Simara running rampage, I have moved!

Last time I was at Vincennes Zoo, for the summer nocturne opening hours, Simara the young female jaguar ran rampage in her pool under the waterfall. She ran back and forth and pounced at the water, racing towards me. I've never seen nature so forceful. She kept it up for an hour while I watched. It was 9pm, I was alone in front of her cage. Afterwards I wound my way towards the exit, but thought I'd check if the fossa was out, preparing myself for disappointment, as he hides in his den most of the time. He wasn't at first, so I turned homeward, then remembered to check the other window. There he was! That night I wrote two poems, one featuring Simara and one about the very strange fossa from Madagascar. Both poems are attempts to describe what it was like for my mother to go mad, to be in the throes of mania and psychosis, in my book in progress Mama Amazonica.

It has been a turbulent time for me, for the first time in thirty years I've moved house, from London to Cornwall, to a remote rural spot near Bodmin Moor. My cat-love of my life Shiva died just before the move. I haven't quite settled in yet, but the garden office is set up, and the beds have finally arrived. When the settees come perhaps Basil my Siberian forest (rescue) cat will come out from his camp under the bed. Mouse who is feral is in paradise in the garden and fields. Yesterday she saw sheep for the first time, her eyes went huge, then she looked outraged that they were reaching into the lane-grass by our gate to munch grass. Molly also ventures out to explore and hunt.

With me came 145 books submitted for the TS Eliot Prize, as I'm chairing the judging panel this year. I sat on my campbed reading one after the other, making notes, keeping the boxes safe among the hundreds filled with my books and household stuff. I'm writing this in the Holiday Inn at Heathrow, at 5am, on my way to the Dromineer Festival today to read. From there I'll go to Swindon Poetry Festival, then Preston, then teach for the second time this year at Ty Newydd. I got back from Totleigh Barton, teaching an Arvon poetry course last week. November will be quieter, it will. December I'm going back to Paris to see Simara and hopefully Aramis the black jaguar, and who knows what? I've one year left to finish my book. Maybe they'll be together by then, and he won't be stuck in the back enclosure. What I've learnt from my many visits is that it's worth sticking around all day, even if they're asleep in the bushes, they will eventually emerge, just like poems.

Reading from French translations of Fauverie at Maison de la Poésie in Paris with Valérie Rouzeau

On June 13th I gave my first reading from Fauverie in Paris, at the Maison de la Poésie. I was honoured to share the event with Valérie Rouzeau, my favourite contemporary French poet, and even happier that she translated the poems I read. She is well known for the verve and inventiveness of the language and the wordplay in her poems so I am lucky to have her as a translator. Susan Wicks has translated Valérie's books Pas Revoir (Cold Spring in Winter) and Vrouz (Talking Vrouz) in superb bilingial editions published by Arc's Visible Poets' series. Cold Spring in Winter / Pas Revoir was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize. I urge you to read them.

I illustrated my reading at the Maison de la Poésie with images. Here is a king vulture's head. It's a sacred bird, a god to Amazonian tribes. I think I must be exclaiming how old Margot and N'golo are – about 50 now – the couple that I visit in the zoo and who feature in both my books The Zoo Father and Fauverie. My poem 'Self-Portrait with King Vultures' draws on the extraordinary encounter I had with a baby king vulture in the zoo nursery, the baby god struggling to stand and fluff up his wingstubs in a child's playpen. Thanks to the Maison de la Poésie for the photo.


The day after our reading Valérie and I went to Vincennes Zoo to see Aramis, the black jaguar who stars in Fauverie and who graces its cover. It was the first time Valérie had gone to a zoo and I'll never forget her reaction to the herd of sixteen giraffes in the distance!

My book Fauverie and the stars of the Fauverie in the Jardin des Plantes Ménagerie, Paris

 This week I handed in my manuscript Fauverie to my editor at Seren. I will still add a few poems and do more work on it before it's published in autumn 2014, but the bulk of the book is there. The title Fauverie comes from the name of the carnivore house in the Jardin des Plantes. For me the word conjures both a big-cat house and a 'fauve' wild beast painting, a habitat of primal colour and encagement. 

 

Like my second collection The Zoo Father, the central character is my father, but in this follow-up volume, the city of Paris is also centre stage, as is the zoo at its heart. I discovered my estranged father was enclosed in his own fauverie, because in the last years of his life  he was bound to an oxygen concentrator machine in a tiny cluttered room, about ten minutes' walk from the zoo, and was much too frail to go out.

When I stay in Paris I'm drawn back to the Fauverie. I try not to go, because it is an obsession, but I rent a room within walking distance, and this August I was so close that I could walk along the Seine, through the outdoor sculpture gardens, and be there in ten minutes! Even after closing-time – 'la fermeture' –  I would linger in the outdoor park and glance over the road to the art deco semi-circular building and think of the great cats in their night cages, locked in at 6pm for 'security'. Whether for our security in case they escape, or theirs, since they are endangered species, I was never sure. It reminded me of when I lived with my grandmother in Wales from the age of seven to fourteen, how she used to make me go to bed at 6pm, and I'd stand at the window looking out at much younger kids still playing in the fields.

Before closing-time, there is feeding-time - l'heure du repas - which is a spectacle. In fact, to see the cats active it's best to observe them in their outdoor quarters about half an hour before 'la rentrée', when they become restless and impatient for food, then to go inside and watch as the keepers thrust their meals through. At this point they are separated, to avoid conflict, and they sleep alone, apart from the caracal pair.

The star of the show is Aramis the black jaguar (a temporary resident), and when he pounces through his hatch, and it's banged down behind him, there's always a cheer, as he thuds onto the lower floor on his stocky powerful legs. Leila the elderly and solitary North China leopard is next door, and she puts on quite a performance, desperately scrabbling at her grille for her rabbit. There are two other North China leopards, Tao and Bao-bao, but she won't tolerate their company. I took these pics with my iPhone as part of my note-making.

Aramis the black jaguar, a temporary resident, before he is moved to the zoo at Vincennes and larger quarters

 

Karu the snow leopard, hand reared by a keeper I believe. The keeper has just passed by and Karu spotted him.

Tao the young male North China leopard, snarling at the crowd. Will he ever get used to them/us? He waits until the crowd has left before eating his food, and hides at the top out of sight, just his ears sticking up. His mate is Bao-bao. There is a rumour she is pregnant - I hope so, this is a very endangered species.

Karu's mate Unda, who recently had surgery on her paw, which broke when she leapt down from the hatch, and she 's had heart surgery.

Black-Ears the male caracal.

Goodbye to rue Hautefeuille, Paris

Here is the view from my balcony on the sixth floor, over the high plane trees in the square St André des Arts, just behind Place St Michel. The trees are swaying in the wind this morning. The leaves are almost fully out but they were just buds when I arrived ten days ago for my writing retreat. I've never had such a close relationship with the tops of plane trees before. I didn't even know they had globular female flowers. There are about nine trees in the square, sharing the space with a metro entrance, a large restaurant which sprawls under them, parked motorbikes, and various vagrants, one of whom sometimes raises a small tent from poles at night. Bye-bye trees of Paris, bye-be sparrows who cheep on my balcony demanding more crumbs. Bye-bye Easter at Notre Dame and Emmanuel, the Bourdon bell only rung on Palm Sunday, Easter day, Christmas and when peace is declared or a pope dies. 

Every time I come to Paris I discover something new. This time it was Sainte Chapelle. How could I have not known about it? I was born here. Last time it was the catacombs. It's as if Paris, which is built on limestone, opens up more of its caverns on each visit. I went for a walk in the Luxembourg gardens yesterday evening, for the first time as an adult. I must have been there as a child, riding on a stag or giraffe on the old-fashioned carousel, or launching a toy yacht on the pond. I can't really remember. But what I do remember vividly is playing in the sandpit in another square, just behind where we used to live on the Boulevard de Grenelle. I went to see that sandpit again. I walked in the footsteps of a six-year-old, along the side of the park and sat and watched children playing in it. They and their parents looked happy, normal. That sandpit was the place I learnt to be an artist, a sculptor at first, then a poet. In it I created my world, a retreat from well, whatever it is I had to retreat from. I will always be grateful to it and to that simple material, sand. 

Sand and leaves. So simple they are hard to comprehend. As for Sainte Chapelle and its fifteen fifty-feet high stained-glass windows, epitome of High Gothic, how do I grasp that? Or the inside of Notre Dame, and its three rose windows, which I braved often on this visit. Or the ritual opening of the central portal, when I happened to be at the end of my first tour, just by the huge main front doors, which are always closed, when the cardinal and the congregation turned around, and the ritual was performed right under my nose, at the front of the cathedral, and after the organ had boomed out nine knocks, the bolts were drawn back and sunlight streamed into the incense-filled nave.

Rue du Pot de Fer, Paris, September 2011

This is the street I stayed in for two weeks this summer, researching for my novel and sixth poetry collection. I was on the fifth floor under the roofs, so it was quiet, unless I opened the skylight which faced onto the street. This accordian player played every night, always dressed in that suit and white spats. My flat faced the back, with a view of the Pantheon and rooftops of the Quartier Latin. I had a terrace with a young aspen which seemed to have rooted in thin air and which swished in the breeze, and a panoramic view of the skyscape which made me feel lonely but light-headed, a good mood for writing.

George Orwell lived at 6 Rue du Pot de Fer, just a few doors away, when he wrote Down and Out in Paris and London, but it's more affluent now. This narrow cobbled street is just off the Rue Mouffetard which leads onto Rue Descartes, where Verlaine lived. Opposite the house where he died (now a restaurant) is a pub Le Bateau Ivre. And a few steps further down is a little green patch and a wall with the poem 'Passerby' by Yves Bonnefoy, next to a fresco of the Blue Philosopher's Tree by Pierre Alechinsky.

My father lived just round the corner from here the last few years of his life, in Rue Clovis, in a tiny studio flat in an apartment block right next to the oldest city wall of Paris, built in the reign of King Philip Augustus. Before then, my father lived in various hotels facing Notre-Dame, including Les Argonautes in Rue de la Huchette and the Hôtel Notre-Dame on the Quai St Michel, where he would have been overlooked by the gargoyles. And before that? Marseille, Lyon, the Algerian mountains – a shifting life under an assortment of names appropriate for a vanished person.