August 2012: Piers Plowright

Piers Plowright

Air and Water: Thoughts of a Radio Fellow

I write on air. Always have done. My books are radio programmes, my plots are real people’s lives, my landscapes sounds, and my characters voices. When I look at my home shelves of cassettes and CDs, as authors might look at their novels, plays, poems, and essays, I hear those voices: Mr Fletcher the Poet, recorded during the 1984 Miners’ Strike, remembering the ritual pig-killing in his Leicestershire village in the 1920s; Doris the window cleaner, climbing her ladder to polish and peer through the glass of Golders Green in North London, and so intrigued and moved by what she saw that she converted from Christianity to Judaism; Troy the black delivery man in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, getting lost with his plate of sandwiches, on his journey from the deli to the dining table; an old man in a Barcelona side-street, singing along to a tape-recording of his younger self; and, above all, Alison Waley, widow of Arthur, the great translator from Chinese and Japanese, re-imagining his peaceful death, one brilliant June morning fifty years ago. This last is a two and a half minute prose poem endlessly polished in the telling and built round Arthur’s translation of a sixteenth century Chinese poem, by Feng Meng Lung, which begins: "Don’t set sail/ Tomorrow the wind may have dropped/ And I shan’t worry about you/ And then you may go" As Alison tells it, the...

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