Poetry Christopher Moncrieff

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: CHRISTOPHER MONCRIEFF

Christopher Moncrieff is a European poet, linguist and literary translator from French, German and Romanian and is descended from the Scots poet, Robert Burns. After professional military service in Europe, Northern Ireland, the Near East and the USA during the Cold War he produced son et lumière style shows before beginning to write full-time and has lived for long periods in Paris and Los Angeles. He read Theology at Oxford and has qualifications in design and on the military staff. A frequent traveller in Central and Eastern Europe, he speaks several languages of the region. He is an award recipient and Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, was a Writing Fellow at Cambridge in 2018-19, has mentored young adults on the autism spectrum and takes an active interest in neuro- and gender diversity. His poetry is published by Caparison Books, Lapwing Publications, the Bucharest literary review Luceafărul, and online at Militant Thistles and The Recusant. www.christophermoncrieff.com

Concerning drawing

For those few airless months when the heat came upon us like an unrelenting storm of fire, reducing voices to dry grass, you sat with her and her easel in an upper room whose northern light let in shadows that played the blues, eliciting conundrums and confessions which she wove into your portrait with a wave of her pale slim hands like a conductor on whose fingertips the orchestra hangs until its last exultant breath. With every arch of her eyebrows a frisson ran down your spine like a snake in search of its lost gender while you imagined what her unseen pencil might be doing as the sound of its impious dance across the paper filled the silences held prisoner by her silk screen, waltz-tune voice. During those drawn-out blazing days yours was an encounter of two souls out of time, fellow-travellers on the stony path of art, bejewelled with talk of palettes, of summer wardrobes without season, perfume paraphernalia that hid in the spaces between the words you never spoke. And in the end, which may be soon or late, her supple bony wrists and arching hands drew you out of yourself and onto the pure white page of her imagining.

(Christopher Moncrieff)

Eulenspiegel

Across the noonday café terrace where canal reflections wept from ivy clustered walls and became brief echoes, coffee conversation turned to the price of pearls; how to ascertain beyond doubt which was of most value, the one that had no worldly price and, like certain earthlings, could not be bought. Yet on the breeze that lifted the weary pages of your carnet, played cache-cache with the candles still burning from the night before, came hints that this might have been a game of mirrors, an espièglerie of pale images that danced among the flitting waiters, who, if only you had dared to ask, might have told you that even as you sat alone with listless unkempt words and unkept promises, your path was soon to cross with hers, and the mirror then would crack from side to side, opening up doorways to a different world.

(Christopher Moncrieff)

Michel-Ange au cocktail

Like a figure from the far-off celestial ceiling of the Capella Sistina she has fallen to earth, sveltly clad from head to toe in black and midnight blue, glass and paintbrush in hand as if to capture all the grace of the human form while sipping champagne and nibbling one solitary canapé so as not to compromise her silhouette, the gracile signature which she presents to the world, daring it to object. And all the while her pale and lovely hands are sketching profiles in the air, conducting the languid crystal notes of her latina-tinted voice - acquired, like her linen suits and paisley scarves in Firenze’s September side-streets en route for molto chic Milano. Each time you glimpse her or her image in your mind you are transported, with a flourish of her sable brush, back to that upper room in summer where first the spell began. But for now she is just here among the cocktail party guests, a reminder of how art, that breath divine, can open wide our eyes

(Christopher Moncrieff)