To Deia
by Roger McGough

I just wanted to say hello, and to thank you for the good times spent in your company without mentioning olive trees.

But there, I've done it. Fallen straight into the holiday trap of making promises that cannot be kept, of failed resolutions.

Olive trees, they're bloody everywhere.

Filling the terraces that stretch down to the sea from the garden in which I sit writing a poem (that seems, against my will and better judgement, to be about olive trees.)

When the moon is full, their leathery, silver leaves fall to the ground, curl up and become cicadas. Their trunks so rough and gnarled that lovers cannot carve their names into them.

Even Robert Graves, whose house overlooks the terraces, forswore the knife for the pen.

But thank you Deia for putting on a good show year after year.
Swimming down at the cala, music at Sa Fonda, vino de casa, grilled squid and tumbet.

And there was something else...Something interesting...

But its too hot to think sitting here in the garden looking at an olive tree that has become a poem about an olive tree that looks like another poem, and yet another, filling the pages that stretch down to the sea.

About Deia
by Diane Redmond

I’ve visited Deia many times over the years but something happened to me last year.

It was the first time I’d ever been to Ca n’Alluny, the house where Robert Graves lived for forty years.

I was fascinated by its coolness and simplicity, by the creative charge it generated, I could almost hear the tap of Graves’ typewriter, the scratch of his pen.

I was reluctant to leave the house where so many books had been written and so many ideas formulated but when I did I was unprepared for what awaited me outside.

The garden shimmered in a heat haze, English cottage flowers and old roses spilled everywhere.

I sat under the shade of the lemon trees and with my back to a dry stone wall where lizards darted among trails of shocking pink oleander I closed my eyes and soaked in what seemed like a gift from the gods themselves.