Four Poems by Iain Bamforth
PN Review 30, March - April 1983
Four Poems About New Bamboo-Shoots in my North Garden at Ch’ang-Ku
from the Chinese of Li Ho
1.
The bamboo-skin sloughs from the lengthening shoots
leaving a peeled skin of jade.
In a single night it is transformed-
soaring a thousand feet from its roots
in the mud of the garden pool.
2.
I have cut down the green bamboos to write my verses.
Over the perfumed oils and spring powder I scrawl
these bitter, passionless words.
Who will see them?-weighed down by the dew,
mourning a thousand branches in the wind.
3.
By the family-well two or three shoots have poked
through gaps in the flagstones:
at dawn I noticed their roots hidden by the path.
Next spring when the waters encroach on the sands
I'll strip away the jade and make fishing-rods.
4.
Like Mao-ling I've come to exult in my poverty.
The ancient bamboos torment the clouds with their tips.
The wind blows and the shoots bend into the rain,
and the birds sit on one stem whose shadow
dips into my wine-glass.
Iain Bamforth grew up in Glasgow and graduated from its medical school. He has pursued a peripatetic career as a hospital doctor, general practitioner, translator, lecturer in comparative literature, and latterly public health consultant in several developing countries, principally in Asia. His four books of poetry were joined by a fifth, The Crossing Fee, in 2013.
His prose includes The Body in the Library (Verso, 2003), an account of modern medicine as told through literature; and The Good European (Carcanet, 2006), a collection of writings on ideas and literature in European history. He is currently working on a collection of aphoristic, fantastic and philosophical stories about medicine conjointly with a book of impressions of Wallacea — the biogeographical name for the various archipelagos between Asia and Australia. In 2015 he released A Doctor’s Dictionary: Writings on Culture and Medicine. His most recent collection, Zest: Essays on the Art of Living, was published in 2022.
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