Amber - tears of trees

I have an amber bear, a bit like this ancient amulet, which may be as much as 3500 years old. Mine is a relatively new thing, I guess, though I have no real way of knowing. It came from Krakow, Poland. Whenever it was made, the amber itself is millions of years old. It's one of my most precious possessions.

My amber bear has made its way into my Iron Age novel. Back in 320 BC, when Pytheas was making his epic journey, amber was viewed as a magical material. It is still believed to have healing powers, but back then it was used in religious ceremonies and rituals because of its extraordinary properties. It appears like a gemstone, yet it is warm to the touch, like plastic, it glows and will melt in a candle flame. When rubbed, it creates static electricity; you can lift cloth with it, and even create sparks. No wonder it seemed to have magical powers to the ancients.

Amber is not found in the Mediterranean, so the Greek supply of 'electrum', as they called it, came from northern Europe. In the Bronze and Iron Age it was plentiful on the coast of Jutland, across the North Sea from Britain, and on the shores of the Baltic sea, which is where Pytheas' quest took him.

There are many wonderful stories about amber's origins. Some believed it to be the droppings of magical lynxes. Others believed it to be the tears of a goddess who fell in love with a mortal fisherman.

The Greek story is that it is the tears of the Heliades, the daughters of the sun god, Helios. When their brother, Phaethom, stole his father's chariot and tried to ride it through the sky, he lost control of the horses and set fire to the firmament. Zeus tossed him down from the heavens into the river Eridanus, where he drowned, and when his sisters came weeping there, they were turned into poplars. Their tears continued to pour, as resin, which solidified into amber.

I wonder if Pytheas believed this tale. Was he seeking the river Eridanus, on the banks of which he would find the magical weeping trees of the Heliades? Or was he, as a hard-headed scientist, trying to debunk the old myth and return with a more factual account of gems washing up on the North Sea beaches?

Whatever Pytheas believed, he would surely have been amazed to learn the truth, that Baltic amber is up to 50 million years old, and is, genuinely, the 'tears of trees', being fossil resin of ancient (and now extinct) conifers. I like to think he had an amber bear in his pocket, while he pondered its mysteries.

Ten bear poems

I am not the only writer for whom bears are their muse, and I'm not thinking here of nursery rhymes, doggerel or poems for children about teddy bears, but grown-up poems about real life, if sometimes somewhat mythical, bears.

1. Top of the list is Galway Kinnell's 'The Bear' from his 1968 collection Body Rags (and also in his Selected Poems). This is a strange and wonderful telling of a winter hunt of a bear, wounding the animal, following the trail of blood and climaxing when the hunter reaches the bear and kills him. 'I... tear him down his whole length/ and open him and climb in / and close him up after me, against the wind / and sleep.'  And thus there is a 'parabola of bear-transcendence' in which the poet becomes the bear. Extraordinary and totemic. 
2. There's an echo of the same idea in Margaret Atwood's 'Bear Lament.' in her 2007 collection The Door. 'You once believed if you could only / crawl inside a bear, its fat and fur, / lick with its stubby tongue, take on / its ancient shape, its big paw /big paw big paw big paw / heavy-footed plod that keeps / the worldwide earthwork solid, this would // save you, in a crisis.' This idea of the bear as holding the earth together is so important, the recognition that it is a keystone of our ecosystems and that without them, we are threatened. The poem ends with the cry 'Oh bear, what now? And will the ground still hold? And how much longer?'
3. Which of Ted Hughes' bear poems to choose? It has to be 'The Bear', from the 1967 collection Wodwo. 'In the huge, wide-open, sleeping-eye of the mountain / The bear is the gleam in the pupil / Ready to awake / And instantly focus.' Here is the bear as our guide from this life into death, or into another life.
4. Much more recent is the wonderful 2012 collection Ice by Gillian Clarke, throughout which a polar bear is the presiding spirit. Forget some of the trite use of Ursus Maritimus as the 'poster bear' of climate change, here is the real thing, vulnerable and powerful. In the opening poem, 'Polar', she says,  ' I want him alive. / I want him fierce / with belly and breath and  growl and beating heart, / I want him dangerous...'
5. J O Morgan's In Casting Off (published by Happenstance this year), is another collection with the presence of a white bear hovering in the margins of many poems. It makes itself known, splendidly, fishing in 'Dividing Line', when a leaping salmon caught by a bear 'ceases at once to be shape - becomes fish. // Its sideways thrash about the claws / that have punctured its course, that have drawn it / clear from its universe of water.... The blood / of the fish / becoming / the blood / of the bear.'
6.  Mary Oliver's 'Truro Bear' (from The Truro Bear and other Adventures, 2008) is a possible bear, seen in the woods by people, 'three or four, / or two, or one.' She hasn't seen it herself, but she's watching out, and 'everywhere I look on the scratchy hillsides / shadows seem to grow shoulders.' Oh, I so know what that is like!
7. There are lots of bears in Chrissy Williams' 2013 pamphlet Flying into the Bear, and some favourite lines. 'Everyone could use a  bear sometimes, everyone could use a wild bear..' So, to choose just one, it's 'The Invisible Bear', the one you fly into if you lie back at night and look up into the sky. 'There's not much comfort in a bear you can see through, but then / in times of not much comfort, reach out for what you can.'
8. 'Eliza and the Bear' is the long title poem by Eleanor Rees' 2009 collection. It begins, 'I did not know my lover was a bear', and goes on from there...
9. I have to include Kevin Cadwallender's Bear and the Elementals, which is online here, and consists entirely of bear poems, my favourite of which is, I think, 'Bear Somnus'. 'In the roll and scratch and snore / of winter, a dream enters .. death calls too, reminding / Bear that sleep is its cousin / and dreams are messengers.' 
10. Finally, am I allowed to include one of mine? It's in my 2007 collection Castings, which you can get here, and given the time of year, its a seasonally appropriate autumn 'Polar Bear', hanging out in the multi-coloured woods near Churchill, Canada.
    
    
    Low-angled sun gleams
    through claret leaves
    and caribou lichens pale green
    in the first skiff of snow.
    
    
    A frozen hare watches
    the flight of a falcon
    and spruce fingers point
    where the winds will blow.
    
    
    Tamarack needles flutter
    and flurries of snow buntings dart
    over flaming jade, bronze
    and copper-leaved willow.
    
    
    Photographers get set to lie
    to freeze-frame your world
    starched, ice-bleached arctic
    whitewashing your rainbow.
    
    
    Here you lie in the forest
    a snoozing sumo wrestler
    under trees barely able to hold
    up the sky, so heavy with snow.
    
    
     So, which bear poems would you include in the list?