SPOKEN FROM THE HEART
Most of us have seen the classic 1966 film Born Free starring the British actress Virginia McKenna. McKenna’s feisty portrayal of conservationist Joy Adamson earned her a Golden Globe nomination and triggered a lifelong commitment to the protection of wild animals, a theme deftly explored in her elegant, beautifully crafted poetry collection Tonight the Moon Is Red.
McKenna’s writing reflects both a love of nature and a fascination of man’s relationship with the seasons, a theme referenced in the poem Nature’s Magic where the certainty of a moment is fused to the early signs of autumn:
“Everything falls into place when I see the leaves turning, Flame, russet, glorious gold”.
Nature is an integral part of McKenna’s life and that sentiment is expressed with an admission that reads like a declaration of faith:
“On this day, when writing this, I need that confirmation. I need to know that nature is steadfast. Dependable. Honest.”
There is passion and warmth in her writing, as well as anger. Animal cruelty enrages her and although our instinct is to look the other way when we see it, McKenna is determined to force feed us the ugly reality. We recoil at the bears in The Darkest Day, trapped in their metal box prisons with “rotting, yellowed feet” as they’re milked for their bile: the raddled monkey of Solitude, left alone in a small cage where, “time is nothing. His silence is within. Inside his brain”; while the Leopard, whose “shining coat of wilder days has gone”, languishes in a concrete box “that allows no patterns of the light to change the monotone of grey in that cold cell”. McKenna’s anger is justified, yet somehow she retains an unflinching belief in man’s essential goodness!
Author Michael Morpurgo (of War Horse fame) who wrote the forward to this collection, describes McKenna’s poetry as a “battle cry”. He is absolutely right: her words speak for the silent and the grieving. McKenna’s husband and Born Free co-star Bill Travers, with whom she founded their conservation charity, died in 1994 and the final 19 poems in the collection are dedicated to their years together.
The raw, bitter sweet tone doesn’t always make for easy reading but as McKenna puts it:
“I am not opposed to revealing my feelings but I prefer to do it in my own way”.
In Mourning life is a frustration where “Empty is empty Full is full Nothing is nothing and time does not heal.” There are tender memories of journeys to faraway places, like the visit to Zanskar in northern India, where flowers picked on a mountain (and kept to this day), are the “Un-faded sweet reminders of the moments when I almost touched the stars”: while in Alone there is the aching loneliness at night,
“No body next to mine to feel my tears. No arms to hold me close against the dark.”
Virginia McKenna writes with heart- warming sensitivity. There is a gracious splendour in the imagery of her words complemented by the wisdom that comes from age, although in her heart of hearts she is still:
“A girl who wants to touch and feel and hold, Who senses the quickening pulse of the spring.”
Reviewed by Juliette Foster
© Archant Community Media Limited used under limited licence
