An Aberystwyth Journal index
John Barnie is a poet and essayist. For many years he was editor of Planet. He also plays guitar and sings in the blues band ‘Hollow Log’. His latest book is a collection of poems, Sunglasses (Cinnamon, 2020). Read an interview between John Barnie and Robert Minhinnick back in 2016 from our blog.
My uncle, Don Barnie, volunteered in the First World War and joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Deployed to Gallipoli, he had with him a cheap pocket diary for 1916 in which he made sporadic notes: ‘10 yds from the Turks trench. Bomb dodging.’
When I was growing up in Abergavenny, people didn’t have paintings on the walls. What they had was an assemblage of family photographs—the children at various stages; a wedding photo from the ’30s; a faded image of grandparents.
I’m a fair-weather walker, so I don’t walk the cliffs between Clarach and Borth in winter. Last summer I didn’t manage it at all because of virus restrictions. The coastal path is very narrow with little room to pass walkers coming in the opposite direction, and I have to get a bus back from Borth to Comins Coch where I live, both of which would have breached lockdown rules. This summer I’m hoping it may be different, but who knows…
It is natural to think in terms of centres and peripheries. A capital city has everything, government, banking, embassies, publishing houses, national museums, theatres, concert halls, opera houses, and more. Anyone with ambition gravitates there.
I have a problem with meat, which I have eaten all my life. During my childhood, meat was hearty—roasts, chops, steak, ham, liver, bacon, sausage, faggots.
When you are a child you notice the small things in life because you are closer to the ground.
Playing at the edge of my father’s flower garden, I was face-to-face with bees and hover flies, with butterflies, and with ants, the red ones that gave a fiery bite, and black ones that were larger but harmless. I didn’t think about them much but every summer I was on intimate terms with insects, more so in some ways than with humans.
I was born and grew up in Abergavenny and during my formative years the town, the Black Mountains, and the River Usk were home, no matter where else in the world I happened to be, but for the past thirty-five years I have lived in Comins Coch, a village one and a half miles out of Aberystwyth, off the road to Machynlleth.
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In the summer issue of last year, Poetry, the magazine founded by Harriet Monroe in 1912, published a poem, ‘Scholl’s Ferry Rd.’ by Michael Dickman. It is not a very long poem, but it spreads over thirty pages, including four pages at the end with only one line apiece. Blank space is used imaginatively here to suggest the increasingly blank spaces in an old lady’s life as she succumbs to dementia.