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Dominic James lives near Seven Springs in Glos. and follows poetry meetings along the M4 corridor. Often published online, and appearing in several Erbacce Prize longlists, he has recently had work included in  Dreich and Stand Magazines and GPS and AUB anthologies. He has two collections: Pilgrim Station, through SPM Publishing and Smudge, published by Littoral Press, 2022.  Currently, after a long term of poetry, he is enjoying Film School in Gloucester, where he is learning hand over fist and running flat out.

https://djamespoetic.blogspot.com/

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Introduction

Easing into taking video instead of photos, I was bound to wield the compact camera over four days in Rome, last May. Wedding guests: taken in the lee of Saturday’s venue, this film finds us on Sunday when ice cream and a green doze took us to the limit of our tourist powers. The narrative is off the cuff, true to the event and the poem was presented as remembered: a lunch, in reach of the Atlas Mountains, years ago. By the way, I generally don’t stray far from Stroud in Glos. [DJ]

Currently, I’m taking taking a year of film school in Gloucesteshire College and, suddenly, a current project suddenly involves, cast, crew, decisions, responsibility… I sort of love it. My poetry films are simpler than the new learning would allow, but i’m glad some of them have been well received. A garland for Greg Freeman’s poems on Woking Statuary, a thousand hits over a weekend for Katie Lloyd Nunn on wild swimming. Other familiar faces make an appearance. Very sporting of them too. I find poets are a good bunch.

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TEXT: THE CACTUS HOUSE

We strolled on cobblestones
to a Romantic garden
on the Botanic Gate.

Mounted fountain steps by lizards,
pollen-brushed, passed this young man,
sprung from his place, who might
find us in the Cactus House.

We’d come to doze in park-life peace
beneath the hill where / at the wedding feast,
we danced among the hedgerows:

Why hothouse first?
Who knows?
We did not toss coins, consult I Ching:
thought it as well to leave un-mixed
causality and moment.

Door One: and in among rotund
and swollen desert plants, full of fun,
more pleasing to the eye than touch;
more thorny than exuberant.

Nodding on the carnivorous bed
outside the house, then in once more –
swamp things and cactus; prickly pear
and flowering stuff. One finds ideas
of lingam and of yoni funny
as they ever are. The nature
of the cactus’ softness cheered us up,
perhaps more like us than we know.
Unappealing fur, white hair that grows
in wisps better tucked in underwear
than adorning some protuberance.

Spined melons, grown from arid soil’s
essential, quiet attractiveness, the spidery,
with tufts and drifts, where limbs and bulbs
of cactus grow pre-fossilised in long containers.

>> Look at that bad boy!

Old and young alike, we are drawn to desert life.

Which brings to mind a poem from
across the Med, past mountains,
outside the Sugar Sultan’s palace.

THE WINTERAGE

The French at table in
l’hivernage, a real mix:
the women in their fifties, say,
their grumpy men are older.
I seldom am so taken with
the men:

the women might have been
those girls I saw beside the Seine
one summer back in seventy-nine,
dark heads bent over tables –
“Tarblers” we were taught in school –
discussing everything and smoking,
gorgeous, yes, at seventeen.

Now here again,
with partners at a later age
the women, younger, self-aware,
a Catholic strain of discipline
in their familiar, Gallic way
and talk, talk, talk,
I’m pleased to say they all hold
cigarettes.
Living it up, in old Maroc,
a stone’s throw from the desert.

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