Circle Time

Written by Sam on Monday the 1st of February 2010

A collection of sketches: simple and honest, these poems seek to placate experience and depict the eternity beyond our landscape.

Written by Sam Rawlings, and with illustrations by Dan Prescott, Circle Time is an exploration into the nature of human experience. It focuses upon the way our emotional lives spiral as we grow older, the ways in which the echoes of our past are carried through time.


An Introduction to Circle Time

To me, poetry is representative of mystery, magic, romance, discovery; for in writing poetry, I often find that I am attempting to describe things for which there are currently no words.

Despite the inconceivable size of the universe around us, there often appears to be a general acceptance that our world is relatively well understood. Many of the whys and the wherefores seem to have been grasped and for the most part, within our culture at least, the answers have been given. However, I always find that if I begin to look through the cracks, stare long enough into the more subtle reaches of life,  anomalies begin to appear, 'moments' begin to arise. This is a common theme in my work, as are the presence of spirals, circles, rhythm.

In this way then, Circle Time can be summerised as a journey through the seasons, the poems addressing and then re-addressing those waves of physical and emotional sensations, whether implicit or otherwise, that repeatedly rise and fall within us as our lives progress.

Whenever I attempt to understand my life, I always find it helps to think in terms of circles. These circles can represent almost anything, be it the duration of a relationship or merely the length of a song, the seasons however, remain the most palpable example... put simply, I tend to view a year as if a circle in time. However, within that yearly sphere, as mentioned, I also acknowledge the existence of smaller circles: hunger, tiredness, sadness, joy, success, failure, luck, each of these representing their own spirals in time, all continually rising at different rates, circling at different speeds within us; and it is exactly this sense of repetition, this idea of re-visiting the same emotions, the same experiences, the same seasons over and over that leads me toward believing in spirals. For with each repetition comes learning, comes a greater understanding, and so instead of following the same circle we instead spiral upwards, over old ground but always along new paths.

Yet despite entering these new spirals, still the echoes of our past, like our physical selves, travel. Like sound, once felt, an emotion's resonance will stay with you long after the actual event has passed. In this way then, my thinking when creating Circle Time was to have the poems replicate this, with certain imagery, themes, various poetic devises often carried over from one poem to the next. If you look closely you will recognize a lot of repetition as each poem's resonance echo's throughout the book.

To conclude, I believe I wrote Circle Time because, despite being fiercely individualist, I also feel overwhelmingly, as if I am part of an enormous whole. Not only does it feel as if my body and my mind spirals, but so I'm sure, does everyone else's. In that way then, the whole city, the whole country, the whole world is moving, rotating; each of our spirals vulnerable to the influence of nature, the seasons, the circles of our lives expanding and contracting in time to the cycles of the sun, the moon. With each day, I find it becomes harder and harder  to ignore the sensation that our whole universe is rolling and turning, cycling and spiraling around us, a forever evolving organism; a beautiful dance upon which the mysteries of existence itself are being played out, mysteries of such weight and depth that I don't suppose they will ever be revealed.


Step Inside Circle Time

Click the links below to read the poems in full, listen to readings and veiw some exclusive artwork:

1. When I

2. Oxford

3. The Diminished

4. This Mourning I

5. Finally Falling Through the Flames

6. By Hope

7. Rebel


To buy a copy of Circle Time, visit the Lazy Gramophone Shop.
Alternatively, to find out which bookshops sell our work, cast an eye over our list of Lazy Gramophone Friendly Independent Bookshops.
Tags for this post: sam, rawlings, circle, time, lazygramophone.

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