New Writing MIRROR, MIRROR Guest Editor GILLIAN ALLNUTT introduces her pick of poetry and prose on the theme of Mirror, mirror. I don’t like the sound of ‘mirror’. It lapses to nothing. It’s chinless. I like ‘looking-glass’. With its hard ‘k’ and ‘g’ it’s definitely here. Both words, it turns out, have delectable origins. ‘Mirror’ has the same root as ‘miracle’, from Latin mirus, meaning ‘wonderful’. ‘Glass’ can be traced back to a probable origin in Middle Low German glar, meaning ‘amber’. When you put a word in a poem, you put at least part of its history and hinterland in too. My ear, though, almost always prefers the Anglo-Saxon to the Roman. Do I prefer Alice to Snow White? I’m not very fond of either. Mirror is rooted differently in my imagination. One evening in July, when I knew the ‘Mirror, mirror’ work would soon arrive in the post, I went for a walk. It was raining heavily but it was Sunday and I’d had enough. It was warm, thundery rain. As I was plodging through a field of long grass, made unfamiliar perhaps by my opened umbrella, I heard myself think: ‘I’m in that film by Tarkovsky.’ Andrey Tarkovsky was Russian. Before he died in 1986, he wrote Sculpting in Time, a book of reflections on his work in cinema – and, incidentally, one of the best books on artistic integrity I’ve read. When I got home from my walk, I looked in it to see which film it was I’d been thinking of – and it was Mirror. Since then I’ve been rereading the book and have come upon this: ‘They [audiences] persist in asking again and again...what rain signifies in my films; why does it figure in film after film....’ The fact is that I hadn’t consciously remembered that it rains in his films. Memory, imagination, work mysteriously – and waywardly. For the complete essay, and for Gillian's full selection of poetry and prose on the theme of Mirror, mirror, read issue 35 • Subscribe! Read a story & poem chosen by Gillian Allnutt The DMF project by Guinevere Glasfurd-Brown Cellophane products by Kath McKay
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