Helen Boden
Artist & Poet
An examination of place and identity, the poetry collection A Landscape To Figure In (Red Squirrel Press) considers the interfaces between physical, psychological and peripheral, examining both the magic and violence of liminal spaces and edges, and imagining fictive and hybrid locations. ‘Haar, St Michael & All Angels’ is the closing poem, an elegy that recapitulates some of the book’s main themes, including the embodied relationship of breath, language and footfall; and voluntary movement and involuntary flight – across generations & species, locally & globally.
Haar, St Michael & All Angels
ground is air is earth
is mist is soil is
light is loam is haze
is bone is breath is
foot is voice is lung
is home to their remains
their flesh made word
beneath names and dates
fixed on york stone
Written in the Howe of Fife, in element-blurring and specificity-erasing conditions more typically associated with the coast, this poem refers to an inland graveyard in Yorkshire (where the local word for haar or coastal fog is, incidentally, fret). Boden found that the softening weather contrasted with the sharpness of gravestone inscriptions, and possibly helped soften her own sense of the harsh distinctions between text and image, written and corporeal/embodied, or life and death. Since composing the poem, the stones commemorating her family members have themselves weathered, their lettering decorated by moss.
Boden often concludes readings with this poem, and the first stanza can be said in a single breath.
Hear a recording of the artist reading the poem ‘Haar, St Michael & All Angels‘ below
Un/Sung Stream
i. The burn is crossed by many roads, carried
on hardly-noticed bridges, and passes between
suburbs and housing estates,
rather than through them. In that regard,
it is an unsung stream
(though often cursed by unwary golfers),
but it comes into its own
in the Hermitage of Braid, and other parks
where it really is the centre-piece.*
ii. Pace Dr Tom, I think
Forkenford (sing of Forkenford!),
Cameron Toll Lade (sing!)
are neuks, kennings, fluvial clauses
where the water dominates, denominates
culvert, trunk road, cycle path & railway ghost
MidLiberton. Colinton Mains Green:
sing what’s between
Firrhill Crescent & Oxgangs Road North,
our necks of the woods:
isthmus, island, domicile?
iii. Sing of the unreported labourer
who lost his life at the Inch’s
unfit-for-purpose
construction workers’ camp
& sing of veterinary nurse
Olive Smith
swept away in a spate on the Braid
trying to save her friend’s dog
iv. Sing elegy for her sing eulogy for him
Sing praisepoem, prosepoem or polemic
Sing freeflow, sing structure, sing what’s unseen
now heard: Braid Burn Sung Stream
* The opening stanza is found from, and lineates, a paragraph in ‘Dr Tom’ Robertson’s blog, Lesser Lothian Streams
This poem is from Braid, a new sequence written in response to a commission from ArtWalkPorty, and to the whole Braid Burn watercourse: from mouth onto the Firth of Forth at Portobello beach, to headwaters in the Pentland Hills.
The poems explore tensions between ‘flow’ and ‘structure’, and between human and more-than-human, both along the catchment’s flood prevention scheme, and within language itself. They emerged through attentiveness to patterns repeated between source and mouth. The sequence also plays with scale, makes analogies – such as between extreme-weather events and social events – and draws on the terminologies of, and similarities and distinctions between: speech, writing (including phonetic script), listening and mapping.
The idea of the isthmus / ‘neck of the woods’ recurs throughout the sequence, in relation to both personal place-identity, and to the effects on water levels of time and climate change.
Hear a recording of the artist reading the poem ‘Un/Sung Stream’ below
About Helen Boden
Helen Boden is a Yorkshire-born and Edinburgh-based poet, facilitator and editor whose work spans digital, print, performance and exhibition. Boden is widely published in poetry magazines and anthologies. She works across a broad range of community, cultural, educational and environmental settings, and specialises in writing for wellbeing, poetry of place and ekphrastic poetry.
Boden’s first full collection, A Landscape To Figure In, was published by Red Squirrel Press (2021), selected for Scottish Book Trust’s ‘Debut Lab’ (2022), and featured in Scottish Poetry Library’s ‘Best Scottish Poems’ (2022). Boden has undertaken several residencies including at the Erskine Building, Dunfermline, and Pentlands Book Festival, Edinburgh, and has featured at several festivals around the UK including StAnza, Push the Boat Out, Spring Fling and Art Walk Porty.
Find Helen Boden’s poetry collection A Landscape to Figure In here
Find out more about In Tension and see exhibiting pages from other artists