Tony Kendrew: Serendipity

Beauty and abundance

“Come stranger
sing for me”

TONY KENDREW is an American poet of Welsh ancestry. He has degrees from the Universities of Cambridge and London, and in 2014, he completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Wales, Trinity St. David. As a colonial child, he spent his youth travelling the world, specifically Europe, Africa and Asia, which “spoiled him with sun and wide-open spaces, and set him wandering”.

He has published two collections of poetry. The first, Feathers Scattered in the Wind, is an utter delight, bringing together reflections on the people and places of the two poles of the poet’s life, Wales and Northern California. Exquisitely written and examining the beauty and immediacy of the natural world, the poems find meaning in everyday sights and sounds and situations—a confluence of rivers, the flight of a peregrine, a billowing breeze—drawing connections between the outer landscape of form and the inner world of the heart.

His second publication, Turning: Poems of Migration and Identity, is similarly remarkable and is the culmination of his MA Creative Writing dissertation. Drawing inspiration from the Welsh word, hiraeth, meaning nostalgia or longing for home, Tony returns to his Celtic roots, examining the way in which we are unconsciously driven to break our attachment to the confines of ancestry and religion, language and culture, in order to seek pastures anew, bringing adventure, inner contentment and, ultimately, self-knowledge. Beautifully executed, his visionary style reveals there are no definitive endings, and that loving and losing are universal and timeless ways of poeticizing the world alive.

In the leftover week of washed-up nights
before the new year shows us to the door,
the knock of bottles under cold street lights
the clouds of breath outside the corner store,
there was no sign that there could ever be
a change to end my single hob affair,
a shift from nine o’clock monotony,
but it happened; you were suddenly there
to rewrite the story of all I thought
I lacked, to intertwine our separate threads
and weave them into solid ties that brought
us here; and now we smile and shake our heads
amazed we wasted years in looking round
for something else till it was us we found.
—Tony Kendrew, Feathers Scattered in the Wind, ‘Serendipity’

in time

the sound of rain
fades into the night

above the trees
the clouds move on

and in the silence
the pine tree drips

and the stars return
as if they had always been there

waiting for the rain to stop
to sparkle on the water
—Tony Kendrew, Feathers Scattered in the Wind, ‘Hot Tub’

Come stranger
sing for me
in your voice
I hear
the sound of unasked questions
that stir my longing

Come wistful stranger
sing for me
in your eyes
I smell
the smoke of ancient hearths
where stories linger

Come dark-haired stranger
sing for me
in your face
I see
the look of love abandoned
the rue of intimacy

I too at home
long for home
with my man
long for a man
with my child
long for a child

Come stranger
sing me deep
sing me the story
sing me the heart of it
—Tony Kendrew, Turning, ‘Come Stranger’

seagulls surf the windblown spray
as in and out the breath of
tide collides against the rocks
and flashes cold the foam and
rips the wind in stinging salt
to clean the mind of jetsam
stubborn thoughts of who and why

tonight the sea is restless
too busy for my questions
its answers leave me wanting
stranded on the seaweed shore
I turn back from its thunder
chaconne of roaring pebbles
to my waiting car’s warm yelp
—Tony Kendrew, Feathers Scattered in the Wind, ‘The Sea at Seven’

I cannot say
I was not expecting you

Sometimes we can smell the rain
In a cloudless sky

And there are so many paths
Through these woods

That your approach
Drifted in and out of my windows

With the birdsong
And the lilacs

So I was never sure
It was not the fickle breeze

Turning my head
And touching my heart

But when you did appear
Silently bearing gifts

Like a night bird
Come with snow

Beauty and abundance
Fell from your wings

And covered the land
—Tony Kendrew, Feathers Scattered in the Wind, ‘Night Bird’

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Post Notes

• Wallace Stevens: Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
• T. S. Eliot: A Man Out of Time
• Emily Dickinson: A Woman Before Her Time
• Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters to a Young Poet
• Roger Housden: Ten Poems for Difficult Times
• Liam Ó Muirthile: Camino de Santiago, Dánta, Poems, Poemas
• Andrew Marvell: On a Drop of Dew
• Dennis Gallagher: Towards the Light
• Archana Bahadur Zutshi: Poetic Candour

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