Haslam, Michael

England, (b. 1947)

Olwen

  1. Where are you from Originally?
  2. What was your face before you were born?
  3. Say, Olwen’s Lover’s Mother bore me.
  4. Go with Olwen,
  5. Olwen’s fate and yours.
  6. And she conceived inside
  7. the weakness of self-separation
  8. in this wise:
  9. A piglet squeal: in uterine
  10. and ran with him before The Awful Fathers:
  11. Something’s wrong with him:
  12. And there she shook it off,
  13. one dreadful fit of shivers
  14. spoiled uncoiling on the floor.
  15. This she could choose to slay:
  16. It lay revealed
  17. Flush with The Beauty of The Pig it lay a shine
  18. upon his neck and face and shoulders
  19. and the extra wriggling of its fingers,
  20. toes and lips.
  21. She said: That beauty is a horror to me,
  22. It is his, and sorrow to him and his
  23. kin and piglet kids.

© Michael Haslam. A Whole Bauble: collected poems 1977–1994. Manchester: Carcanet (1995).

About the Poet:

Michael Haslam, England, (b.1947) is a poet. He was educated at Bolton School and Peterhouse, Cambridge. Initially published in the network associated with ‘The Cambridge School of Poetry’ in the 1960s and early ’70s, he became widely known through the publication, to great acclaim, of his collected poems, A Whole Bauble (1995).

In 1970 he moved to Foster Clough, near Hebden Bridge in the Calder Valley and, as he says “by the late 1970s merely living here had become my sole poetic subject”. He still lives in the same house. Having worked as a laborer for most of his life, thanks to a legacy he is now able to devote his time to writing. [DES-09/19]

Additional information:

  • ContinualeSong is the the website of Michael Haslam, Poet of Foster Clough. This site is now only available via The Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive.