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Candia Comes Clean

~ Candid cultural comments from the Isles of Wonder

Category Archives: Music

Pegasus Bridge 50th Anniversary

04 Tuesday Jun 2019

Posted by Candia in Celebrities, History, Music, Nostalgia, Personal, Poetry, Social Comment

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Arlette Gondree, Brahms Requiem, D-Day, Major John Howard, Normandy, Pegasus Bridge

It was an entirely fortuitous and serendipitous encounter.  Major Howard was

sitting at a table outside Arlette Gondree’s cafe. (Arlette’s house was the first

French home to be liberated.)

I was in the company of Major Michael Hickey, a military historian who

was with my choir.  We were singing The Brahms Requiem seven times

in ten days, all over Normandy, along with a French choir and the

orchestra of Basse Normandie.  We sang in different towns

and we sang in German.  The audiences were in tears.  It was an

emotional and healing experience for all involved.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/99/Pegasus_Bridge%2C_June_1944_B5288.jpg

Photo: 9th June, 1944.  Wikimedia Commons

 

Pegasus Bridge

Generous gesture – German flag festoons,

hoisted with the Allied banners.  Bunching,

fussy boudoir blinds. Here swooping platoons,

like death’s head moths, stealthily came gliding.

Across the bridge John Howard bravely strode,

piper ahead, deflecting sniper shot.

Now European coaches block the road;

the dispassionate stamp postcards they’ve bought,

sending snapshots of Hell to those who knew

the mark of Caen first-hand. Wish you were here!

He was: a fact to startle and imbue

those that have eyes to see and ears to hear.

The café’s bright umbrellas shelter all

from noonday’s heat, so one could fail to spot

cool nonagenarian. By the wall,

hero’s crutches propped, ready for action.

His longest day is past; his time now short:

German beer his major satisfaction.

 

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Bye Bye B-52s!

07 Sunday Apr 2019

Posted by Candia in Music, News, Personal, Photography, Social Comment

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

B-52 bombers, Brahms, Cello sonata, Cotswolds

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Off home now after drowning out the Brahms Cello Sonata in the local

Cotswolds church…

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Celebrity Portraits

20 Wednesday Mar 2019

Posted by Candia in art, Celebrities, Media, Music, Photography

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Amy Winehouse, Audrey Hepburn, celebrity portraits, Clarendon Gallery, Craig Alan, David Bowie, Marilyn Munro, Populus Series, Stow-on-the-Wold

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by Craig Alan, from his Populus Series, featured in The  Clarendon

Gallery, Stow  (Cotswolds)

Photos by Candia Dixon-Stuart

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Chelsea Lovers

02 Saturday Mar 2019

Posted by Candia in Arts, History, Music, Nostalgia, Personal, Photography, Relationships, Romance, Sculpture

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

ceramic sculpture, Chelsea porcelain, National Trust, pastoral, Upton House

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from the collection at Upton House, NT

Photo by Candia

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Sheep May Safely Graze

05 Saturday Jan 2019

Posted by Candia in Animals, Environment, Home, Music, Nature, Nostalgia, Personal, Photography

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Cotswolds, schaffe konnen sicher weiden, sheep

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st lawrence lechlade 1
st lawrence lechlade 3
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In my neighbour’s field…..

                        Schaffe konnen sicher weiden resonances.

Images by Candia

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Centenary of Wilfred Owen’s Death

04 Sunday Nov 2018

Posted by Candia in Arts, History, Music, News, Poetry, Social Comment, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

autorotation, Beaumont Hamel, Bois des Fourcaux, Bois l'Eveque, calvaire, Cambrai, Craiglockhart, del Gesu, Delville Wood, Dufay, dunnock, Hamel, Hebuterne, Last Tree, lynchet, Mametz, mandrake, Maricourt, Napier University, Ors, Queen's Hall, remblais, Sassoon, Somme, Steve Burnett, sycamore, The Branch, Wilfred Owen, World War 1 poetry

A plate from his 1920 Poems by Wilfred Owen, depicting him.

A re-blog:

A friend told me about an amazing radio programme about Steve Burnett,

in Edinburgh, making a Wilfred Owen violin from a fallen branch from a

sycamore tree from Craiglockhart Hospital, now Napier University,where

Sassoon and Owen met and discussed their poetry, before Owen

returned to the trenches and met his untimely death.

I listened to the programme and then felt compelled to write the

following piece:

 

The Sycamore Sings

Shall life renew these bodies?  Of a truth

All death will he annul…

(amended words from his poetry on Wilfred Owen’s gravestone)

 

Where a mother muted her offspring’s ire,

deleting his line’s interrogative;

where Dufay scored his music at Cambrai;

St Quentin’s corpse loomed from the Somme marshland,

to hallow the grandest basilica;

where guillotines did their grisly work,

fog lifted from shattered Bois l’Eveque-

new dawn drawing back night’s curtain of war.

 

On a towpath, a twenty five year old,

tried not to fret how he would cross the bridge.

Mesmerised by the autorotation

of seeds, he foresaw his own slow spiral,

where magpies croaked in blasted canopies.

Dark, stark poplars had been lopped long before;

the copses razed; the rides and lynchets scarred.

Mametz, Maricourt and Bois des Fourcaux:

sweet chestnut, lime, beech, hazel, oak, hornbeam-

mad mandrakes uprooted; bi-furcated trunks.

Sad remblais of Hebuterne (No Man’s Land)

absorbed shrill batteries near sunken lanes.

Calvaires bowed before continuous suffering.

In Beaumont Hamel, a single tree remains,

petrified. In Delville Wood, The Last Tree

stands like a gibbet. Sycamores survive.

They grow where other trees give up the ghost.

One such, at Craiglockhart, he could recall.

Again he heard the dunnock’s douce refrain,

singing for dear life, from lush foliage,

before its notes were silenced, once for all.

Fragments of father’s sermon rose to mind-

about The Branch, hope, regeneration.

Now, while still green, a supple slice is bent

into a tongue which will tell of all loss,

tears oozing like resin from a wounded bark:

man and nature in divine harmony.

In Queen’s Hall, it will sob and it will sing

of the pity of war – the air fleshily weeping.

And, one being dead, yet will be speaking

through a universal language of peace,

from a pattern once conceived by Gesu.

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Two Musical Angels

24 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by Candia in Arts, Music, mythology, Nostalgia, Personal, Photography, Religion

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

angels, Cotswolds, St Lawrence, stained glass

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                       St Lawrence Church, Lechlade (Cotswolds)

                         Photos by Candia Dixon-Stuart

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Bagpiper in Oxford

23 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by Candia in Humour, Music, Photography, Social Comment

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

bagpiper, bagpipes, busking, Oxford

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Bike for quick getaway!

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Musical Theatre Collage

06 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by Candia in art, Arts, Fashion, Music, Nostalgia, Personal, Theatre

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

collage, musical theatre

IMG_0040

 

 

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Image

We’ll Gather Lilacs in the Spring Again

15 Tuesday May 2018

Tags

Novello, W War II, We'll Gather Lilacs, Webster Booth and Anne Ziegler

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Posted by Candia | Filed under Music, Nature, Nostalgia, Photography, Relationships, Romance

≈ 1 Comment

← Older posts

My name is Candia. Its initial consonant alliterates with “cow” and there are connotations with the adjective “candid.” I started writing this blog in the summer of 2012 and focused on satire at the start.

Interspersed was ironic news comment, reviews and poetry.

Over the years I have won some international poetry competitions and have published in reputable small presses, as well as reviewing and reading alongside well- established poets. I wrote under my own name then, but Candia has taken me over as an online persona. Having brought out a serious anthology last year called 'Its Own Place' which features poetry of an epiphanal nature, I was able to take part in an Arts and Spirituality series of lectures in Winchester in 2016.

Lately I have been experimenting with boussekusekeika, sestinas, rhyme royale, villanelles and other forms. I am exploring Japanese themes at the moment, my interest having been re-ignited by the recent re-evaluations of Hokusai.

Thank you to all my committed followers whose loyalty has encouraged me to keep writing. It has been exciting to meet some of you in the flesh- in venues as far flung as Melbourne and Sydney!

Copyright Notice

© Candia Dixon Stuart and Candiacomesclean.wordpress.com, 2012-2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Candia Dixon Stuart and candiacomesclean.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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