Anne Bryan's Biography
Anne Bryan started writing poetry in her middle fifties after going to two funerals at which poems were read. She decided to choose a poem to be read at her funeral but she couldn’t find one which exactly matched her feelings about life and death. Although she hadn’t written a poem for almost forty years, she thought she'd write one that would fit her life.
Anne’s first poem wasn’t much good but it was satisfying to write, and she was encouraged to continue writing when her second poem received an commendation in a competition in the BBC Wildlife Magazine in 1994. Since then some of Anne’s poems have appeared in magazines, including the New Welsh Review, Fire, Krax, and Connections. Anne has always been absorbed by the natural world which she sees as rich in ambiguity, with its ever inventive diversity of life, its intense struggles and conflicts and the endless connections that unify an extraordinary chaos.
When Anne began to write she enrolled at Creative Writing and Literature classes at the Lifelong Learning Centre at Cardiff University. In 1999 she was awarded a D E Evans prize for a collection of poems and prose, ‘Strange Attractor’ which centred on the legend of Saint Melangell, a Celtic saint whose emblem, like Persephone and Demeter, was the hare. Melangell reputedly saved a hare from the hunt by concealing it under her skirt. The collection looked at the way Celtic and pagan cultures saw the natural world, and how we could no longer see it in the same way after Darwin. Her poems explored the controversies that arose when his theory placed man and animals as close together as Melangell and her hare.
Anne attended an Arvon course on writing for the Internet and then transferred some of the Strange Attractor collection to a web site, linking the poems to fractal images. Since then the site has changed as Anne's writing has evolved.
Stevie Smith’s poems immediately spoke to Anne when she first read them about 10 years ago, and Stevie’s seriously absurd work continues to fascinate her. In March 2003 Anne and her tutor Jan Carew and fellow students presented ‘An Evening with Stevie Smith,’ when a reading of her poems was linked to episodes in her life.
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Writing essays for the Lifelong Learning courses has encouraged Anne
to explore her interest in literature and in the relationship between science,
poetry and religion.
Anne maintains pages for Jan Carew and Chris Torrance on this web site;
they
were her tutors, and are now her friends.
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Photo -Anne with Chris Torrance |
The poem 'Small Autobiography' was written after attending a class at which people introduced themselves with a short biography. Many people had travelled extensively and were now far from their country of origin. Anne has lived all her life within ten miles of her birthplace in Cardiff, and she thought ‘I am a barnacle’. She then went on to think of her life as a medical student and doctor, as a mother, as a volunteer worker in a local nature reserve, and as a writer, in terms of the life of a barnacle, beetles, a woodlouse and a grasshopper.
Small Autobiography
Chapter 1 Barnacle
In my free swimming youth I couldn't resist
the urge to glue my head onto this rock
and hide inside an armour plated dome.
Now, when the tide comes in and covers me,
I can never let go but I step out
into the sea to unfold my nets.
I taste the currents curling round the world,
eat plankton swept from the Panama gulf
fragments of weed from the Sargasso sea.
Even when the tide leaves me high and dry
I hold the astounding sea in my cell
and embody the sumptuous ocean.
Chapter 2. Longhorn Beetle
It took five years to eat my way
Chapter 3. Sexton Beetle
It took two of us to prepare everything,
to dig a place where children could grow
and be sustained on the meat we found
Excited, we waited for eggs to hatch;
the beautiful grubs wriggled into our life,
my body supplied their liquid nourishment.
How quickly they shifted into new skins
from infancy to the incredible secret
metamorphosis of adolescence.
We watched their wings expand and set,
they flew away from the home we made
searching for the meat of their own lives.
Chapter 4. Woodlouse
I lived with the others under our stone,
Chapter 5 . Grasshopper
When I was in my egg I heard the birds
bursting with fierce intensity, they sang
of the joy and effort of being alive.
I clambered out of my shell and found
I was a nymph, green and insignificant
and I went into hiding, mute as a leaf.
I began to nibble the soft growth of Spring;
soon the wind was sighing in the long grass
and the days vibrated with flies and bees.
As the grass faded and sank I rubbed an itch
on my leg and then jumped with surprise:
I found I was singing the song of my life.Anne Bryan
You may print any poems or prose by Anne Bryan for your own use or to pass on to a friend, but please don't copy the poems or prose into assignments, magazines, newsletters or web sites without permission or acknowledgement. Ask for permission by E mail
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| Back to Strange Attractor homepage |
| Monumental worms, a poem on earthworms, the subject of Darwin's last book |
| Beagle Voyage Two poems on Darwin's voyage on HMS Beagle |
| Sonnets on Darwin's work: 'Bonded to Barnacles', on the animals he studied for eight years, and 'Darwin's Loft', on the pigeons in the Origin of Species. |
| Darwin and the Heavenly Rhinoceros - a short story |
