[First published in The Wider Web/Write Out Loud]

Last week I decided not to comment much on the poems Bob Beagrie shared with us; I wanted to them to be heard, and work on the reader, for their music, the texture of the language. I’m just hoping that it persuaded at least some of you to go back and listen to what they said, as well as the way they sounded, so that you could feel the surprise of recognition, say in the lovely image of the shape-shifting seals that

cheose a life apart in the sealtsæ-tides,

on the blæcecges o’ the woruld’s teahorducts.

or in the admission of the limits of language, and the erosions of language through time.

I stand, one hand on the cross, turning,

aiming names at horizon markers

knowing the words can’t reach them,

how the crow-wind strips them bare,

how history is deciphering our footprints.

The other thing I might have said is that when I think about ‘northwords’ and ‘northern poetry’, I have in mind a quality that I’ll call expansiveness. And also a relish in the textures and surfaces of things that are an essential quality of what Gerard Manley Hopkins called haeccitas. It’s this quality that I like so much in the poems of David Underwood. So, less argument this week; just the enjoyment of sharing poems.

David(www.davidunderdown.co.uk) has recently come to live in Hebden Bridge. Though a Mancunian by birth most of his life has been spent in the West of Scotland, latterly on the Isle of Arran where he is an organiser of the McLellan Poetry Competition which is how I first came to meet him. I can’t resist using this photo of me having the time of my life, having won the competition in 2015, and reading to a big room with the judge, Simon Armitage, in the audience, and David himself, just to my right. 

His two collections, both from Cinnamon, are Time Lines (2011) and, in 2019,  A Sense of North. David Constantine describes his poems as ‘watchful’: ‘he gives us a view from (in his own words) ‘a window / we did not know was there’, he makes ‘a halo round the ordinary’’. The Poetry Book Society said of A Sense of North:

 drawing on subjects as varied as Roman legionaries and a worn-out shirt, modern air travel and the imagined life of a lugworm, [it] searches for purpose and order in the human condition. A sense of wonder finds itself kindled in the small and familiar as much as the large and emotive. Whether pondering the fickleness of memory or the meaning of love and loss, this is poetry that asks what it means to be alive.

Time for the poems. I want to start with the poems of a particular sort of landscape and move towards the more interior and particular to illustrate the business of windows and of haloes round the ordinary. We start in wild places, and the relished names of bothies. Note that you would see the Quirang from the Craig Bothy…and then the poem ranges like an airborne camera across the Highlands

Bothy Lands

Peanmeanach, Leacraithnaich,

Strathchailleach, Staoineag, Craig . . .

Across the firth the Quiraing’s jigsaw fret

is topped again by April snows

just as when families arrived

All over now: moors marching back 

to claim their Homes for Heroes.

from scoured shingle, lousewort and broomrape

clinging on. For fear of falling masonry

the house is closed with health and safety tape.

Out in the Minch the famished gannets gorge on plastic 

line their guts with shreds of carrier bags.

Inland, stacked beach-high behind the tide lines,

cartons, a lube oil drum among the yellow flags.

The bridge has gone – a lone Lands Ender

heading South was almost drowned – 

but though the talk’s of open access

all futures now are settled on The Mound – 

glens bright with plans,

bankers talking dirty down in Edinburgh

of how they’ll bring the salmon 

back to how they were.

Birders scan the empty shorelines

toting top Swarovski bins.

Sharks sieve thinning seas for plankton, 

thresh accusatory fins.

Peanmeanach, Leacraithnaich,

Strathchailleach, Staoineag, Craig . . .

I read this as a pibroch, a lament for dispossession, and for the despoiling of the earth. Bothies shelter storm-caught walkers, but they are invariably the abandoned houses of folk who could no longer be sustained by the land, or who were forcibly cleared from it. Homes Fit for Heroes indeed. Nothing can sentimentalise them. The moors are ‘marching back’, the masonry’s crumbling, the seas are choked with plastic and the birds and the fish are gone. What’s left is the roll-call of the Gaelic placenames from a time when the people who spoke them knew what they described. It’s a haunting angry poem that sticks in the mind and the heart.

The next one takes some chutzpah, to take on MacCaig on his chosen ground. Toad.Everyone’s favourite MacCaig poem, I imagine: 

Stop looking like a purse. How could a purse
Squeeze under the rickety door and sit,
Full of satisfaction in a man’s house?

Here’s David’s take on a similar experience:

Naked

You must have hopped in

while the door was ajar 

bringing with you a pattern 

from the spaces between

tall stems and stalks

the dark marsh grass

behind the shed.

Beneath the light I see

through your hopeless camouflage

the mad mosaic of browns

and greens, your landscape;

and when I bend and kneel –  

my eye almost the level of yours – 

your eye is an unwinking bead.

Among the upright legs of chairs

you pulse a gentler rhythm. 

Cupped in my palms

I encompass you.

We are surrounded by upholstery

and household equipment – 

the two of us, skin to skin.

Out in the marshy bit behind the shed

from my bare hands you slip 

naked into soft rain.

From underneath my hood

I look in vain amongst the grass

for where you’ve gone

and kneel, and feel the ground. 

There’s so much to like about this, starting with the title that sets up the expectation of both intimacy and vulnerabilty. I like the shifts of perspective, too, from outside to inside to outside again and the ambiguity of spaces between. It’s an expansive word, space, and a relative one two. I like the way the space perceived by the toad is utterly different from that perceived by the human. There’s a moment that draws you in..that observation of how the the toad brings into the angular spaces of the house a camouflage that abruptly ceases to work. There’s the tenderness of the connections of touch and also of eye contact, and the abrupt sense of loss when he returns the toad from that moment of intimacy into the world in which it vanishes, quite; you share the poets wondering if it was ever there at all. Brilliant. MacCaig comes to mind again

A jewel in your head? Toad,
You’ve put one in mine,
A tiny radiance in a dark place.

A similar sense of intimacy, the trope of ‘handling’, and a kind of wonder fills this next poem, that begins with a question.

Charlotte Brontë’s Boots

Your choosing them: what took your fancy 

must have been the compact chiseled toes

capped by black leather, soft

as human skin might be.

No Vibram, no Goretex, no inner sole.

You could never walk roughshod in these

over your reverend father, over Branwell, 

over your dead sisters,

yet here they are, left and right,

under glass now. In fine or inclement weather

each morning you would lace them tight

to go about the business of your day.

More here than fabric and the skin of animals.

The same fingers held these as held the pen 

in that room upstairs, the one where Jane 

and Bessie Lee and Rochester were born.

Brown, patterned like Laura Ashley

and tiny, more like gloves than boots,

they must have encased your feet,

your boniness, white beneath your stockings.

Who warmed them, those feet of yours,

sore and cold from moors and rough cobbles?

Who would you trust to feel the space 

between each toe, or hold that instep in their hand?

I think it’s the final stanza that lifts this poem beyond what many of us may have written, as it shifts from a speculation about the world of a famous writer and her boots to something more important..her feet inside them, and the imagined vulnerabilty of the wearer. Tenderness. There’s not enough of it in the world. 

I thought I’d finish with a poem that segues nicely from one garment to another.

My Favourite Shirt

After all this time my favourite shirt

the one I never have to think about

or wonder if it’s right, has gone, 

worn out, a tear across its back

where countless times I’ve tucked it in. 

And now I look more closely

the collar’s frayed. Cuffs too.

In places it’s so thin it is diaphanous.

When did this occur? When

was the first time someone might have looked

and idly thought: ‘Bit shabby’?

I wonder how it is that we lose grace.

It doesn’t happen suddenly

though that is how you notice it, 

the thinning of the lips, the brightness gone

from this person who remains your friend.

It doesn’t need a commentary, does it? Except to observe how it’s lifted from what might feel predictable by one startling line: I wonder how it is that we lose grace. That phrase ‘I wonder’ is what lies at the heart of so much of David’s poetry. What do I mean by ‘wonder’? I think it’s what one critic wrote (my rueful apologies..I can’t locate the source) :resonance, aliveness, enthusiasm —attained through very close observation which manifests as care and love for such varied aspects of the world.

Thank you, David Underdown for being our guest and sharing your poems. For me, it’s been a labour of love.

 

[Originally posted on The Wider Web on the Write Out Loud site . June 2nd]

I like to toy with a notion that I came across years ago. I don’t know the source. I have a suspicion it could have been David Crystal; basically, it’s that if the accidents of history had taken a different shape, the governance of England could have set up its home in the north. York, say, or Durham. Great cultural and religious centres. What would have followed would have been that the language and accent of the ruling classes would have been northern. I think it’s a lovely idea. I remember that the decision to let  Wifred Pickles , a Halifax man, read the news during the war brought down a torrent of criticism. What’s remarkable is that when you listen to archive tape, he sounds remarkably RP. 

Whatever. This post will be about a northern poet and about what I’m going to call northwords. Bear with me. 

It seems to me that all the poets I originally gravitated towards, and whose books I bought were ‘northern’. Or, at the least, not metropolitan. When they weren’t self-evidently ‘northern’ they were ‘regional’; they came with distinct voices that could not be described as RP, and would lose something important if they were read in RP…and I guess that what they would lose would be music, rhythm, texture. I’ve shared the idea with other writers that this poetry was somehow more ‘committed’, less inclined to be ironic, more inclined to wear its heart on its sleeve. I know it’s teetering on the edge of a generalising sentimentality, but I’m trying hard to be honest, to nail some kind of felt truth. One of my northern poet friends opined that ‘metropolitan’ poetry was ‘too cool for school’, that it prided itself in its avoidance of a felt emotional engagement. I don’t know if that’s accurate or fair. But something about it resonates enough for me to want to try to pin down that elusive idea of ‘north’ and ‘northernness’. 

Let’s start with ‘accent’, and (predictably) with a quotation from Tony Harrison’s ‘Them and Uz’. 

“All poetry (even Cockney Keats?) you see 

‘s been dubbed by [ɅS] into RP, 

Received Pronunciation please believe [ɅS] 

your speech is in the hands of the Receivers” 

Harrison spoke for tens of thousands of us who, in the 50’s, were harried for our accents in the Grammar Schools we sat scholarships to get into. It goes deeper than accent…which we can train ourselves to change. It springs from lexis, the words themselves, their resonance, their heft and texture. All the Old English, Germanic, Scandinavian words. 

*Words for where we are and where we might go: north, south, east west; here, there and everywhere; this, that and the other. 

*Words of house and home: gate, door, window (which is a wind-eye); roof, wall, and also fire and hearth (but not chimney, which is French) 

*Words of kinship: folk, father, mother, brother, sister, daughter and son, and child and children 

*Words for the earth: what we make of it-plough, sow,and seed and till- and where we come from and where we go: clay, and dust. Rocks and minerals and what we make with them: iron and gold, swords and ploughs, and hammers. Also, for the times and seasons of the earth: day, night, summer, winter, spring; its weathers, its sun, cold, rain, wind;  and for the trees and flowers that grow from the earth…rowan, birch, holly, oak, alder, thorn, beech; the names of the landscapes they grow in…moors and fells, dales and denes, dens and cloughs, leas and thwaites, all of which make the names of places where we live. 

*Words for the seas: water, wave, froth and foam, wharf and staithe (also the boats and ships) 

*Words for the textures of things: rough/smooth; hot/cold; wet/dry 

If we grow up with these words, we grow up with their texture and music. When people tell me they recognise my ‘voice’ it must be partly to do with the accent and dialects of the West Riding. Along the way, I picked up Northumbrian inflexions, and some persist, the way the stress might fall differently, the rising inflexion at the end of a sentence. Lexis, syntax, accent; they go deeper than we know. Which is why I’m attracted to the poets whose ‘voice’ is not RP, and especially to those who deliberately celebrate the roots of their language. Ian Duhig is one, and so is Steve Ely. Irish poets can’t help it. 

All of which brings us to our guest, Bob Beagrie. I’ve seen Bob perform his work two or three times at Square Chapel in Halifax. “Perform” is the idea you should hang on to. His work is firmly and deliberately rooted in belief that poetry is primarily oral, and it’s also in his attachment to the roots of the English, pre-Norman English. Like Steve Ely, he’s entirely comfortable with the idea of blending this old English with his own 21^st C language. At first sight it will puzzle…but sight isn’t the way in. Reading aloud is. A bit more of this later. First, let’s meet him. 

Bob Beagrie has published nine full collections of poetry and several pamphlets, most recently Leasungspell (Smokestack 2016) Nobody (Hunting Raven 2017), This Game of Strangers – written with Jane Burn (Wyrd Harvest Press2017) and Remnants written with Jane Burn (Knives Forks & Spoons Press (2019). . His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines and has been translated into Finnish, Urdu, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Spanish, Estonian and Karelian. He is co-director of Ek Zuban Press & Literature Development and a founding member of the experimental spoken word and music collective Project Lono. He has worked as a writer in schools and community settings for twenty years and has held residencies at The Dylan Thomas Centre, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, The Hartlepool Headland, Crisis Skylight, The James Cook Birthplace Museum. He lives in Middlesbrough and is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Teesside University. Now, over to him: 

“Thanks for inviting me to contribute (he’s sent four poems and explains that:) the first two are extracts from the first part of Leasungspell which was published by Smokestack in 2016. The book recounts the journey of an Anglo Saxon monk walking from the monastery on the Hartlepool Headland to Whitby in 657 AD, carrying secret correspondence from St Hild. The monk, Oswin, grew up a pagan and was converted to Christianity after his family was slaughtered by Mercian raiders and after having lived as a wild hermit for a time. As he treks across the wild landscape of the Tees Estuary, animated by God’s light and the old earth spirits, he describes the things he encounters and tells the story of how he became a monk, and how the Princess Aelfleda arrived at the monastery. Due to there being not enough surviving vocabulary from 7^th Century Northumbrian the text is a creative hybrid of Old English, Modern English, Yorkshire, Northumbrian and Cleveland dialects.” 

 I decided to put the poems in a sequence that will take you from 8thC English to the recognisably modern, so you can see how rooted we are. Before you start, if it’s new to you, you may  be as puzzled as I was at university when I was first set to read Beowulf. The thing was, no one told me to read it aloud, and to realise that I would actually hear words I was familiar with. There are two unfamiliar graphemes ð and þ. Anglo-Saxon text distinguished between two th sounds:  soft (as in think) and harder, (as in though). Think of Riddley Walker. You want to get the sound in your head, and the rhythm comes with it. Or you can listen to it first and then read it aloud yourself. It’ll be a labour of love. Here’s your link 

Oh, and here’s another thing. I know people who resist the fantastic,the magical, and these poems have a magical field as well as a history. Robert Macfarlane addresses this scientific/rational resistance to ‘magic’ when he writes, in Landmarks  about the provenance of a language he calls Childish.  

“To young children…nature is full of doors…what we bloodlessly call place is to young children…dream, spell and substance: place is somewhere they are always in, never on…the best children’s literature understands this differeent order of affordance.” 

 I think this is what fed into a poem I wrote about ‘true naming’  

    you need one to be sent on a quest / through silent forests, stony wastes, 

   to a bony church and a hillside that opens 

   to a way that he’ll walk through all the ages, / to come dumb and dazzled to the seashore 

I guess I’m comfortable/at home on the shores of the North East coast, and with the way in places like Whitby, or Dunstanburgh the perceived barriers between the past and the present grow thin.  We’ll start with one such shore in Leasungspell. where shapehifting grey seals sunbathe on tide-smoothed rocks. 

Adríeme on the sands o’ wendan watterwegs 

græ seolhs sunne-bathe, idel, gelic tide-smeðian roccs, 

an’ hu thie honc, hu thie beorc te æn anoðer, 

wisccars abristel, col eyes átrendle hwenne æfer thie 

finde mi passen, an’ i wundor hwæt dríemes floe  

ynneside thor flod-dog sculls. Sum sæy sum seolhs 

are nae triewe seolhs at ealle but schyftars hwo hæfd clæþd 

‘emsylfes in fur, cheosan te dwell healf thor lifes 

as déor that dyf thruh ísceald bryne an’ iegstréam watters,  

gnagan reaw fisc an’ hlæhh at gods an’ mancynn;  

þouh þese be but léasspell for gowks an’ bearns. 

Raðer, i recon thie wær ænes beons wið sāwls 

hwo befeall sum gréate bane or bliht o’ hearm  an’ syððan lifian  wiðin The Glōm for so lang  

wiðoot sumyan te stier ‘em fram that trod,  

hwo hæf forgietan thor lincs te mancynn 

an’ cheose a life apart in the sealt sæ-tides, 

on the blæc ecges o’ the woruld’s teahor ducts. 

                              …………………………………………………………………………  The mann i sloh in Rheged hæfd oft huntede mi breost-hord 

for alþouh we boþ feaht bealdlic wið spere an’ scield  

for wiðercynings he wæs nae mi triewe foeman. i ken nae  

his name, nawþer wyrre-cræft macod me sigoriend  

an’ him woruld-deað, but raðer luc, God oþþe wyrd;  

an’ slippian te soden grund wið a blodie gasc mi spere  

hæfd oppened in his cræg i seo mesen thruh his deað-mist,  

feolt a wearme wyllspring o’ mynd-floe o’ heah,  

ruggig beorgas, steap wudu an’ scieldtrum dælls 

spillan inti his inborn eorð, an’ ænlic þænne de i see hu  

we ealle, as blostm o’ eorð, berst oþþe rot te gan ham. 

So that thruh his deað i fund a paþ te faðfylness 

for hwylc i hæfd oft gifen þancs un te him 

an’ prayed he beon Heofon wið the Cyning o’ Cynings. 

I’m willing to bet you found you fell into the rhythm, reading more quickly, until you were fluent  

‘through his death I found a path to faithfulness for which I have oft given                                                                       thanks unto him …..the King of Kings’ 

You might want to say: Well why not write it like that?  To which I’d say: would you have paid the same kind of attention? I’ll leave that question there. Here’s Bob again: 

  “The next poem, ‘Remnants’ is the title poem from the new collection that has just come out from Knives Forks & Spoons Press which I wrote with Jane Burn. It is a futuristic sequence of post-apocalyptic dream visions based on the notion of a small tribal community struggling to survive after the next Great Flood.” 

(I’ve mentioned Riddley Walker earlier…Russell Hoban’s wonderful post-apocalytic tale that’s written in what seems to be an invented dialect. Remnants is its blood brother (or as Riddley would say, moonbrother). The clue to reading it is the same as it is with Hoban’s story. Read it aloud. Think of a Northumbrian accent.) 

                   Remnants 

The Old Man ysed t’ tac us oot onte the skerries 
snot-slippy n’ green at doon-tide n’ lathered  

wi’ flies that foggled awer feet as we padded  

leery over the wyrm-stems o’ knotted kelp 
te peer inte them rock pools, picking winkles, 
ousting stones te latch them scuttling crabs; 

the sea rose n’ fell aboot us, baring n’ covering 

the boles o’ a petrified forest, the limpited ridge-tiles  

of a once thrifty B & B called Neptune View,  

the washed-oot bingo hall wi’ its drunk bandits 

the barnacled spire of an ainchent kirk where  

the One God once drooned. ‘Hlisten!’ he’d sush us, 
‘Sumetymes ye can harcen the kirk bells still  

ringing undra the waves, calling all the Mer.’ 

 
At niyht I’d wayke, thinkin I’d heard ‘em, 
te pry over ower stockade o’ scrap cars n’ cawld stores 
across the flooden playn n’ wunder if the Mer 
we’re gatherin’ te march fro the deep watters 
bringing the cawld furie o’ the Drooned God  
upon the remnants o’ the bairns o’ men. 

  
Efrey morning, for me learnings, the Old Man  

had me recite the songs n’ psalms the Olders sang  

onboard ship throughoot thor Greet Floating: 
      The Rhapsody o’ the Hrafen’s Skull 
      The Ballad o’ the Boar’s Tusc 
      The Hymn o’ the Stag’s Heart 
      The Canticle o’ the Whale’s Lung. 

I love the way the poem conflates elements of a contemporarary present (the B&B, the bingo hall) with a timeless landscape of sea meeting land, and a past that exists in the ryhthms of Tyndale’s Bible, in order to create a vision of the future.  

The final poem is taken from Civil Insolvencies which will be published by Smokestack in October 2019. The language is now firmly, it seems, in the 21stC . But I hope that now you also hear where it came from, where its roots lie 

Chiromancy 

“The great Sage as high as Heaven visited here” 

      Wu Cheng’en: Journey to the West 1592 

High staggered moorland crossroads 
too few trees, the big wide sky 
fresh roadkill and opportunist crows 
turning turning turning turning, 
The Roda Cross by the roadside 
scattered offerings in the grass 
Hogtenberg’s summit beyond Westerdale 
Crouched friars, Rosedale Abbey, Cockayne Ridge 
Roundhead recruits resting sore shanks, 
tarmac’s scrape and sweep through crimples: 

Life line, Fate line, Heart line, Sun line. 

The cross’s shadow pointing arrow straight 
at Boulby Mine, turbines and the sea 
turning turning turning turning, 
sheep picking paths through cropped heather, 
fleeces marked with red or blue splodges, 
lichen forests spreading over dry stone walls. 

I stand, one hand on the cross, turning, 

aiming names at horizon markers 

knowing the words can’t reach them, 

how the crow-wind strips them bare, 

how history is deciphering our footprints. 

( here are two more links to performances of the last two poems. We really spoil you on The Wider Web) 

Bob Beagrie, it’s been a pleasure to put this post together. You’ve been phenomenally generous. The last word is yours:  

“The collection I wrote with Andy Willoughby ‘Sampo: Heading Further North’ which is inspired by the National Finnish Epic ‘Kalevala’ was published in three languages in three different countries during 2015. I consider myself a European poet and think that poetry, and creativity in general, can act as a bridge that is able to span cultural and linguistic boundaries. The act of translation is a process of reaching out, a tentative grasping of potential meanings to be carefully examined and carried back into one’s own language, and enrich it. This process seems more important than ever given the rise of xenophobia and right wing ideologies over the past few years.” 

To which we can only say ‘Amen’