VAUCLUSE DIARY

Monday 4 May

‘The virus will not hurt everyone equally.’ This, from an Economist article about car sales, has become a truism, in terms of society too, with places that are densely populated, polluted and with low income inhabitants suffering out of proportion to others. There have been days when, reading Le Monde it has seemed that everyone in rea (nimation) is called Mohammed. In addition to the nursing homes, of course, where poorly paid caregivers are likely immigrants too. France is taking this on board, at least rhetorically, and brainstorming, at least from political platforms, about the working conditions of ‘essential workers.,’ a lot of whom have to choose between going to work or going hungry.

Well, not to preach, but describe…it is a sunny day in the south of France; we have just had lunch and are going to run errands two towns away. We’ll head again for the asparagus farmer, whose crop, normally exported to Paris restaurants and even NY (but only the white asparagus, they have green over there), is not going anywhere far these days. Our next door neighbour would like 2 k of the ‘tips and stalks,’ that is the broken ones, cheaper ‘and there’s no waste.’ He boils them and eats every inch of each with olive oil from last season’s olive crop and a little salt. My sister-in-law wants strawberries, from the same place, for jam. And we’ll get strawberries and asparagus, and see what else has been picked today.

Next Monday the first stage of our confinement will end, and shops will open, and we can travel 100 km without an ‘attestation.’ Way not far enough to hug my granddaughters… but I think I might go to the coiffeur three days in a row.

Eavan Boland

The Irish poet Eavan Boland died suddenly of a stroke two days ago. She’d returned to Ireland from Stanford where she ran the creative writing department when the university sent faculty and students home this spring because of the Covid virus. I knew Eavan because we lived for several years in the same group of condos on campus and met at the recycling bins, or at events, a poetry reading, say, at which Eavan would deliver one of her lucid introductions. Or I’d run into her on campus, heading ‘home’—at least so far as ‘home’ was her campus condo—or to the little grocery shop tucked into the law school residences; usually she was listening to her earphones. We also met, infrequently, to gossip (Eavan was a great gossip) over coffee. She was an easy woman to talk to. She was a busy woman, at events most evenings during term, returning to Ireland, her true home and background to most of her poems, when term ended.

I’ve always admired Eavan’s poetry. We shared a generation, and the concerns and frustrations of women of that generation, including the domestic ones, which she both celebrated and decried. She was wonderful at back gardens ( ‘The War Horse’) and kitchens full of humming shaking white machines. More and more the personal reached for the universal, a story about her grandmother, say (see below), widening to the socio-politico-historical domain. But always she was a lyricist, a writer of songs, the elegaic a constant register (once I said I like humour in poems, and she looked at me, startled: ‘I don’t have humour in my poems.’) Never a heavy line, a word too many. I bought her books as they came out; I am eager to see the next, and as it turns out, last one, History, announced in this week’s New Yorker.

Coincidently the New Yorker has one of Eavan’s poems in the current issue: ‘Eviction.’ I recommend you listen to her read it on the New Yorker website.

Eviction

By Eavan Boland

(New Yorker, 27 April 2020)

Back from Dublin, my grandmother
finds an eviction notice on her door.
Now she is in court for rent arrears.
The lawyers are amused.
These are the Petty Sessions,
this is Drogheda, this is the Bank Holiday.
Their comments fill a column in the newspaper.
Was the notice well served?
Was it served at all?
Is she a weekly or a monthly tenant?
In which one of the plaintiffs’ rent books
is she registered?
The case comes to an end, is dismissed.
Leaving behind the autumn evening.
Leaving behind the room she entered.
Leaving behind the reason I have always
resisted history.
A woman leaves a courtroom in tears.
A nation is rising to the light.
History notes the second, not the first.
Nor does it know the answer as to why
on a winter evening
in a modern Ireland
I linger over the page of the Drogheda
Argus and Leinster Journal, 1904,
knowing as I do that my attention has
no agency, none at all. Nor my rage.

I notice, for myself, the plainness of the language, the expert handling of line, the simplicity of the syntax, anaphora, the way closure is built up through rhyme and half-rhyme: ‘page’…’agency’…’rage’; the repetition of the sound ‘g..’ hard and soft, as the poem is hard and soft.

VAUCLUSE DIARY

Thursday 30 April 2020

So here’s the end of April upon us. What, I wonder, will May bring? We look around at other countries, to see how the slight tweaks they are making to their confinements are working out. I’ve begun listening to Cuomo, the governor of NY state, who is a fine communicator under the present circumstances, less formal, more ‘one of us’ than the French executive, whose manner of handling what must be a very difficult situation, I for one have also admired. There are politicians in this country that I am glad are NOT in charge.

Meanwhile…having read that asparagus growers who normally send most of their crop to fine restaurants are almost giving their crops away locally, we drove two towns southeast yesterday to one of them and came home with a kilo of white asparagus that was absolutely delicious. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten freshly-harvested asparagus before. We were able to stand in a building and watch a worker load dirty, ill-assorted stalks into a machine from which the stalks emerged clean, sized and peeled and ready to be shipped—except no, they won’t be shipped. Thus it was that we had 3-star Parisian restaurant asparagus for supper.

And for desert, strawberries picked that morning, with some left for today’s lunch. No need to wash them, the seller said, no pesticides. They were small, not the big, hard ones supermarkets sell in California, with a shelf life of who knows how long.

There were other things on offer too, such as new potatoes.

I roped my husband into helping colour my hair. We managed not to get any goop on the walls.

VAUCLUSE DIARY

Wednesday 29 April 2020

A nail-biting storm of hail and rain two nights ago—nail-biting because, is the roof going to leak again?—and an overnight solid downpour yesterday, clearing up in the afternoon in time for our usual walk: down to the cemetery, up the trail along the stream, cross the stream, follow the path that rises gradually to the valley called ‘L’aube’, which used to be full of vegetable plots, because there are numerous natural springs up there, but is now mostly going wild, with remnants of quince trees, cherries, a persimmon we haven’t found yet, but know it’s there—and lots of broom taking over, also some beehives up at the road, where we mostly turn back, since we’ve been out for half an hour, probably gone further than the allowed 1 km, and it will take us half an hour to retrace our footsteps, through field and wood again. Occasionally we cross the road, continue up another trail to the top of the mountain called Pied Porcher, but a little warily, because 1) the gendarmes, we are told, patrol the village and its surroundings 3 times a day; and 2) my sneakers’ treads are smooth, and if I twist something sliding downhill in scree and need to be rescued it would be very embarrassing. Clearly I need new shoes, but where would I find those right now?

However, our PM announced new measures, easing confinement after May 11th, including the possibility in regions without too many cases of the virus of going 100 km without a permission slip (one writes this ‘attestation’ oneself, and one is supposed to write a new one every time one leaves one’s house). This region doesn’t have a lot of cases, and so, if we are good, hopefully we will be among the fortunate. But it does eliminate the possibility of returning to Paris, should we want to (to return the car we rented for a month two months ago?), and as for returning to the Bay Area (our tickets are for mid-June) that is looking improbable. I see today on the Stanford University Covid update that the university is going to try to get researchers back to work, but still hasn’t made plans for Fall Quarter. How oh how will they get the students safely back on campus?

One day melts into the next and changes little. It’s time for lunch: homemade potato puree with cream and butter, some meat/spinach thingies the local butcher makes, a salad, cheese, fruit, wine…I know, I know, this doesn’t sound like a bad life, and it isn’t. I have a friend in Paris who would give anything to get out of the city and walk in the woods or fields for a few days, and yesterday I heard from a friend in Turkey, who went from a fellowship to work in the poetry archives in Dublin home to Turkey where he is confined in a house in a city with five other people, including a grandparent.

VAUCLUSE DIARY: Café Zoom

Sunday 26 April 2020

In this privileged confinement it is really quite lovely to have one day melt into the next until one has to look up the day and the date, should one need it—for example to order provisions the day before we go to collect them, from the sidewalk in front of the produce shop, where the butcher and the baker will also deposit our orders, making a single transaction (3 cheques), a single outing a week. Last week I thought it was Wednesday when it was Thursday and I almost forgot to order the food. I feel relieved of most obligations—to visit museums, say, or see the film everyone is talking about, utterly guiltless about my unsociability…bliss is an empty calendar?

Last evening, however, for the second week, I went to a Café Zoom, by invitation of a UK friend, who seems to have an endless supply of fascinating friends and friends of friends, who write, compose music, sing, play giant music boxes, harmoniums, translate, send messages in bottles from (a sampling) Mexico City, New Zealand, and closer to home, Brittany. Next Saturday night will be moderated by Charles Boyle, the one-of-a-kind editor and publisher of CB Editions (and himself a poet and author of un-pin-downable books, available via the London-based CBeditions, where readers can order from a Confinement selection.

Charles has invited his authors to appear, read, juggle at next week’s edition of David Collard’s Zoom café, which is how I (a proud CBe author) first turned up at the café last weekend. I may be becoming addicted…first it was the fun of trying something new, after listening to children talk about their staff meetings on Zoom, now I wonder whether this is a small part of coming transformations, whether as participant or ‘audience’ member, discreetly waving to friends from around the world whose faces (and kitchens and bookshelves) pop up on your screen at 8pm, Greenwich time, on Saturday night.

Yesterday we climbed a mountain, one that is right next door, on foot. But my ‘baskets’ (tennis shoes), which didn’t expect such intense use and no shoe shops open, have smooth treads, and coming down I kept slipping on scree. I was afraid I’d twist a leg and have to be rescued, by—horrors—a helicopter or a team of firefighters who, obviously, have better things to do at the moment, not to mention the expense to public services whose pockets are worse than empty. I saw a front-page story in the local papers about this unlocal person who took it upon herself to take a forbidden hike and…Oi!

Wigtown Poetry Prize Pamphlet 'Catch and Release' available to read online

The 2020 Wigtown Book Festival (Scotland) has a page about the Alistair Reid Pamphlet Prize, with my winning pamphlet, Catch and Release from 2019 free to look at and read. While nothing can compare with holding Gerry Cambridge’s beautiful pamphlet in one’s own hands, this is the next best thing. AND the pamphlet may be ordered for the very modest price of 6 pounds from this link, from anne@wigtownbookfestival.com.

VAUCLUSE DIARY

Saturday 25 April

As I sit rocking on the two back legs of the white plastic garden chair, feet propped on a stone bench, looking west past the since-WW2-unfinished cinderbrick wall of my neighbour’s garage at the patchwork of fields, orchards, olive groves, vineyards on the Rhone Valley Plain, my eyes stop, over towards Avignon, on a layer of brownish black cloud, which is smog over the Rhone corridor of autoroutes up towards Lyon, points east—the Alps, Switzerland, Italy, Germany…and north towards Paris. There is virtually no automobile traffic, but I assume that trucks are still rolling with food for Europe from Spain, Portugal, France. That’s nice, even essential, but it makes me think that the only way air pollution is going to disappear is if the world returns to some idyllic (I say this ironically) pre-industrial time—or perhaps fast forwards into a future of virtual everything.

Still, to end, for now, on a positive note, it is a beautiful sunny day, not too hot, not too cold, as Goldilocks exclaimed over Baby Bear’s bowl of porridge, trees are fully leafed, but the leaves still look tender and new and hopeful, and if a few weeks the cherries will be ripe.

VAUCLUSE DIARY

Thursday 23 April

It seems that only 3+% of the Provence Cote d’Azur Region has virus antibodies, as opposed to much higher percentages in the Paris Region. Knowing this tends to give one a false sense of security, and cabin fever yields to the desire to go shopping. Not a good idea. I know.

Commerce! The lifeblood of societies? Even the Haida had their gift-giving economies, their exchanges, and writing, didn’t writing begin in Mesopotamia with cuneiform lists of cows and other livestock on cylinder seals? The drycleaner is open in Carpentras! I can take the wool blanket upon which I spilled a cup of coffee ten days ago, and while I’m open, why not take down the curtains my lovely mother-in-law sewed, how many years ago and drop them off? I still like the fabric, so maybe I can ask the seamstress in Caromb, the seamstress who is sewing masks for the whole region, to make new mattress covers (on the model of a fitted sheet) for the mattresses on the 60s hippie platform beds in the small loft? When she has time?

And if we make a trip to Carpentras (10 minute drive) why not pop into the good patisserie and stock up on—well, chocolates to begin with, but also maybe a tart, a cake or cakes. And maybe on the way home we can drive through Caromb and stop at the big hardware DYU store , and after that the plant nursery is right on our way, and Paul, our neighbour, wants some lettuce plants for his vegetable plot, up to 60 or so, depending, he hinted, on how long we are going to be here.

How long are we going to be here? Who knows? We could, obviously, be worse off, much, much worse off.

Maybe we should just stay home?