaze (West Swindon) it's growing alongside normal Bird Cherry and some of the plants look like they could be a cross between the two.

Colorata intergrowing with normal Bird Cherry

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The native region of Prunus padus is a broad band running across N. Europe and nearly all of Russia.

In Europe there's next to no tradition of doing anything with the fruit, but it's different in Siberia, where they make "bird cherry flour" from the dried fruit. This in turn is a constituent of bird cherry cake, apparently a most delicious dessert. ForagerChef  has an article that will tell you all you need to know.

The bird cherry trees were a marvelous sight on Crooked Hill. The bushes were weighed down by the black fruit, sprinkled with last night's rain. You could pick a big bunch, toss a handful of berries into your mouth, and using your tongue to separate the flesh from the pits, cover your whole palate with a tart, sweet film. Tisha bent the bushes down to make it easier for Dasha to pick, and she squealed like a child when the rain from the branches showered down on her, creeping in under her neckline and trickling down her back. Two baskets were quickly filled. 

(Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Wild Berries (1981), Ch 4. For more about this, see 

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2023/05/ill-be-picking-bird-cherries.html .)

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Bird Cherry Pocket (Taphrina padi). Frome, 26 May 2024.

But here's another thing that can happen to bird cherries. This is Taphrina padi, known as Bird Cherry Pocket, a fungal gall that turns the fruit into elongated sacks. On this youngish tree in Frome most of the fruit had been infected. 

Bird Cherry Pocket (Taphrina padi). Frome, 26 May 2024.

Uninfected fruit ripening on the same tree. Frome, 26 May 2024.