Whose life is it anyway?

a guest blog post on Anthony Wilson’s Lifesaving poems  [September 2015]

A few weeks ago I was writing about the way I had found myself conflicted about learning things about my granddad’s life that that didn’t fit with poems I’d written about him; how I was feeling uneasy about the truths of documentary records, and the truths of poems and poetry. I think it bothered me particularly, because it took me a long time to put people in my poems at all…ten years ago, pretty much all my poems were like my photographs: unpopulated landscapes.

I tried deliberately to break out of the straitjacket of endlessly writing pretty/atmospheric/repetitive (inevitably) evocations of places like Skye and the Pennine Moors. I took my cue from Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘The world’s wife’, because I saw that I could try ventriloquism, learn the way of other people’s voices. I wrote monologues for all sorts of famous statues, like The Angel of the North, and for an artist who had fascinated me, and for his wife, and his model.  But never about real, living people…or, at least, about people who I knew, and might get to read the poems.

I suppose the first breakthrough of sorts came in the guilty relief and release –for both of us, I want to believe – that came when my mother died in her 90s . She spent the last fifteen years of her life in a nursing home following a  severe stroke. She fought against every moment of it. She resented and hated it. I took her ashes to the Valley of Desolation, her favourite place in Wharfedale, and soon after, wrote a poem about it as a sort of atonement or prayer for absolution. Then I felt guilty that I’d not written for my dad, so I wrote about his birdwatching, his shoe mending, his singing; and then I had to balance it up with more about my mum. It’s a strange thing, guilt, but the outcome was that over about three years I’d written a handful of poems, and more about my grandparents, and it seemed to come more easily with each one. I didn’t feel as if they were looking over my shoulder, tutting.  Or not as often, or not as loudly.

But I can pinpoint the big breakthrough to specific dates. In October 2013 I was on a writing course at Almaserra Vella in Spain, and the tutor was Jane Draycott. She gave us a quick writing exercise…first impressions, get-it-down-fast responses to a randomly chosen postcard, which happened to be a Penguin book cover that had images of flame on it.

And I wrote about our friend Julie who we’d visited in her flat in Whitby a couple of weeks before. Julie was dying of an incurable cancer; she’d confounded the specialists by outliving their predictions by over a year.

Flames. The most tenuous of connections. But a flame burned fiercely in Julie, and in the underlit smokestacks of the Boulby mine just up the coast. Maybe that was it. I typed it up with very few changes the week after. When she died a couple of weeks later, I nerved myself up to give the poem to her brother at her funeral. I was genuinely frightened. But he liked it, shared it. Gave me a permission I realised I needed: to write honestly about and for real living people. That poem Julie won first prize in the 2013 Plough Competition. Andrew Motion had liked it! I used some of the prize money to put together and print my first two pamphlets.

Julie

According to the specialists you died six months ago

and I like sitting with you, proving there’s an afterlife

as we roll cigarettes, you perched like a wire bird

up on your kitchen top beside the angel

that I made for you before I knew you weren’t alive.

Your fridge’s crusted like a wreck, with magnets

and pictures of BobDylan, and you show me

that programme that Patti Smith had signed, for you,

not knowing you’d been applauding from the Underworld.

You make me laugh each time you tell the phone

it can get stuffed because it’s your mad mother

who will not believe that you’re not with us any more.

Your eyes grow bright in your dead woman’s face,

then sink, then glow like cigarettes, like the ironworks

up the coast, or the small lights on the cobles

tied up and tilted on the mud; like the strange flares

from the stack high up on Boulby Cliff, where the shaft

goes down a whole dark mile of ammonites, and heads off

far away beneath the weight of oil rigs, and sunken ships,

and shoals of cod, and all the grey North sea.

Which is where it gets just a little more complicated. We’ve been going to the Isle of Skye for twenty-odd years, renting a bungalow from Norman and Effie Macpherson in the crofting valley of Achnacloich on the Sleat peninsula. Norman was a shepherd all his working life, on Ben Lomond, on Ben Nevis, and finally, till his death four years ago, back on his home island. Every now and then I’d try to write about them, but always felt conscious of what I imagined would be their wry, dry take on the whole sorry impertinent business. What did I know? Even so, when I put my first pamphlet together I wanted them in: a seven-poem sequence titled Crofters.

If anyone else had given me permission for that, it was MacCaig, who I read and re-read, trying to nail down just how he did it; that apparently simple thing of writing about the people and hills of Assynt that he loved and knew better than I’d ever know Skye, or Effie and Norman. Anyway, that’s the thing I was after. The way Norman would hide behind the barn to smoke, the quiet pauses of Effie’s speech. Here’s Norman

He’s laid up in the house:

joint pains, congested lungs,

bladder like a bag of knives,

and maybe sheep-dip’s to blame.

and Effie, the first year after he died, feeding the sheep that come running

like threads to a spool,

and milling like a boil of beans –

ignore the black and white dog,

the woman in the pilled grey fleece,

her hair that breezes cannot ruffle.

It was an expensive dog, that one. Norman went down to Tyndrum to buy it. A serious business, buying a working dog.

I still didn’t feel right about publishing the poems. In a diffuse sort of way, a way that says: well, they’re not going to see these poems. No-one’s going to buy them after all.  That sort of thing. And then I wrote some more, and sent some in for competitions. A poem called Norman came 2^nd in a York Literature festival competition this year. I wrote from memory and feeling. Some things I know are factually true and some as though they ought to be.

Norman

 could birth a lamb in the lee of a dike,

smit a skittish ewe in a squall,

pin down a ram and not give a jot 

for its yellow stare, the black slot of its sideways eye,

wear a two-year Herdwick like a scarf over three miles of bog,

make good a tumbled fence with a twist of twine,

strip out an axle on a Subaru,

stand half a summer to his waist in the slop of the dip

haul a whole flock through and still tell a tale 

over the clamouring misery of bleat.

He could walk all day in a pelt of rain and a sack for a coat.

To put down a runt or one with a goitre 

or one with a sprain or a maggoty arse – 

that was beyond him quite.

The days for the slaughterman’s truck 

he was away over the moor.

He knew where the first primrose showed.

I knew all about the Subaru, but the Herdwick was there for the heft of the word. It would more likely have been one of the blackfaced sheep. I don’t know the proper name. A Cheviot? What I was after was the mix of Norman’s durability and the sentimental side he could show.

He once told me he knew a secret place in the woods beyond the headland. He’d take Effie there to show her the first primroses. They can’t be got at now, because of the deer fences. He was cross about them, because now there are no deer to keep down more competitive plants.

The man at the garage in Armadale told me that all the neighbours were pretty sure that years of exposure to organo-phosphates in the sheep dip played a part in his illness. That had to find a way in.

That’s Norman who I didn’t know all that well; but it’s the Norman I remember. I worried about whether Effie would recognize him. Or think me obtrusive. An incomer.

The business was finally settled for me when Liz Lochhead picked a poem as the winner of the 2014 Plough Competition. It pivots on something Effie happened to say when I told her about an odd meeting in the rain down in Tarskavaig. This is it.

Tinkers

Washed up on a rucked-rug  shoreline,

floats, fish-boxes, rubber gloves,

fertiliser sacks, kelp, clots of wool,

and the cockle –pickers, peat-pickled 

bog-creatures, leathery, with ruined teeth,

long, dirty nails, eyes as dark as iodine.

They tinkers. Och. says Effie. You’d do well

to look to the barns, and count the spades,

and what did they ask you for,

the leather women, old coats belted with rope,

rubber boots patched with gaffer tape,

hair like seaweed, when they tapped

on the windscreen, brown as selkies.

For a light only, the bright ember,

blue smoke blown on the wind, the spit

of rain off the sea, and thanks we’re away 

down the road and done with the day,

with turning stones, with lifting kelp,

browsing the hard shore for a knuckly net

of cockles, iron, amber,cobalt, rust.

What’s to be done with the Tarskavaig tinkers

who come up out of the peat or the sea?

And when the light goes, where do they turn?

We’d had a laugh over that. Not ‘PC’ that ‘tinkers’. ‘But they’re tinkers just the same’, said Effie. And I cut her some cake. Well, it takes more than a slice of cake to say ‘thank you’ for putting someone out there in public, when you never said ‘please’ in the first place. I had sleepless nights over it all,  then said the serenity prayer. The bit about asking for courage to change the things we can. I made a neat parcel of my three pamphlets, and wrote a letter that took me more redrafts than most poems, all explanation, mea culpa and apology, and posted it all off to Achnacloich on the Sleat peninsula of Skye.

Then I waited. And nothing happened. I thought maybe she’d gone to visit her cousin, or gone over to Ireland for a holiday, or…….. I thought over and over, what if she’s upset, or worse. Last week I bit the bullet and telephoned. O, hello, she said. I was meaning to ring you…I feel guilty now, you know how things get put off, it’s been a terrible summer, och, the worst I remember, dreich days, and grass poor, we’re taking supplements up to sheep; yes I got your books. We liked them. Norma says I’ll be famous now. Och, no, of course I’m not cross.

For two days I walked on air, and in November I’ll be able to go and see her, and all will be well. Whose lives are they anyway, when we write? I have no idea. But I know we’re responsible for them, and the truth of them. Whatever that is.

A 2018 Postscript: Since I first wrote this post, I’ve had two pamphlets, a collection, and a jointly-authored collection published. The tinkers and Effie and Norman finally went properly public in 2016 when they appeared my first collection, Much Possessed [smith|doorstop. £9.95]. And in  more poems that may or may not be published one day. There’s a moral here. Stay with your instincts. Anyway, as a bonus track, here’s Norman from “Much possessed”

Blended

That would be the time I saw the White-tailed eagle,
the time Norman says Well, yes, I’ll take another,
the time he came up to the cottage, which is a thing
he rarely does;it would be Effie, usually,
who’d have a cup of tea, a slice of Dundee cake,
but Norman says cake’s not his thing, and coughs,
thoughtfully, because sheep dip will do that
over the years, it’ll get to the lungs, so then
we settle on the whisky; not a single malt –
the Isle of Skye that’s blended in the South,
in pawky Edinburgh, but like Angus
at the Post Office by the ferry always says:
it’s a wee bit smoky-peaty, and och it’s no
to everybody’s taste, but it turns out
it tastes just fine, which is how it comes to be
that Norman takes a generous third glass
and spreads himself a little and says
that last year, driving back from Armadale,
just where the road comes over the moor
above Loch Dughail, just before it twists
down the three miles through the birches,
just there, and was it June? Och, summer, anyway
and right there above the loch, and it was a day
so still, there was a White-tailed eagle, sailing
in off Slapin, and not a wingbeat to it now,
and there it was, and there it was reflected
in the loch, and you know, that was a lovely thing,
the eagle in the wind and on the water.
And I know that though I never saw the eagle
ride the wind to Rhum, I know I saw it then
with Norman, comfy in the armchair,
with that third glass of smoky-peaty
blended Isle of Skye.

Finally having a break from trying to keep up with new posts for the cobweb. A month should do it, by which time I’ll have managed to line up new guests, and, who knows, something interesting will have cropped up in this bubble of poetry we inhabit.

In the meantime I’ll be reposting some older posts that might stand an airing. And thank you for following and reading. Makes it all worthwhile.

Originally published on Roy Marshall’s poetry blog : August 2015

“Taking stock”

About 12 years ago I finished an MA course in Creative Writing that I was ill-advised to have started. I don’t know what my motive was, but my heart wasn’t in it. I duly got my MA, but the writing didn’t start in any meaningful way until I started going to the Poetry Business Writing Days on a regular basis a couple of years later. Even then, between 2007 and 20012 I averaged about twelve new poems a year.

Something strange (or, rather, wonderful) happened in 2013; it was like a dam bursting. I’ve written ceaselessly since. 272 new poems. I cannot account for it, but I’m happy to count my blessings. And I can now look back and see a curious process and progress.

In one of the essays I wrote for my MA I see that even then I had an idea about where I wanted to be. I wrote that my imagination was:

‘visual ,excited by landscape, particularly the landscape of hills, fells, sky, sea and weather’. but that I wanted to be more: concerned with explorations of people in landscape, and the meaning of their histories.’

Basically, all my poems were like the photograph of the shore at Achnacloich. Empty of people. Which leads me to a shift, of sorts. Back then, even before I started on an MA, I went up to Skye for a week on my own TO WRITE. I would write about Clearance sites. I would read John Prebble. I would take poets with me. I would be serious about it.

Not much came of it except this one poem that eventually was accepted by ‘The North’. I didn’t know that was a big deal. I know better now. The backstory is that I was getting myself lost as usual up on the moor, following, and losing, deer tracks, and looking out towards Rhum, and back to the Cuillin, and realising that I couldn’t see any of it straight. It was all coming through the lens of Ted Hughes and his stags, and his stones and his horizons. And it was that frustration that I wrote about. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but when I came home to radio and newspapers, I discovered that had been the day that Ted Hughes had died, and I thought that made the poem worth keeping. Here it is.

                       Achnacloich: October 1998

As the heron creaked clear
of the wet alders by the brown burn,
taking a line from the curve of the fell
where the eagle had mantled
and flown lazy and sure to the far edge of things,
you were watching, old hawk, among the crofts,
the sheep staring mad-eyed
at your insurance man’s suit
shiny at cuff and collar, creased at knee,at elbow.
You watched and talked all that wet day,
your gritstone vowels, your cadences
open as the sky; falling for ever.

You were there on the shoreline,
rooting through the blueprint bones
of sheep, those scattered vertebrae,
this relic jawbone clamped on silence
among the stones, the hiddle of baling wire,
mired iron sheeting, rust.
Across the green and sopping parks
sheep huddled in the lithe of the long wall,
and beyond, on the bareblown hill
the deer were waiting for you and me;
alert and wary, then, pouring easy as light
up the tumbled slopes and out of sight,
in those gulleys gouged in the cold hills.

Heaven poured down on Rhum,
fans and blades of honey, silver-gilt.
As we walked and watched that day
in Achnacloich; old hawk, you saw
the pressed dry grass where the deer lie,
a single slot in a cup of peat;
the buttresses of turf, of heather, tangled whin,
and, always the horizons calling
until, far below and far away,
the wood was a struggle
a scattering foil of birch and bloodbead ash.

There we stood in the high place
where rock was kneeling, clean and dry and bright
and all the earth was a stage
for the performance of heaven.
The tumbling outcrops fell away;
away, away beyond the foundering islands,
beyond the damascened sea.

The stones, the light, the rain,
all fixed in the reflex of your hawk’s eye.
Wherever I walked in Achnacloich,
The Field of Stones, that day your words,
joined with earth and engraved in rock
were under my feet. That day.

    (Ted Hughes d. October 28 1998)

I realise now it more than just a bit of landscape painting, and that I was enjoying collaging lines of Hughes’ poems into my own, and I was actually writing about something personal. But I didn’t stay with it.

It was another 5 years before I started again, and I made a big effort to populate my poetry. I took my cue from The world’s wife and worked away at ventriloqual monologues spoken by fallen angels. I like some of them, but no-one else seems to. I wrote about John Waterhouse, the painter, and his wife, and his favourite model. More dramatic monologues that didn’t go anywhere very much. And then a long hiatus, though I started going regularly to The Poetry Business Writing Days, and they slowly worked their magic. Tentatively, I started to write about real people, but very self-consciously and awkwardly until 2013 when I was on a writing residential and I wrote this poem that changed everything.

Julie

According to the specialists you died six months ago
and I like sitting with you, proving there’s an afterlife
as we roll cigarettes, you perched like a wire bird
up on your kitchen top beside the angel
that I made for you before I knew you weren’t alive.
Your fridge’s crusted like a wreck, with magnets
and pictures of Bob Dylan, and you show me
that programme that Patti Smith had signed, for you,
not knowing you’d been applauding from the Underworld.
You make me laugh each time you tell the phone
it can get stuffed because it’s your mad mother
who will not believe that you’re not with us any more.
Your eyes grow bright in your dead woman’s face,
then sink, then glow like cigarettes, like the ironworks
up the coast, or the small lights on the cobles
tied up and tilted on the mud; like the strange flares
from the stack high up on Boulby Cliff, where the shaft
goes down a whole dark mile of ammonites, and heads off
away beneath the weight of oil rigs, and sunken ships,
and shoals of cod, and all the grey North sea.

This poem, about someone I was very fond of, only happened because of the pressure of a fast writing task that ambushed me into knowing an emotion I didn’t know I felt. Thank you for that ‘write from a postcard’ task, Jane Draycott. I plucked up the courage to give a copy to Julie’s brother at her funeral. He liked it. He shared it with people, and I sent it off for the Plough Poetry Competition, where Andrew motion liked it and gave it the first prize. That’s what changed everything. It gave me permission to think I could write, along with the encouragement of Kim Moore (who put one of my poems on her Sunday Poem blog), and Gaia Holmes, who gave me a guest slot at the Puzzle Hall Poets. That was it. The dam broke.

Years of reading and teaching, and having a family and a history were stacked up, waiting to be dealt with and voiced. It took 70 years, but I finally got going. More fallen angels, poems for my parents and for my grandparents, and my children, and long-ago girlfriends, and finally, folktale and myth that became imaginatively real and relevant for the first time in my life. Daedalus let me write about the death of my son. Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Garfield and Blishen’s The god beneath the sea reminded me why I loved Prometheus and Hephaestus, and why I loathed most of the Greek Pantheon. Norman MacCaig taught me it was possible to write about gods and heroes with the ease of familiarity. Which is what lies behind this poem that I chose to put into my chapbook Larach (along with John Keats’ urn and Orpheus and the rest). It’s nice to feel comfortable enough to be angry in a poem.

True stories

Violent and vulgar as the Krays comes Zeus,
a white bull, miasmic with testosterone,
or a shower of gold, or a flurry of wings
and swansdown.
The whole pale mortal world
just asking for it.
A bit of blood and bruising.
No harm done.

No wonder Cronos had no stomach
for Olympus and its thuggish brood.

Roman Ovid knew blood clogs scabbards,
stiffens nets; the blue-white shine of bone;
the gristly wet noise of a boy
spitted on a hunting spear;

Years and reverence
bleached Greek myths white and silent,
censored severed hands and torn-out tongue;
the loud incontinent reek of death.

As if hyacinths, pale anenomes,
the silvery liquid song of nightingales
would atone, somehow.
Birds and flowers, and cold bright stars –
archers,hunters, bear and plough.

Surely simpler, and more godlike,
to prick holes in the fabric of the night,
let bits of heaven shine through.

I suspect all my pent-up frustrations about arrogant Old Etonians and their sense of entitlement, and their palpable contempt for the rest of us has fed into this. Whether it’s healthy or not, I don’t know. But I enjoyed writing it. I like doing it at open mic. events, too.

The last year has brought new breakthroughs that I’ve recognised in the moments where they happened. I’ve reached a point where I can write with what feels like real emotional/imaginative truth about the things that matter to me more than anything. It’s a long business, learning not to shy away from hard truths. Kim Moore has taught me that in her poems that deal with domestic violence in her lovely collection, The art of falling. And then, in March this year, in a residential she ran, she somehow ambushed me into writing a poem about my son’s suicide, direct, unmediated through games with myth and personae. It’s the poem I’ve waited all my life to write.

 A weak force

there’s sometimes a loss you can’t imagine;
the lives never lived by your children;
the one who simply stopped
in the time it takes
to fall to the ground
from the top of a tower block.

No time at all.

They say gravity is a weak force.
I say the moon will draw a trillion tons
of salt sea from its shore.
I say a mountain range will pull a snowmelt
puddle out of shape.
I say gravity can draw a boy
through a window
and into the air.

There is loss no one can imagine

in the no time between
falling and not falling
you learned the art of not falling

beneath you burned
the lights of Sheepscar, Harehills,
Briggate, Vicar Lane,
lights shone in the glass arcades,
on the tiles, on the gantries of tall cranes,
on the motorway tail lights trailed ribbons of red,
and you were far beyond falling.

Because you shut your eyes
because you always shut your eyes
you closed them tight as cockleshells
because when you did that the world
would go away the world
would not see you.

I remember how you ran like a dream.
I remember how you laughed when I swore
I would catch you.

Then you flared you went out
you flared like a moth and you blew
away over the lights over the canal
the river the sour moors the cottongrass
the mills of the plain
and over the sea and over the sea
and the bright west
and sank like the sun.

Thanks for inviting me, Roy Marshall. It’s been good to take stock.

next week: Whose life is it, anyway ?

Promises to keep and apologies to make; it’s been too long since the last post. I may be part-Troll. I may be like Detritus in Terry Pratchett’s stories…our brains don’t work in hot weather.

Which is how I started the last post..feeling guilty about not posting every week, but basically too busy. Mainly with home improvements and hospital appointments, but also with very enjoyable poetry events. It was lovely to go to Leeds a couple of weeks ago to read at the launch of Strix‘s fourth issue. What an achievement that’s been for them. Should you not know about Strix, it’s a new magazine of poetry and short fiction. In its first year of publication, Strix has been admired by Carol Rumens in The Guardian (‘—handsome, streamlined and sharp-eyed’) and was shortlisted for Best Magazine in the prestigious Saboteur Awards. Strix is edited and published from Leeds, England. The editors are SJ Bradley, Ian Harker and Andrew Lambeth. They have done a quite remarkable job, and are now attracting hundreds of submissions. Watch out for Strix. It is, without doubt, a lovely thing.

Even nicer was to read at the Leeds Library,  founded in 1768 as a proprietary subscription library and now the oldest surviving example of this sort of library in the British Isles (it boasts Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) as one of its original subscribers) and celebrating its 250th anniversary this year. It’s an astonishing place, right in the heart of the city centre, and probably not known to the bulk of the folk of Leeds. If you’re ever in Leeds, give yourself a treat and go in for a look round. It’s on Commercial Street, tucked in behind and above the Co-op Bank. The first time I went was earlier this year to hear my hero Tony Harrison, so there was a real frisson to be able to read where he’d read.

At the end of July I was reading at the third launch event of my new pamphlet Advice to a traveller. And what a lovely night it was, with guest poets Laura Potts (it’s high time a smart publisher snapped her up) and Ian Parks, and a travelling enthusiastic audience from Mexborough and Doncaster. Made all the complications of organising venues worthwhile. And thanks to the staff of Wakefield’s Red Shed which is a really nice place to read and listen in. Thank you, everyone.

But what about that clock, and that winged chariot? I’m cautious about how I explain this. I don’t want to give the wrong impression. Maybe I should say, before I crack on, that I am fit and well and happy…no qualifications. Hold on to that thought. I’ve noticed for the last couple of years I’ve been writing what might seem bleak-sounding poems, a bit dark, a bit valedictory but not particularly backward looking or nostalgic. More concerned with the fact of death being a lot closer than it was not so long ago. I believe your poems are like dreams..you have less control over what they say to you than you’d like. Or at least, the good ones, the important ones, do. Behind them all is the acknowledgement that at 75, your days are numbered, and you begin to accept that you’re not immortal. It’s not distressing (well, not to me, anyway) but it means that sometimes you’re looking at life through a diminishing lens you need to understand and get used to. And it also means, for me, that everything becomes more interesting, and I don’t want to waste a minute. I’m in a hurry to do stuff. I can’t hang around fine tuning poems and pamphlets. I want to write and write and get it out there.

At my back I always hear time’s winged chariot hurrying near. Curiously, I’m untroubled by the concept of deserts of vast eternity, and I don’t think Marvell was, either. To his coy mistress is a young man’s vision in a young man’s poem. Because, I believe, he hears nothing of the sort. He’s in a hurry, but not because he thinks he’s going to die any minute soon. The one who speaks to me these days is Norman McCaig. A couple of years ago I set myself the job of reading his collected works, a few poems every day for a year.

By the time I reached his poems written in the 1980’s I started to notice images of approaching death. The horse that comes along the shore, the black sail in the bay, the scythe in the field, the immanence of journeys ending. I wondered why, because I didn’t know much about his biography. I noticed poems that mourned the death of old friends. The penny dropped a bit later. In the mid-1980’s he was the age I am now, an age when some of your oldest friends, all about your own age, have died. The thing is, he had nearly 15 years left to live, but he wasn’t to know that. And most of his poems go on being vibrant with life and the love of life. He went on walking in the Sutherland hills, fishing the remote Green Corrie. He became frail in the 1990s, but he wasn’t frail when he started noting the finite nature of things. I see what he meant. Time has changed its meaning. It is too precious to not do things in. It makes life more urgent, more vivid. I can’t get enough of it.

It would be slickly ironic to say that time is wasted on the young. It isn’t. I’m a firm believer in the value of wasting time, of faffing about, of being bored when you’re young.  I suspect that boredom is the mother of creativity, eventually. Though I’m massively impressed  by the energy and drive and hunger of young and youngish poets I know. Poets like Kim Moore, Laura Potts, the perennially youthful Clare Shaw. They make me more alive. I don’t know how they manage it, but I’m grateful. And equally grateful for the company of younger* poets I meet in writing workshops, who have all the time in the world, but (unlike me at their age) believe in cracking on, and writing as if they don’t. Which brings me to today’s guest.

*I realise, when I check and proofread this that ‘younger’ is entirely and meaninglessly relative. I suppose, by now, I mean anyone under 50. Eventually, it’ll be anyone with most of their own teeth who’s nippy with a Zimmer frame

When I started writing the great fogginzo’s cobweb I only knew that I wanted to provide a platform for poets who you might not have come across, poets who hadn’t yet been published, but poets who wrote things than I wanted to share.  It was a way of saying thank you to the ones who had shared my poems before I’d had any published. Which, in turn, is why I wanted to write more and write better, to justify their faith.

This will be the third post to introduce the work of poets I meet at The Albert Poets Monday night workshop group in Huddersfield. You’ve met David Spencer and Regina Weinert. Now meet Jack Faricy. In fact, let him introduce himself:

“I came late to poetry both as a serious reader and as a writer.  I’m an English teacher now but even that was an afterthought.  My first degree was in Economics and French. It was only after a few months working in an insurance company that I realised what a terrible mistake that had been.

I taught English as a foreign language for close to a decade (Thailand, Japan) and completed an MA in Linguistics by distance learning.  This enabled me to return to the UK and study for a PGCE.

I’d started reading more contemporary poetry but creative writing had always felt like something for other people.  I’d made the mistake of admiring elitist authors who could be savagely dismissive of aspiring writers with ‘provincial’ backgrounds.

But the itch outgrew Martin Amis.  I wrote my first ‘real’ poem after experiencing grief.  It is a landscape poem that is not obviously about loss.  I found I couldn’t stop, especially after enjoying the support and encouragement of friends at The Albert’s Monday workshops.

Now, sitting down to write feels like housekeeping.  If I didn’t do it, chaos would rule.  Giving shape to an idea or a feeling allows me to file it away and start afresh.  And once everywhere’s clear, I can start messing things up again.

I have had poems long- and short-listed in a number of competitions.  ‘Tom’ was highly commended in the 2016 Red Shed Poetry Competition and ‘Spoor’ was the People’s Choice for Best Poem in the 2017 Canterbury Poet of the Year Competition.”

I really like that:

Now, sitting down to write feels like housekeeping.  If I didn’t do it, chaos would rule. 

 I’d never thought of it like that. Housekeeping. But yes, that growing awareness that things are not where they should be, neglected, a bit dusty and grubby, ideas neglected, jobs unfinished, stuff left lying around. Writing as ‘putting things in order’. Yes. And now, the poems.

Spoor

His silt-soled footprint fits like skin;

its mud-mould gives

a little, goads the nuzzling toes

and flexing arch.

I try to feel my way in, discern

the pulse of his veins,

hunt-quickened, alive

to some new cunning in his prey.  My eyes

strain to be his, not blurred

and blinking in the wind, but whetted

keen, flashing and darting

as he harries an aurochs

to death, heedless of shapes

left in the sand to harden, become relics

of the chase, like this

fragment of his scattered form.

Nothing. We share nothing

but this tide-washed stratum.

My foot’s a blindworm

thwarted in its burrowing, nostalgic

for its cast-off skin.

I turn back to the dunes. A boy

digs; his mother, deck-chaired,

wind-shielded, hugs herself for warmth,

waves.  I retrace the steps between us.

This poem reminds me that Jack’s poems have two qualities that particularly grab my attention. One is the quality of curiosity coupled with a wide frame of reference; you can find yourself anywhere in the world or in history. The other is the way he will seize on the moment that draws you in, and then speculate about its back-story, which is often (but not invariably) presented quite filmically.  So we start with the fossil record of the momentary impression of a long-dead hunter, his single footprint in estuary mud, then strain to see through his eyes, and fail. My foot’s a blindworm. I think this image nails it. We’ve reached a dead end, and then the focus shifts, as it does in film, back to the living and loved. We have been away too long. I love the ambivalent tone of that last line:

I retrace the steps between us.  

knowing that the waving woman cannot know how far away in time he has been.

Three more poems, then, that share this business of digging into the meaning/significance of ‘the moment that draws you in’. The next ones, I suppose, more purely imagist. But I like the irony of it very much

Tinkling Cymbal

Pylons vanish up, cables slung

over crawling traffic and a field

where blackthorns claw the mist.

Motionless on a hoarding’s rim

a peregrine falcon digests its prey

above a quote from Corinthians.

Drivers see mirrors and screens,

their vehicles passing like sand

through the neck of an hourglass.

( I assumed, wrongly, at one workshop, that everyone would know the Corinthians reference in the title and link it with the image of the billboard parked on the embankment. Who hires those advertising trailers? Who rents the field space. Who wants to admonish me and pay to do it? Anyway, here’s the reference, in Tyndale’s version:

Though I spake with the tonges of men and angels and yet had no love I were eve as soundinge brasse: or as a tynklynge Cymball.

The next poem starts with an image, and then, like Spoor, takes in a swoop of time back through two millennia, eliding the the hubcap that spun away from the collision with a Roman legionary’s shield, the moorland road and golf course coinciding with a Roman road, the inflated plastic heart of an impromptu roadside shrine and the small flag of a golf course pin fluttering at the site of a brutal execution.

A tethered heart twitches

in shivering wind.

Traffic cones sprout bouquets that buckle

under sleetfall. The toppled wall bleeds meltwater

into runnels that thread the way

from Rocking Stone to Cambodunum,

Slack’s ROMAN FORT (site of).

This unrecovered hubcap’s where

a Cantabrian sloughed his shield

to piss insults in the snow.

A flagged pin piercing Petty Royd,

the longest par three in Yorkshire,

points to his deathplace. Cudgeled

for breaking rank, he lost his hold.

Gusts tug the jittering heart.

I was judging The Red Shed poetry competition a couple of years ago when this last poem  turned up in a batch sent by the organisers. It jumped out, snagged my attention, drew me in. I liked the disingenuousness of it;  I liked the way it it somehow manages to bring irony and empathy and caustic humour together. I like the deadpan tone. And I genuinely had not known about the anagram.

Tom

If you only could have known,

looking out over Margate Sands

in the wake of your breakdown

and summoning The Waste Land’s

middle section, that the shelter

where you surveyed the wreckage

of washed-up humanity, and felt the

burning allure of unholy Carthage

still stands and, as if in allegiance

to your enduring fame,

now faces a public convenience

bearing an anagram of your name,

then there’d at least have been something

you could have connected with something

So, thank you Jack Faricy…for the poems, for the idea of writing as housekeeping, and for connecting all kinds of things with all kinds of things, and playing games with time, reminding me that