Anna Crowe - Coming to Light

Born in Plymouth in 1945, Anna Crowe was brought up in France and Sussex, and studied French and Spanish at the University of St Andrews, where she has lived with her husband and three children since 1986. She co-founded StAnza, Scotland’s Poetry Festival, and held the post of Artistic Director for its first seven years.

A poet, translator and reviewer, Anna Crowe teaches creative-writing in schools and colleges and for the Arvon Foundation, and has led a poetry workshop for the Department of Continuing Education at St Andrews University for many years. She won the Peterloo Open Poetry Competition in 1993 and again in 1997, when her first collection, Skating Out of the House, was published by Peterloo Poets. A pamphlet of poems, A Secret History of Rhubarb, was published by Mariscat Press in May 2004.

Ten years after the war,
and things were beginning to surface:
the eagle-headed bottle-stopper,

made of glass, that came to light
between the floor-boards in the attic.
German officers had lived here

in 'Sous les Tilleuls', the house they called
'Unter den Linden'; but I remember
the day you drove an old woman away,

bawling her out for picking lime-flowers
from the trees outside our gate; the iron
clang as it slammed, the garden

shrinking into darkness. Yet maybe
that was just a trick of the light,
my dazzling element that carved

everything into black and white.
Slowly our horizons grey, and I saw
how the sun sank into the great red arms

of the cedar at the road's end
like the pietà on the wall at school;
how the smell of roasting coffee - blown

from the torréfaction, two streets away -
came with the promise of rain; finding,
when I climbed the spiral stair to the tower

and emerged into the sun,
that I was tall enough, suddenly,
to see a rim of light that could only be the sea.