Tuesday Poem: North by Helen Lowe

homes
white timbered in the south
give way to brown-red
in mid and north -
avenues of birch trees
serried lakes

an elk
runs through deep winter
the night train flares
through cuttings -
inferno cast across jagged firs
frozen earth

rushes headlong
into spring - a pied crow
solitary
above a grey field


Published in Bravado 14 and reprinted with kind permission from the author.


I am delighted to share Helen's haunting poem 'North' this week as my Tuesday Poem. Following my own recent travels in Sweden, it was enlightening to hear Helen's own experiences in that wild country and how it impacted upon her weaving of words.

'As a postgraduate student, I studied in Sweden, and this poem commemorates a journey I made from Stockholm to a little town called Arjeplog, which lies just below the Arctic circle. The poem captures specific elements of the journey: from the changing landscape between the south and north of Sweden; to the elk that ran on the tracks ahead of the small train from Umeå into the interior; and the return journey by night train to Stockholm - during which I did not sleep, so a somewhat surreal experience. Yet I hope the poem works on more than one level, capturing that sense of going out and returning home that applies equally to this specific journey and also my larger experience of having travelled from the Southern Hemisphere to the North. I hope it also conveys a sense of a "stranger in a strange land", moving through, but also observing the landscape in a detached way that one born to the land may not necessarily do.'

Helen Lowe is a novelist, poet, interviewer, and member of the Tuesday Poem community. She won an inaugural Robbie Burns Poetry Prize in 2003 and has since had over fifty poems published. Her first novel Thornspell (Knopf) was published in 2008, and in 2012 she won the David Gemmell Morningstar Award, for Best Fantasy Newcomer, for The Heir of Night (The Wall of Night Book One). The Gathering of the Lost (The Wall of Night Book Two) is currently shortlisted for the David Gemmell Legend Award. Helen posts every day on her Helen Lowe on Anything, Really blog and you can also follow her on Twitter: @helenl0we


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