Middling Wood: & Other Poems

By Valentin Per Lind

Middling Wood is Valentin Per Lind's second volume of poetry, offering a rich tapestry of traditional and modern verse that plumbs the depths of the human soul, set against often wild and evocative landscapes, in which love, jealousy, desire and loss become potent elemental forces.

"Middling Wood & Other Poems offers a dive

• Language: English
• Publisher: Per Lind Publishing
• Release date: Jun 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9781805415541

Valentin Per Lind

Valentin Per Lind was born in 1959 and studied History and English Literature at Leicester University. He is passionately interested in the Greek Mystery Cults, Jewish Qabalah, Christian mysticism and the European Witch-Cult of the Middle Ages, entailing some lengthy discussions in many of the poems' notes. From his earliest days, he thrilled to Beowulf, and its abiding image of the Norse hero battling monsters. At university, he was heavily influenced by the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century as well as the later Victorian poets such as Tennyson, in particular Tennyson's Idylls of the King with its re-imagining of the Arthurian cycle. Combined, these influences engendered a love of poetry that endures to this day.

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Middling Wood

Middling Wood

& Other Poems

Valentin Per Lind

Copyright © 2024 by Valentin Per Lind

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or

used in any manner without written permission of the

copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book

review. For more information, please contact:

[e-mail]

www.valentinperlind.com

First paperback edition 2024

Book design by PublishingPush

ISBNs:

978-1-80541-555-8 (paperback)

978-1-80541-556-5 (hardback)

978-1-80541-554-1 (ebook)

Published by

Per Lind Publishing

Eastbourne

United Kingdom

To my beloved Fatna

who has seen,

and patiently tolerated,

both the best and the worst of me,

and to all those who

still have light in their eyes

Contents

Preface

Muiredach

Delilah

Middling Wood

Rogue Manager

The Passion of Sister Agata

A Day Without Wind

Tomorrow

Ravilious Country

The People of the Wind

Love Endures

The Bank of Celandines

Yesterday’s News

Becometh the Rose

Good Morning, America

Morning on Primrose Hill

The Closing of the Day

Year of the Plague

The Fox in the High Covert

Minor Angel

Hellebore Summer

Tough Act to Follow

Vain Heart

Aspens

Rushes

Termagant

Seventeen Minutes

300

Contessa

The City After Rain

The Garden of Delight

Sunflowers

Alaphant

Blown Away

Rational Man

Leviathan

Song of the South

Neolithic

Black Pilgrimage

Usher

Clytemnestra

The Name of the Rose

Wise Men Say

Rainy Night in Georgia

Queen of Heaven

Lady Blackbird

Kite Boy

Fool in the Rain

Journey’s End

Oblivion

Seasons of Mist

Our Dad

The Light Sutra

What We Lost

To the Lighthouse

The Typing Pool

How We Are Fallen

The Slug

The Curlew

Stregi

A Woman in Her Power

Old Souls Weep Not

Too Late, I Loved

The End of the Night

On Friston Downs

Youth’s End

The Sting

Don’t Take Me Literally

Court of Night

An Orchid in Rain

Muse

The Garnet Ring

Winterreise

The Flowers Are All Cut Down

Nausea

Storm Over Innsmouth

Nocturne

Preface

It is now around eighteen months since my first volume of poetry, Corvix: Poems of Love, Sex and Death, was published in its expanded edition. Since then, I have continued to write, and the poems presented in this volume were all written over the course of 2023-24. Unlike Corvix, Middling Wood is not a themed collection. Instead, it is a generic collection of poems, in styles ranging from classical to modern, embracing themes of love, war, sorrow and the conflicted soul, in which land and weather often reflect the shifting climate of human emotion. Poems such as Hellebore Summer, Yesterday’s News, How We Are Fallen, and The Typing Pool explore how we look back to see how the world has changed around us, for better or worse, and there are social/political critiques in Good Morning, America and Leviathan. Present, also, is a preponderance of supernatural themes inspired by the English Romantics such as Keats and Coleridge, and later writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, M. R. James, and H.P. Lovecraft expressed in poems such as Middling Wood, The People of the Wind, The Bank of Celandines, Rainy Night in Georgia, Black Pilgrimage, Stregi, Usher, The Curlew and Storm over Innsmouth. Whereas Corvix was, in many ways, quite a fraught book, the poems in Middling Wood are less consumed with death and regret and, one might say, more optimistic. Within these pages, the reader will find satirical poems, social commentary, evocations of nature and the changing seasons, and works of myth and mysticism. I hope that the reader who chances upon this book finds something that touches a chord.

Valentin Per Lind

March 2024

Muiredach

Come, boys, and muster nigh the cross!

The great high cross that wards the graves of Muiredach

Where kings sleep soft among the bleachéd bones of monks

And the old gods rage in the wild earth,

The protean gods of Eire

Who writhe and roar

Among the oaks where the crow caws loudly

On Lammas Eve,

The great old oaks whose branches comb

The golden hair of Áine¹

And rattle like teeth in the north wind.

Take shelter, lads, about the old cross,

The old high cross

Of rock and stone, implacable,

Rearing rudely

Girt by stars,

Twined by serpents whose tongues flicker

As the grass atop the field of Clontarf

Where Boru’s² harp fell,

Where the blood of Ireland’s sons did blight the bitter clover,

And Taranis³ of the fiery bolt

Turns the wheel of the sun

That spins the seasons’ yarn

In Padraig’s emerald land.

Notes

The cross of Muiredach is one of three surviving high crosses at the Irish monastic site of Monasterboice in County Louth. Other high crosses occur at Durrow Abbey, Abbey of Kells, Kinnity and Clonmacnoise. These are Celtic crosses, but very tall and imposing with sculptured panels depicting scenes from the Bible. Most date from the 9th and 10th centuries. After around the eleventh century, high crosses ceased to be erected. In this poem, I have endeavoured to interweave the Christian and pagan Celtic influences (such as the sun wheel, which is a feature of Celtic crosses), which are still present in Irish culture and history despite centuries of Catholicism.

Delilah

O sweet Delilah, lay down thy lantern and thy knife,

Thou succoured me within thy bed,

And now would take my life.

How be it that dark deceit should make its home

In one so fair,

And love’s similitude disguise the worm

That twists thy soul within its lair,

And chains me now to pillar of regret;

I would bring down this roof upon us both

But still would not forget.

Black is thy hair,

As the storm that stirs the prairie grass,

In easy summers, when the asters nod,

And the meadow aches with bobbing flowers,

Cornflower, poppy and goldenrod,

Eyes that burn as fires in the deserts of Karakum,

Blazing livid in the pit of eventide,

Lips moist as pitted fruit, wet with liquor of plum,

And ivory thy skin, as unto Persian silk

That drapes the women of Sardis,

Whose breasts are pale as milk.

Damned is that man who hath not loved thee,

And damned the man who has,

Lost is the man who feels thy kiss,

For he hath drunk the draught of lust,

Of agony and of bliss.

Bitch of wolves art thou

Who stalks the forests of birch

On nights of snow,

And wouldst consume me, soul and all,

My bones left for the crow,

And in love’s calumny, from my tower I fall,

The broken potsherds of my life such charnel,

Scorched by flame ’neath Askalon’s ruinéd wall,

Flayed of the memory of all that’s good and true,

The rain weeps tears from the wet trees

And the blackbird sings a song I never knew.

Notes

I had long had the idea of writing a poem on Delilah from the biblical story of Samson, and finally, the inspiration came. The poem reimagines the story told through a modern relationship with the protagonist being chained to a metaphorical ‘pillar of regret’ and threatening to ‘bring down this roof upon us both’. The Delilah portrayed in this poem is a seductive, powerful and manipulative woman who ensnares men only to betray them. As such, she belongs to the motif of the sinister and predatory feminine.

Middling Wood

Long hath I trod the stony path

And passed through village fair,

But no village do I live in

And abode I hath nowhere,

But just a blanket and a knife

And a pack upon my back

That by the day gets heavier

As I trudge along the track.

Oh, the salt air through the heather blew

And the yellow gorse flowers danced,

When from seeming nowhere

Upon a gentleman I chanced.

Full splendid was his attire,

A dress coat he did wear,

Breeches of the finest cloth

That made me stop and stare.

Turned high was his collar,

Nested within, a silk cravat,

Gold were the buttons on his dress,

Upon his head a jaunty cap.

Quoth I to the stranger,

"From what port has thou come?

The sun doth shine less brightly now,

And the spring flowers pale and glum.

"Wherefore thy carriage and thy horse,

And where thy manor be?

For no fine house I know of

’Twixt this place and the sea."

And the beau he spoke and spoke to me,

In tones sonorous and bold,

A voice endowed with wisdom

And curiously old,

"I am bound for Middling Wood

A mile along the way,

For there is treasure buried,

And there we’ll bide the day."

Thus I turned and followed him

A mile along the way,

Followed him to Middling Wood

There to bide the day.

And as we entered Middling Wood,

And late became the hour,

A chill crept full into my bones,

The forest dark and dour.

We stooped beneath the twisted trunks

As we picked our way,

Skirted nigh the gnarléd roots

Wet with moss and damp decay,

Until, at last, we reached a dell,

Deep in rotting leaves,

There the stranger stayed his course,

He rolled up both his sleeves,

And sweeping back the cover,

The insects and the mould,

Revealed unto me a face

That stared out dead and cold.

"This be the face of Mary Dare,

Sixteen years of age,

Slain while picking berries,

Her throat cut in thy rage,

"And this be Richard Lambton,

The rector’s son and true,

Cut down for a penny,

His heart pierced through and through,

"And there be many others

In this lake of leaves,

Dragged down by the worms

Into the earth that heaves."

Forthwith, the stranger raised his hand

And they came walking out,

From behind the trees they floated,

And in a circle, prowled about.

"The treasure that lies buried,

It is your conscience true,

But afeared you are to visit it

To see how much it grew,

"And the weight you carry on your back,

It is the weight of sin,

The voices that for mercy cried,

Their pleas among the din.

"He who bringeth death to others,

Death must face one day,

And the value of the lives he took

Is the price that he must pay."

And as I looked down upon my feet,

Another body did I see,

A body I’d not gleaned before…

And the body, it was me.

Notes

This poem, written in the Romantic-era Gothic style, portrays Death not as the habitual, black-cowled figure, but as a handsome stranger who reveals the reality of a person’s nature to them at the moment of death. The term ‘middling’ implies a place betwixt and between, i.e. the spirit world. The idea of the tramp carrying the weight of his sins on his back is borrowed from