While I’ve been off the airwaves, I’ve been tinkering about with the unwieldy archive that this website’s turned into since 2014.

Lost images

A lot of the earlier posts have lost some of their images….and I’ve not been able to replace some of them. It’s ridiculously time-consuming and is likely to take much longer than anticipated, so I’ll plod on with it piecemeal, rather than waiting until the whole thing is updated.

Deadweights

Lots of the posts have become time-expired, tired, irrelevant…or maybe were not very interesting in the first place. Quite a few were duplicates. I can’t quite figure out why. Anyway, I’ve gone through as unsentimentally as possible, and deleted 200+ posts. I quite enjoyed that.

Guest poets

It also struck me that I’ve had scores of talented poets as guests on the Cobweb, but there was no quick way of finding out who they were, or when they appeared. It took along time, but I’ve now created an alphabetic index. I can’t understand why I didn’t do this from the very beginning.

My poems

I noticed that, for reasons that escape me, I’d started a page called ‘Poems’ (or My Poems). For the life of me I can’t see why, so I’ve dumped it and replaced it with an ego-trippy page called My Landmark Poems. I chose six that seemed to me to be the most significant, poems that became game-changers.

Menu

The design of the cobweb has bothered me for some time. A lot of poetry blogs are really elegantly usable. I’m going to stick with the one I’ve used since I started, but just point out that the door to all the different pages is the menu. So why not pop in and have look round.

Click on the Menu and up pop the pages

……or my Landmark poems…..and so on

With a following wind I hope to be shortly writing new posts and sharing my enthusiasm for guest poets.

Fingers crossed.

Thirty years ago today, our son David, took his own life. He’d be 51 today, if he’d lived, our lovely boy.

I’m reposting this blog from 2019 in his memory, and for all the other troubled children.



1992. Only a few weeks after his twenty-first birthday, our son David died in a fall from the top floor of a high-rise block of flats behind the Merrion Centre in Leeds. I  see it from the motorway every time I drive to Leeds .

Suicide prevention remains a universal challenge. Every year, suicide is among the top 20 leading causes of death globally for people of all ages. It is responsible for over 800,000 deaths, which equates to one suicide every 40 seconds.

Every life lost represents someone’s partner, child, parent, friend or colleague. For each suicide approximately 135 people suffer intense grief or are otherwise affected. This amounts to 108 million people per year who are profoundly impacted by suicidal behaviour. Suicidal behaviour includes suicide, and also encompases suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. For every suicide, 25 people make a suicide attempt and many more have serious thoughts of suicide.

September 10^thwas World Suicide Prevention day. Anything anyone can do to raise awareness of the waste of life and the damage it does to friends and families, and to teach us how we can better look out for and look after those we love is timely.

For over twenty years I’ve wondered if I should have seen anything that would have told me how desperate our 21 year old son was when he took his own life. The sense that I bear a responsibilty for it will never leave me, or his mother, his sister, his brothers. All I can do is share the story. 

Just over five years ago, two people I love found their son dead in their living room. He was about the same age as mine was when he killed himself. I remember I wrote to them and said something like: people will tell you they can imagine what you’re going through. They are wrong. More thoughtful people will tell you they can’t imagine what you’re going through. They are nearly right. The fact is, you can’t imagine what you’re going through.

Three good friends of mine, all the same age as me or thereabouts, have died in the last 18 months. Two, apparently fighting fit and well, died of sudden catastrophic heart attacks. One died after a long and painful illness. We grieve for them, but we understand our grief. Their deaths are sad, they diminish us, but we understand this natural process. It doesn’t accuse us. But when someone you love takes his own life, when it comes without warning, it’s inexplicable, bewildering, devastating. It makes no sense. The world makes no sense. You are made helpless with guilt; you believe you are to blame, that you could have prevented it if only…..

This happens to tens of thousands of people every year. The statistics are terrifying. The websites you can visit will tell you:

Suicide is the single biggest killer of men aged under 45 in the UK. In 2015, 75% of all UK suicides were male.

Men and boys are often more vulnerable to taking their own lives because:

• They feel a pressure to be a winner and can more easily feel like the opposite.
• They feel a pressure to look strong and feel ashamed of showing any signs of weakness.
• They feel a pressure to appear in control of themselves and their lives at all times.

Most suicidal people don’t actually want to die, they just want to remove themselves from an unbearable situation, and for the pain to stop.

There’s a lot of support and advice available for people who are worried that someone they know may be a suicide risk. Advice like this:

So how will you know? 

You ask. It sounds scary, but the best thing to do is talk about it.

Saying something is safer than saying nothing. Trust your gut and start the conversation

What to say

Not too much. Above all, LISTEN

For me, and for my family, it was all too late. Because we had no idea, because there was no warning sign we could pick up on. There was just the immutable fact that our David had killed himself. We are tight as a family, we comforted each other, but we go on living with the bewilderment and loss and overwhelming guilt. It never quite goes away. So I’ll dedicate this post to all the families who have lost a child, a sibling, a parent, a partner to suicide, and I’ll talk about the long long process of finding the serenity to accept what cannot be changed. I’ll tell you our David’s story.

Two of my five children were adopted, and our David was one of them. Against all the rules, we met his birth mother, who would have been no more than eighteen. She wanted a say in who would adopt him, and a wise social worker thought she had that right. That young girl trusted him to to a couple not that much older than her. She will be in her sixties, now.

It’s a complicated story, but the core of it is that we were at yet another stage of the usually ponderous adoption process, which suddenly accelerated quite wonderfully and frighteningly, and we found ourselves sitting in the small living room of a foster-mum, and our David, who wasn’t yet Our David, four months old and surrounded by love, was having his bath. He wasn’t called David, either. He was Conrad Hamilton Gervaise Irving (no surname), and just Conrad, for convenience. When you adopt a child you’re not supposed to keep his or her given names. Since the truth is that the amazing and enlightened social worker short-circuited every due process that evening, and that we drove home up the M1 with Our David in a carry-cot on the backseat of a Ford Anglia, it didn’t seem so transgressive to keep Conrad as his middle name. David Conrad Foggin.

This much
I remember:
the small neat creases, the crook of each elbow,
the crook of each knee, the soft place
between your neck and your shoulder,
and the tight whorls of dark hair
tattooing your skull, and the delight,
the wide pink of your open mouth
as you came shedding light and bright water
out of your bath, how you sank
in the fleece of a fat white towel,
and you lay on your back on her knee
and you danced,
how you pedalled and trod on the air,
and how pale the soles of your feet.
You were mangoes, grapes, you were apricots,
all your round warm limbs, your eyes.
How your name made you smile;
how we said it over and over, your name;
how we wanted to make that smile.
And I remember
how we would take you away,
and why your name could not come,
why we must leave it behind,
and how we feared for your smile.

When his face would cloud over, or when he seemed to turn inwards (as happens with all your children) it troubled us. And then it would be OK, and we’d forget.

Later, when he was nine or ten years old, he drew endlessly; meticulous battle scenes, some times on rolls of lining paper, so they stretched out like eclectic Bayeaux tapestries. I wrote a poem about them, years ago, and keep revisiting it, and rewriting it.

Our David’s Pictures

In tracing the anatomy of war

our david’s concentration’s absolute.

He kneels in peace, head bowed. An acolyte.

His pictures conjure tiny armies on the floor.



All history’s invited to this fight:

Martello tower, pele, and launching pad,

heaps of Roman, Norman, Saxon, Panzer dead.

Drawn up, his minute cohorts. Black and white.



Each man’s accoutred – breastplate, chainmail, greaves.

Crusaders squint down Gatling sights,

or brandish spears with blades as big as axes,

and quivers jammed with arrows, bunched in sheaves.



Every shield’s a wicked chevron

or a bossed and studded disc;

the sky is bristling with a stiff cheval de frise

of arrows and everyman’s vulnerable, at risk.



There’s Agincourts of arrows, flight on flight.

The sky’s cross-hatched, and somedays almost black.

The sun’s crossed out. Eclipsed. Our David’s arrows –

they fly miles, out of day and into night,



they shift the whole perspective. What is it

he celebrates? Pattern? Power?

The living or the dead. I’ll never know,

his last bow drawn, and loosed, an age ago.



I wrote this when he was still alive, puzzled and perhaps mildly worried about the obsessive quality of the drawings. But mainly delighted. When he died, I changed the ending, and it was read at his funeral. We had a Bob Marley track in the service. Stop that train. It was an extraordinary service. There were dozens and dozens of young people who I’d never seen before, who I didn’t know, but who had clearly loved our David. For some reason he either never knew, or if he knew, he didn’t believe it.

It was a long time between being told of his death and his funeral. My wife and I had separated seven years earlier. We weren’t asked identify his body and I was too numb to wonder why I wasn’t notified of the inquest, and I was too numb to protest. The morning the police told my ex-wife of a death behind the Merrion Centre, the morning she drove from Leeds to tell me, the morning we went to the police station in Chapeltown was the morning I started to learn about the lovely boy I realised I didn’t really know. That he’d been smoking dope, that this may have triggered a suspected schizophrenia, that some time earlier he’d served a short prison sentence for a trivial non-violent offence, that he was being looked after by NACOS, that he was training as a painter and decorator (like his great-granddad). I know I could have known all this, and I should have, but I was too busy, too tied up with a new job, a new relationship, and deep down, because I was scared to ask. Most of those young folk at the funeral were young offenders on schemes like the one our David was apparently enjoying. Nothing made sense.

It was a morning like this

a Sunday morning. The sun shone.

It was July. It was a morning like this,

your ex-wife at the back door,

and why would she tell you

your son was dead, or had died,

or had been in an accident

on a morning like this still

not fully woken, a morning of sun

to drive into Chapeltown to drive

to a police station that’s called

The Old Police Station now, that’s

a bijou gastropub but then was just

a police station full of Sunday morning

sadness, and a morning something

like this and two young coppers

who thought we’d need somewhere

quiet at the back which turned out

to smell of smoke, that had a pool table

and coffee rings, and no-one knew

how to start or what to ask but

it was a morning much like this

they asked if we knew a tower block

behind the Merrion Centre or if

we had a connection to a tower block

and a ring with a skull and a brown

leather case and did we know if

our son had friends in a tower block

behind the Merrion Centre and

we might as well have been asked

about tree rings or chaos theory

or fractals on a July morning and

one young copper saying that

he didn’t think it made sense

for cannabis to be illegal and

what harm did it do really and

how it wasted everybody’s time

and I don’t know why I’d remember

that except it was a morning like this

I learned what waste might mean.

A couple of weeks after David’s funeral my good friend Bob Hogarth, the Art Adviser said: why don’t you do a painting of him? Why don’t you paint his life? I set out on a collage of maps of the city, photographs of his childhood, images of a small attache case and a strange ugly ring that he’d left on the top floor of that block of flats behind the Merrion Centre, an old atlas open at a map of Africa. Buddleia. Hydrangeas. I worked on it for a week or so. And then stopped. Just a layer of collage and thinned down acrylics. Every couple of years I’ll have a look at it, and resolve to finish it. But I don’t think I want to. I suspect I understand why. It took a long time…more than twenty years…to find out that for me the answer lay in writing. Maybe it started with a friend of a friend buying me Jackie Kay’s Adoption Papers, and then started again with being told about Carrie Etter’s Imagined Sons. 

It started with rediscovering Greek myths, and particularly the story of Icarus. It was discovering, through the process of retelling the story, that the character no one pays enough attention to is Daedalus, or points out that if Daedalus had used his amazing gifts well, he would never have needed to build a labyrinth, would not have given away its secret, would not have been imprisoned in a tower with his son, would never have needed to conceive of making wings. I understood, through this that if you make wings for your children, it’s not enough to just watch them fly. Whether they fly into the sun or the heart of darkness, if they fall, then are you responsible, and how will you live with that.

Tony Harrison wrote that in the silence that surrounds all poetry

‘articulation is the tongue-tied’s fighting’  .

I believe articulation is healing, a way to atonement and to being able to forgive yourself. The serenity to accept the things you cannot change. Articulation can be confessional, too. You can’t change the past; ‘what ifs’ and ‘if onlys’ simply make you spiritually ill. We know this, rationally, consciously, but living by it needs help. Two poets have given me that help. Clare Shaw’s credo “I do not believe in silence” and her unwavering frank gaze at her history of self-harm, and psychological disturbance gave me courage. As did Kim Moore’s decision to use poetry to deal with her experience of domestic abuse. And, finally, one moment in a writing class that Kim was running that somehow unlocked suppressed and unarticulated belief, guilt, knowledge. I remember I wept silently all the time I was writing. It only lasted five minutes, that task. But an insight, an acknowledgement takes only a moment no matter how long the process that leads up to it. This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine says Prospero at the end. I think I understand the release he must have felt in that split second.

A weak force

there’s sometimes a loss you can’t imagine;

the lives never lived by your children, or

by the one who simply stopped

in the time it takes

to fall to the ground

from the top of a tower block.



They say gravity is a weak force.

I say the moon will tug 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;

motorway 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 you sank like the sun.



I count myself lucky. Lucky to have had our son for 21 years. Lucky to have learned to live with the loss of him and to have learned how to make amends to myself and to his memory. Lucky to be able to articulate it.

A year ago we we were told we now have a Minister for Suicide. She has no budget, no staff, no office, no brief.  A disproportionate number of young men and women will take their own lives in the coming year. Some of them will have been made desperate by being stripped of benefits, being made homeless; some will have been denied the recognition and appropriate treatment they desperately need for their mental health issues. Whatever their circumstances, there will be parents, siblings, partners, children, friends who will be numb, full of unassuageable guilt. There is loss no one can imagine.

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Dylan Thomas’ Do not go gentle into that good night has bothered me for many years.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

It bothered me more when, in my 30s I sat with my dying father. All my dad wanted in his last days was release from pain. Imagine the sheer tone-deaf selfishness of that injunction in his ears. All I can hear is a young man’s impotent rage against the loss of his father. It makes me wonder about rage and poetry. Among other things.

It has been a quiet week here in Ossett, mainly because my wife, Flo, and then me, tested positive for Covid after two years and more of shielding, self-isolating, masking, handwashing, disinfecting and the avoidance of social gatherings. It’s made each of us alternately angry/depressed/philosophical/rueful…but mainly miserable and pissed -off. It doesn’t help that I’m increasingly prone to bouts of what I can only describe as rage-born-of-frustration. It sort of helps to know you’re not alone. 

The poet Jo Bell’s given me permission to use this Facebook post; when I read it it chimed immediately:

“You all know this already, and this is a classic case of me speaking to my own bubble. I’m almost weeping with anger after hearing a government PR man on the Today programme, blithely pretending that Johnson knew nothing about a party – a party at which he [the PR man] exhorted people in writing to ‘not wave bottles around in front of the camera’ and later crowed that ‘we got away with it.’ The man also repeatedly made the point that Downing Street staff were ‘working very hard’. I don’t doubt it. But we all remember the pictures of NHS staff who were working on the frontline for 12 or 16 hours a day and sleeping in corridors, and quarantining their own families at home for months on end. Many of us, of course, couldn’t work very hard, and spent our way through our savings, because our lifetime’s work disappeared as the people around us kept to the rules, for the good of our neighbours and strangers.

A Ministry of Justice cleaner, Emmanuel Gomez, contracted Covid and died – possibly from the people around him. They were boldly flouting the rules that they themselves had put in place – and which we were all following at the expense of our own working and domestic lives, to keep each other safe. The level of explicit lying and doublespeak perpetrated by this government are gobsmacking. I didn’t get this man’s name, but I hope he goes home and bangs his head against the table in shame.”

Almost weeping with anger. 

Exactly. It’s the anger, the rage, that makes you incoherent and impotent. At worst it makes you lash out. I’ve shouted at a bunch of Tory canvassers who knocked on my door (we’re in the middle of a bye-election here in Wakefield); I wanted to be cold and calm and and take them to them to bits while clearly maintaining a moral superiority. But I lost it. I could not handle a bunch of smug fools telling me self-evident bare-faced lies. I was impotent.

A couple of days ago, Flo and I spent a period of 26 hours trying to deal with the NHS 111 hotline that I was told, in an NHS letter, to use in the event of a positive Covid Test…because I would be eligible for anti-viral drugs. 

It’s hard to describe the experience. Kafkaesque is a cliché but it’s as near as I can get. It involves long periods on hold, followed by being asked to spell out the reason for the call, followed by a lengthy questionnaire and then being put on hold while we arrange to put you in contact with a clinician. The same process is then repeated several times. There is apparently no way of maintaining an on-going record of the sequence of phone calls, so you constantly go back to the start and on no account do you collect £200. After a bit you simply stop trying. But in the morning your phone tells you NHS 111 rang you at 1.23am and at 3.27am….. Later you are rung by an actual pharmacist, you are put on hold, you lose the line. They ring you back. Eventually a doctor in our local hospital rings. He is appalled to be told about the process. He is a nice man, and tells us he sees no real need for me to try the anti-viral drugs. The only reason I rang in the first place was because a letter told me I should.

Why didn’t I ring my surgery and the doctor who know my case inside out? Because it’s a Jubilee and the surgery is closed for four days.

In other news (ironically) footage of our egregious PM being booed on the steps of St Paul’s is edited out of the footage by our public service broadcaster, and our Culture Secretary is in denial. Again. I’m almost constantly angry and it does no good. The Serenity Prayer in under enormous stress.  But after all, this is a poetry blog. Facebook and Twitter are the places for ranting into the void . If you want that done well, then follow (as I do) Another angry voice, and  I see you.

So, I’ve been brooding on the difficult relationship between art and anger. We’re taught to be comfy with notions of emotion recollected in tranquillity, or that beauty is truth and that’s all you need to know. Songwriters and singers can develop a creative partnership with anger (think Early Dylan) and arguably even with rage (think Sex Pistols).

I have a feeling that angry political poetry gets sidelined these days. Tony Harrison was villified for it by the ‘popular’ press. I’m thinking of “V”, particularly, but also his Gulf War poems. I’ve no doubt that lots of readers will help me out, but I can’t readily think of ‘angry’ poets or ‘angry’ poems outside the performance/stand-up circuit. And it makes me smile awkwardly to see how John Lydon and John Cooper Clark got assimilated into the ‘eccentric lovable national treasures corner’. 

The only thing I’m sure about is the ways in which, one way or another, I seem to have shaped some of my own anger into poems…or poetry. What follows will be a bit scattershot. Forgive me…I’m still dealing with Covid, which is debilitating and annoying.

Let’s start with Lear.. Here he is about to storm out of his daughter’s castle and into a transformative storm.

I will have such revenges on you both 
That all the world shall – I will do such things – 
What they are yet I know not, but they shall be 
The terrors of the Earth! ….

                                        O Fool, I shall go mad!

I’ve always thought this a wonderful gift to an actor,  the character inarticulate with impotent rage, the fractured phrases, the dashes that invite you to consider how the actor will inhabit those spaces. He’s flailing for language and it wont come. Grrrrrrrrrrrr….. And shortly after he does go mad, and what’s rather wonderful and terrible is that he comes out the other side in what sounds like lucidity. It’s verse that never puts a foot wrong. Because the mad Lear is in control of this anger

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! …………………..

Rage makes you incoherent. Articulation is the tongue-tied’s fighting. The gift is to find the right channel. I thought I’d cool my head and calm myself down by reflecting on the the rage I feel about the apparently untouchable sense of entitlement that characterises the last ten years of the contemporary Tory Party in power, and then how more or less by accident, I found a way of channelling it. The answer for me lay in the Greek Myths, the stories of the Greek pantheon, and particularly the version created by Garfield and Blishen in The God beneath the Sea. 

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Olympus is in the hands of arrogant and empathy-free public school bullies with supernatural powers. I came to think of Zeus (who crucifies Prometheus, the maker of humankind) as a divine psychopathic gangster:

Violent and vulgar as the Krays 

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.

(True Stories:  Larach. [Ward Wood 2014]

There was a one conduit for the anger, and another in the persona of Apollo. Serial rapist and torturer of Marsyas the Satyr. It was Tony Harrison who taught me about Marsyas, via The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus which I saw at Salts Mill, performed by Northern Broadsides, 30 years ago. The anger at the silencing/muting of the working class that Harrison channels in The school of Eloquence erupts in this play that spins around the death of the satyr who has the temerity to surpass Apollo in a contest of musicianship. Some of the rage I felt at Cameron’s contempt for Jeremy Corbyn (wear a suit/stand up staright/sing the National Anthem) was given a shape, I realise, by what Harrison taught me.

Autodidact Marsyas, face to face                                                 

with god. Between us, flensers,                                                           

their knives along his wincing flesh.

Abject, in a loose wet skirt of his own skin: 

this satyr’s all that my sealed eyes can see.                                                         

A scream that occupies all silences                                                                                

all I can hear

(Apollo wishes to atone.. Outlaws and Fallen Angels. CVP [2016])

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He keeps turning up, Apollo. When Kim Moore was working on  her first collection The art of falling, she got me hooked on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and thence to the story of the rape of Daphne by Apollo, appallingly and beautifully recreated in white marble by Bernini.

He doesn’t get it, this golden god

this spoiled pretty boy, 

why his skin grows crusted, 

why his supple fingers crack like kindling

why his large joints are querns

why clay and stones impede him

why his blood pulses slow and green.

(Metamorphosis: Outlaws and Fallen Angels. CVP [2016])

I must be full of unconsummated anger. Or maybe I’ve finally exorcised it with this last poem, started in a Poetry Business Saturday workshop, with Rilke’s poem Archaic torso of Apollo as a starter. What I never saw coming was that it would be taken over by a phrase from a left wing blogger I follow on Facebook.

I see you, Apollo

“there is no place/ that does not see you. You must change your life. “  

                                                                                                                                                   Rilke                                                                                                                          

Sans head, no fingers,hands or arms.

No mouth. No lips. Someone found you beautiful.

.

You’re an accident of time,

the great convulsions of the earth,

.

the depredations of  philistines or vandals,

the boys from the steppe, stinking of horse

.

and sweat, and blood that may be their own,

who cannot feel a wound, pumped up

.

with fear, testosterone, adrenalin,

flames, and screams of the nearly-dead.

.

I see you, Apollo, toying with a lyre,

testing the give of a string, and Marsyas

.

slowly dying nerve by nerve, slippery

with blood; his wet skin, his appalled gaze.

.

I see you exquisite in marble, oblivious to everything;

hot and reeking of musk, you’re blind 

.

to tender leaves springing 

from the fingers of a frantic girl.

.

I see you, Apollo, on a green hill. A gaping mask

the winds blow through. You have no body at all.

.

Like all the gods, you thought you’d fixed the game,

in the flatteries of myth, in bronze and marble.

.

You never saw us coming; libraries burning,

the statues overturned and smashed,

.

your lyre strings turned to garottes. 

Do you see us Apollo, 

the satyr’s children’s children? We see you.

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[from Pressed for Time. Calder Valley Poetry 2022]

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I think I may just have got Apollo out of my system. And here’s a thing. For the first time in days I don’t feel full of anger. Writing will do that sometimes. The tongueless man gets his land took.

Thanks for indulging me. Next week I’ll celebrate a collaborative collection that I really like and makes the worls a better place.

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Words of love.

I’ve been remiss. I’ve not written anything for too long. I’ve been trying to write this ever since Flo, my partner of 36 years, and I got married just over two weeks ago, on a day of alternating snow squalls and clear blue skies. It was a day like one years ago on Skye,  a day of snow and sun. We were hiking back from the Point of Sleat, in a sudden whiteout, and blundered into a herd of Highland cattle and one big Highland bull, pressed into the side of the hill, moodily waiting out the snow. And, snuffling and mooing, they made way for us. That was another special day. Days are where we live.

I wanted to write about writing about being in love. I thought I could write something grateful and insightful and intelligent. It turns out I can’t. In the end you simply have to sit down and do it and let it be what it will. This I learn from the to and fro of Kim Moore and Clare Shaw egging each other on to stick to their NaPoRiMo challenge via Facebook. They are each distracted by children or by work or by tiredness and still they do it. A couple of days ago each of them posted a piece for which the prompt was the challenge to write a love poem.

Kim wrote one for her three year-old which had a section that I’ll not forget in a hurry:

My nearly-three-year old 

says when I’m not with her

she hears my voice 

inside her head saying 

‘I’ll be back soon.’

……

sometimes it feels 

as if I’m talking 

to a strange bird 

who repeats

whatever it hears

or an old soul 

come to teach me everything

It took me back decades to the lurch of that possessive, utterly-enveloping feeling, watching my tiny daughter running down the road to greet me, oblivious to everything but me coming to meet her. That kind of love.

Clare’s was different; a reminder that when love goes it goes absolutely and leaves you in a different place. A lost love.

To hear a knock on the door 

and no-one there. 

To be empty, to be filled by a memory. 

To hear footsteps, to be suddenly cold. 

This took me straight back to Thomas Wyatt, who might well have written this in the Tower when he was in imminent danger of execution for loving the object of the poem. It was a dangerous business, falling in love with the wife of a king.

They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change

So many songs, so many poems that we call love songs and love poems. The ones you share. Then the ones you hug to yourself when you sing along to the Everleys…When will I be loved? The ones you would dance to:  I saw her standing there /I wanna hold your hand/ I love you, Peggy Sue/Then he kissed me/Heartbeat, why do you miss/ I’m in love with you……………………… And so on. There’ll be the songs that played along to your heartbreaks. Brian Ferry singing You are my sunshine. Prince’s Purple Rain.And the ones when you fell in love again. Steve Forbert: I’m in love with you. You can write the soundtrack to your life with them. Love is all you need.

And it’s a matter of life and death. Faith, Hope and Charity or Faith Hope and Love. The greatest of these is Love. Or Charity. In 16th Century England you could be strangled and burned for choosing the politically wrong one. Like Tyndale who was concerned with the love of God who  so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. [John. KJV]. 

Agape, eros, desire, absorption and infatuation. We talk about love of country (whatever that means); we love our children, our parents and our partners, and sometimes I think we never feel love more vividly than when we find we’ve lost it.

I got to thinking about the poems I’ve written that I could call love poems, though I didn’t think of many of them as such when I wrote them. Poems for my parents and grandparents, poems for my children. When it came to poems for a lover, a partner, a wife, I was never confident enough. Love letters I could write. But poems, not so much. I think I thought that if you couldn’t do it like John Donne…say in The Good Morrow..then you shouldn’t try, that you’d just be writing sentiment

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an every where.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest

.

Clever, confident, laconic, grown-up, sexy. No wonder I thought that was the way to do it when I was a teenager, and why I never quite got over it. Until I learned to listen to more understated voices. Like Ursula Fanthorpe’s.

Atlas

There is a kind of love called maintenance
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;

……………………………..which keeps
My suspect edifice upright in air,
As Atlas did the sky.

.

It taught me, that poem, that a celebration of patient and enduring love of the kind we call living together could be so wonderfully memorable. 

I was thinking about that when Flo and I decided (after 36 years) that we needed to get married to safeguard each other legally. It’s a shock to discover that there’s no such thing as Common Law marriage. Not really. Living together and sharing everything for 36 years gives you no rights at all in law. It turned out that it made us happy to get married. We had a lovely day of it. I didn’t write a poem for it or because of it. I realise that over the years the love poems I’ve written have been oblique…apart from ones not for sharing, publicly. But a couple of years ago I wrote a poem that says what I want to say about all this. UA Fanthorpe gave me permission. This is for me and Flo. Self-indulgent, possibly. But who’s to stop me? 

Hyacinth Girl

But that was years ago. In Bakewell there were beasts 

with clotted flanks in the cattle market’s clanging mazes, 

on a day of rain, the showground waterlogged,

pubs warm and dark and full of farmers in damp coats,

farmers drinking big mugs of hot dark tea,

screwing red faces round slabby bacon baps;

.

and at the junk stall in the market down the street

I bought you this small warm mahogany box

with a broken lock. And some dished brass discs,

and two brass rods. I had no idea what use they were,

only that you would like them. And that was the year

I made you paper hyacinths in a paper box

painted with hyacinths , and a poem for its lid.

.

I suppose I was thinking of cruel months

and hyacinth girls, and unexpected rains.

I was thinking of surprises. I was not thinking at all.

I was in love, and in various ways I am, still,

and thinking how we have assembled things around us

and cannot bring ourselves to throw away anything.

These cards, those bits of ribbon, these fragments.

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PS. It’s a self-indulgent post is this. So while I’m on a roll, let me advertise the launch of my new collection, Pressed for Time published by Calder Valley Press

It’s on Tuesday May 3rd in the lovey and airy art gallery of Brighouse Library, in whose grounds you can park for free. It’s an early start, 7.00-9.00pm. (ish). This is partly because that’s the hours they offer, and partly because these days I get very tired very easily. It’s the first live reading I’ll have done for over two years, mainly because of the combination of lockdowns and shielding. I realise I’m absurdly anxious…not on health and safety grounds, but because I’m terrified no one will turn up. So, If you can make it I’ll love you all for ever. And if you can’t, you’ll be able to buy the book, after May 3rd, all 104 pages of it, either via this blog (there’ll shortly be a Paypal Button in the My Books link at the top of the page) or direct from Calder Valley Poetry.

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(Photo courtesy of Jenny Foggin}

I planned to start this post by reflecting on Anthony Wilson’s enthusiasm for/love of the poems of Thomas Tranströmer for one, and of James Schuyler for another. Schuyler particularly…you can sometimes hear Schuyler in Anthony’s poems in the way that Tony Harrison, and later, Norman MacCaig could, every now and then, make me sound like them, their rhythms and phrasing. 

I’m thinking, for instance of a sequence from The four of us, a poem from The Afterlife. 

.

From three gardens away

a lawnmower begins its drone

carving stripes we’ll never see.

A woodpigeon clatters above.

The great time we’re having

(or had) is not what’s really there.

Beyond the silent tripod we have

no idea what lies ahead of us –

futures of wild promise, snapshots of our own children

under this very willow.

We cannot grasp what we have

been given, or can give back

However, I was not very well for a couple of days and I missed my self-imposed deadline of Sunday, and then Monday. And on Monday, Anthony posted a poem on his blog which saved me a lot of trouble. Because he says it much better that I could. Here’s the link.

.https://anthonywilsonpoetry.com/2022/03/28/lifesaving-lines-the-bluet-by-james-schuyler/

Before that though, I’ve been turning over in my mind what it is I mean by ‘my kind of poetry’. Because there was a time when I wouldn’t have thought that today’s guest was ‘my kind of poet’. Indeed, there was a time, not all that long ago when I would have been puzzled by the idea that poems could be ‘life-saving. Bear with me.

For years and years poetry was always on the periphery for me. There were exceptions. When I was 16 it was the Metaphysicals….sardonic, clever, witty, sexy. Everything I wanted to be and wasn’t. At 18 the Augustans spoke to me. Clever, cool and witty. And I like the craft of couplets. At 20, briefly, it was Hopkins. What they all had in common was visible craft. At 22 I heard Robert Speaight’s recording of The Wasteland’ and it opened my ears and mind to TS Eliot. You can listen to it via YouTube in all its melancholy thespian RP musicality. It jars in a way that it didn’t, 57 years ago. Our ears become accustomed to different vowels and stresses. It occurs to me that it also opened my ears to Shakespeare, for which I shall be eternally grateful. Try it. Here’s another link. 

.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VoBtk0-xIs

And so it went. As a teacher I liked the textures and evident emotion of Hughes and Heaney, but as  a reader it was mainly documentary and revisionist history that spoke to me: ballads and broadsheets, social realism. The 19thC Novel, Orwell. When I was asked to read Robert Lowell I fought it. I wasn’t interested in introspective, reflective late Romanticism (as I saw it). It wasn’t for me. I thought it was self-indulgent. Which is ironic, now I come to think. Anthony notes something in his post that chimes : 

      “I have also been reminded of Seamus Heaney’s dictum in The Government of the Tongue 

       that ‘no lyric ever stopped a tank”.

I used to think that was an unanswerable argument to a question I never fully worked out. But now I say of course it can’t. And your point?  No tank ever made me happy or illuminated a mystery. A wren landed on the window sill earlier today, and just for a second it stopped my heart. So it goes. The thing was, what I wanted in poetry was stuff that could fill a room, like Shakespeare, that was memorisable and memorable. Most poetry was never ‘lifesaving’, and what I wanted was unlikely to be understated and quiet. We didn’t match. I didn’t miss it. I just didn’t get it..or it didn’t get me.

Something changed, about 15 years ago. Something shifted and if you wonder about ‘my kind of poetry’ it’s what the great fogginzo’s cobweb has been sharing for the last eight years. What strikes me is that while I’ll never have the apparently encyclopaedic knowledge of/familiarity with contemporary and 20thC that Anthony Wilson shares with you in his wonderful book Life-saving poems I’ve gradually being made more open to voices that one time I’d have dismissed. Life changes us.

Anthony and I share more things than the things that ‘separate us’ (he’s not a fan of the 19thC Novel, for instance): teaching English to Post-Grad teacher trainees, writing about the teaching of poetry in Primary schools, an enthusiasm for a particular Garrison Keillor Lake Woebegon story, which is a story that begins with stories about snowfall, and a story about a man (who does not know that his father has died but whose story we shall learn something of)) telling the story of Hansel and Gretel to his children, and about how an author can, like god, change the events of a story to save his characters pain.

It occurred to me that I could begin with a story. Let me take you back to 1960. St Catherine’s College Cambridge. 17 years old and up for interview for an Open Scholarship in English. Everything was foreign, from the fact that there was no railway station, so you had to get a bus from March to the otherness of gated colleges and the bustle of insouciant young men in gowns who threw breadrolls at each other in the dining hall. The other candidates wore grey flannel suits and had partings. I had grey winkle-pickers, an Italian suit and a Tony Curtis hairdo. They had elegant drawls and asked me what I thought about Kierkegaard, and had I been to Heffers. I was interviewed by Tom Henn who wrote The apple and the spectroscope (no, I’ve never read it), who had an oar hanging on his study wall, and asked me my opinion of the prevalence of bee imagery in Shakespeare. I knew it wasn’t for me, or I wasn’t for it. I didn’t feel resentful or stupid. I was just in the wrong place. Later I went to Durham where I felt comfortable simply because it was in the north, was hilly and had my favourite cathedral. That’s how a lot of poetry has felt to me in the last few years. 

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But you learn from the company you keep, and it changes you so you can understand its language. That’s how I feel about Anthony Wilson, whose Life-saving Poems (along with Clive James’ Poetry Notebooks) have introduced me to new ways of thinking and new familiarities.

That’s a more than usually lengthy preamble…be thankful it’s not longer. Time for our guest. Who probably needs no introduction but still….

 Anthony Wilson is a poet, writing tutor and lecturer at the University of Exeter. His books of poetry are The Afterlife (Worple Press, 2019), Riddance (Worple Press, 2012), Full Stretch: Poems 1996-2006 (Worple Press, 2006), Nowhere Better Than This (Worple Press, 2002) and How Far From Here is Home? (Stride, 1996). 

The Wind and the Rain is forthcoming from Blue Diode Press in 2023. 

In 2015 Bloodaxe Books published his bestselling anthology Lifesaving Poems after his blog of the same name.

He is also the author of Deck Shoes (Impress Books, 2019), a collection of essays, and Love for Now (Impress Books, 2012), a memoir detailing his experience of cancer. 

Anthony has held writing residencies at The Poetry Society, The Times Educational Supplement, The Poetry Trust and Tate Britain. He has judged the Manchester Cathedral Poetry Competition, The Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and The Impress Prize for New Writers.

He is editor of Creativity in Primary Education (Sage, 2015), and is co-editor of Making Poetry Matter (Bloomsbury, 2013), Making Poetry Happen (Bloomsbury, 2015) and The Poetry Book for Primary Schools (Poetry Society, 1998).

He blogs at www.anthonywilsonpoetry.com.

To put it in perspective, last time I looked, the blog had about 10,000 followers. This one has about 450. I’m in awe of it all. A few years ago I wrote about the poetry blogs that have influenced me and my writing, and here’s part of what Anthony said about how he started on Lifesaving poems

  “ since I began it in July 2009 I have been copying out poems into a plain Moleskine notebook, one at a time, in inky longhand, when the mood took me. Allowing myself no more than one poem per poet, I wanted to see how many poems I could honour with the label ‘lifesaving’. 

My criteria were extremely basic.  Was the poem one I could recall having had an immediate experience with from the first moment I read it? In short, did I feel the poem was one I could not do without?

Copying them out into my book has not always been fun, but now that I am finished, I am in possession of a deeply satisfactory feeling of having learnt more about myself and about each poem that I copied.

Over the next weeks and months I am going to be blogging here about the stories behind the choices I made, the influences upon them, and what I learnt in the process”. 

I commented:

And what follows is a list of about 180 poems by 180 poets. That’s more than three years’ worth of blogposts sorted, at one fell swoop. Bloggers’ Nirvana. Shangri La. Provided, of course you know at least 180 poets, and you know their work well enough to choose one poem from each of which you can say, hand-on-heart: ‘this is lifesaving’. What I love about reading Anthony Wilson is the effortless erudition that is never exclusive or scholarly. It’s what great teachers do…like Bronowsky in ‘The ascent of man‘, or John Berger in ‘Ways of seeing‘ (and not remotely like Kenneth Clarke in ‘Civilisation’). It’s like the introduction to poetry you get if you regularly go to Poetry Business workshops. I’d not heard of half the poets Anthony chose. But I have now. 

Of course, Anthony’s Lifesaving poems are not unconnected to another theme of his blog which was essentially a shared journal of his experience of the diagnosis, and subsequent treatment for a particular cancer which was, at the time, life-threatening. I’ve been treated for two kinds of cancer, and I’m currently being treated for a third, which is also life-threatening, so it’s going to resonate. “

And then I wrote: 

But I doubt I’d have that kind of courage to share the experience

Well, since then as the treatments for cancer have become more radical, and suffer from the law of diminishing returns, it turns out that I can write about that kind of experience, obliquely more often than not,  and the fact that I can write about personal mortality is at least in part down to Anthony, and lately in particular, to his book The Afterlife. It turns out that I can write introspectively and reflectively, so this post will be a thank-you as well as an appreciation.

The Afterlife hasn’t garnered the reviews or the attention it should have in 2019. A lot of good work’s gone missing in action during the pandemic. What’s the book ‘about’ ? Let me borrow from the publisher’s blurb: 

…”the poems explore the borderline territory between grief and laughter, memory and forgetting, illness and health. His central subject is the way we live within family and community, questioning the roles we construct, both alone and with others. The Afterlife explores central themes: mortality, mental health, the relation between body and soul, and how to live fully in the present moment”.

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I like that last phrase particularly, not least because I guess that’s what the best poems are doing at the moment when we read them. I’d add that they have a quality for me that chimes with the Serenity Prayer..the way we achieve cceptance of the things we cannot change in order the better to live with them. It’s not easy or comfortable. As Fiona Benson wrote in her endorsement:

“Anthony Wilson’s poems are often meditative and always very, very readable, but don’t be fooled; the avuncular voice belies a restless interrogation of faith, love and loss, and Wilson moves from moments of everyday comedy to a wounded reckoning with the afterlife of cancer survival (my italics) and poems of intense anger and grief.”

To which I’d add that believing you are going to die and coming to terms of a sort with that, and then learning that you are going to live, and coming to terms with that, is going to make anyone into a dark watcher. The opening lines of The editing suite (which will make you sit up and pay attention) describes it perfectly:

We turn back the film of our lives 

            and edit the past in rooms 

 where no one goes

.

Between two kinds of existence, not quite of this world. Liminal. This is my take on it, anyway. And now to the poems, and particularly to noticing that Anthony’s poems can seem plain and understated, which means that you can be ambushed by the moments that draw you in, the moments that mark language as ‘poetry’. Moments like these, which are often the openings of poems.

There are days  I lose to knowing  / it has come back

I have not felt desired by you / in years

I am telling my hands / to be still. They do not want /to be still

Now I am no longer any use to you /…..

and these lines in the middle of one that’s utterly unexpected 

               Death shelf, you said. You need a death shelf

In other words, for all the apparently plain language of many of the poems, walk carefully, and listen. Read them aloud. See if you can nail the ‘voice’. Especially in the apparent matter-of-factness of everything in the opening poem of the collection

Teaching Writing Theory

.           

On Tuesday I discovered if my cancer

had returned. Later I discussed teaching writing

to six-year-olds. We spun our arms

like windmills, then made chopstick-motions

with our fingers mirroring the motor control

functions we daily take for granted

even less think about as we stare at the page.

We looked at motivational theory. Taxonomies

and heuristics jammed the white-board,

a cacophony of formulations we all wanted 

to witness taking flight. During self-study,

I watched students tap-tapping at mobiles

and tablets, all the while sustaining complex

discussions about pedagogy, and dress codes

for their forthcoming Christmas parties.

If they were nervous of the outcome 

of their assignments, none of them showed it.

.

           I keep reading this, recognising how the ‘if’ in the first line undermines the matter-of-factness of ‘On Tuesday’ and the apparent confidence of “I discovered’. What follows is a flurry of polysyllables, of distracting activity and pretence of understanding. It keeps on giving, and I love it. The business of distraction is probably why I asked for the opening sequence from Part Three..a 14 page, not-quite-blank verse, sort-of-stream of consciousness poem called To a notebook which includes, among many other things, references to the poet’s love affair with particular kinds of pen and ink and paper, as well as a troubled relationship with Facebook. Above all though, I think it’s a poem about displacement strategies which have to do with dealing with intimations of mortality and also the urge to write. In the end I think it’s Cartesian. Scribo ergo sum. These fragments I have shored against my ruins. Just enjoy it.

from To a Notebook (page 1 and a bit)

All summer long the lorries have passed

My window taking earth from one end

Of the street to the other, an eternal quest

For silence and rest.    Now Joe brings

His radio and sets up shop right outside,

All the hits I used to know and now resent

For filling this moment with noise

I did not ask for.    The house that took till

October to build is now taking till December.

I sat for so long listening to trucks beeping-

Reversing I no longer hear them (not true).

It’s amazing I go to church: for a non-joiner

Like me, a miracle.    I’m there to have my

Edges knocked off, plus knock those I slowly

Learn to love. After a week of people, 

Silence.   The breeze finding its voice

Like rain on apple leaves but without rain,

So prolific with windfalls this year, 

We hear them thud and roll from the house, 

The territorial robin that has sung all summer

Suddenly clearer than thought while I make

Lists for eggs and books I want to have read,

This paper, scratchy yet smooth, is the best –

Since when? – France, probably (maybe 

All the answers are France).    The worst part

Is starting, but then you know that already.

Twitter can’t keep up with me, nor I

With it: help me, someone, understand

Why I need to applaud your cake.

The delicious loneliness of staying 

In a town where no one speaks English,

The rain never more alive than when 

I lay awake listening to dawn inch closer

Through the fizzing traffic.    Only a week ago

Automated hosepipes like cicadas sprayed

In sunshine (‘The Cathedral is not a happy place,’

Said -not telling). Then blue tits invaded

The apple tree after a summer away, 

A silent V of geese arrows across

Ochre-orange clouds, my heart a shipwreck

To follow their progress.    I sleep badly 

And make others do the same. I try 

To sleep in the day, but no. 

.

Two more poems that particularly moved me, because of their clear-eyed dealings with the dying and the dead. Poems that make their peace with both, and need no commentary from me

The Last Time I Saw Mary

.

The last time I saw Mary

was in her kitchen, September sunlight, the door open to her garden.

.

She gave me a tutorial

on my book, warning me not to be meretricious.

.

Your faith, she said, don’t be afraid

of it. It is who you are.

.

She was skinny by then, her grey hair

in a bob, like a girl’s.

.

Shuffling in her slippers she made coffee

and brought waffles.

.

The Dutch balance these on their cups

and watch them deliquesce

.

into the hot liquid, she said. So sweet.

To an English person, their name is unpronounceable.

.

I said, I think you can buy them in Lidl now.

They cost nothing.

.

Sitting With Your Body

.

When the others had gone

we sat with your body for a while

and watched you pass over 

from person to body, watched you

become blue, then grey, then ivory,

then grey again, the cave of your ribs

no longer heaving, and Tatty stroked

your shoulder as if comforting 

a poorly child who hasn’t slept,

all the while watching your stillness,

finally you were still and ours,

then we kissed your ice forehead

and found our coats and walked 

across the common to eat with the others.

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Both of these poems bring me a sort of peace, and it’s a rare thing in these days of the sleep of reason. What can I say. The Afterlife was published in 2019, and it’s been overlooked. Go and buy it. In the meantime, thank you Anthony Wilson for being our guest, for your blog, for your Life-saving poems, and for The Afterlife [Worple Press. £10]

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Not so long ago I came across this comment about In The Taxidermist’s House in  the Wombwell Rainbow poetry blog : 

“An ecopoetic and zoopoetic powerhouse of a 28 poem collection. Her final poem “journey of the light travellers” is an empathic devastating critique of wind farms. “Woodlice” is from the insects point of view and, for me, captures it perfectly.

A lot of the poems enact transformation, metamorphosis “They come/the seekers of freedom/shedding the skin of crowds//Emerge/displaced and solitary/haunters of canal paths/” 

Metamorphosis, transformation, shaeshifting.  I simply had to have a copy.

But let me tell you about the image of a freezer full of stiff birds 

If you can find it on your i.player, see if you can track down a BBC 4 occasional series: What do artists do all day  And if not, here’s a link to a YouTube extract. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5PxZbqjlcE

I’ve watched the programme about Polly Morgan again and again.  In it she says that people send her roadkill she might use;  someone rang her to say 

saw a dead fox today and thought of you.

She’s an artist who creates work out of taxidermy; she rummages about in freezer chests looking for exactly the right size of mynah bird, and then sits with infinite patience, teasing off  the skin ( and therefore the plumage) in one undamaged piece; she uses incredibly sharp scalpels and focussed concentration. There’s something reverential in the attention she pays to the bird in her hands, and something very gentle and steely about the way she puts it back together, stitching minutely, stroking back the plumage. And musing at the same time about her awareness of her hands’ fragility; ‘sometimes’ she says,’ I can’t stop wondering what’s beneath the skin’.

The images haunted me; I had to put them into a poem: 

Much possessed

She keeps mynah birds and fledgling sparrows

in the freezer. Knows just how feathers lie

in a wing…………………..

Sometimes she looks at the backs of her hands,

imagines the bones she has never seen…

And, in part, that’s also how I came across the debut collection by today’s guest, Marion Oxley. The opening poem of the pamphlet is Still life [after Polly Morgan]. There a stanza in there that made me punch the air.

             Hands tie up hair, pin back despair,

             pack loneliness into the shoulders

             of a raven.

I knew Marion Oxley before this, because she’s been (when it was still alive and well) a regular supporter of the Puzzle Poets Live open nights, a member of the poet Gaia Holmes’ occasional writing group Igniting the spark, and every now and then getting up to the mic. with one of her poems. She’s not one to seek the limelight, which is why I’m especially pleased to share her work. She writes powerfully and memorably, like this

A fortune telling squirrel dressed in bling
peers into a crystal ball; the murky waters
of the Leeds Liverpool canal slowly part.

.

Jake the ten foot Burmese python
squeezed into a freezer;
lies coiled like a giant black pudding
waiting for the thaw.

From: A taxidermist regenerates Blackurn.

..which is a title to win a place in any competition shortlist. She’s good at titles that draw you in; The girl who became a zebra, A crocodile in Neverland, A chameleon goes to Butlins. You see what I mean?

 Anyway, time for introductions. Marion Oxley was born in Manchester and spent her early years in Salford. She’s worked in a variety of paid and voluntary jobs including the NHS, youth services, Manchester City Council’s Equal Opportunities Unit, Women’s Aid, drug and alcohol services, postal services, psychiatric nursing, community occupational therapy and adult services care management. She has a BA(Hons)Fine Art.

She came to poetry by chance whilst learning to play the fiddle. Inspired by the tradition of story telling in folk ballads. This lead to a desire to experience the landscape of contemporary pieces, especially those that explored the inter-weaving of geography, archaeology, myth and folk-lore. She is a regular visitor to the Orkney islands.

She currently lives amongst the flood plains of the Calder Valley with her boisterous Staffordshire Bull Terrier, Alice. She has family in the Republic of Ireland and volunteers at the local foodbank.

She’s told me:  I don’t really feel I’m on the poetry ‘scene’. I mostly write alone though currently doing a Wendy Pratt short course along with some excellent poets who are so much better than me, so are an inspiration. 

She may be underselling herself; her poems have been published widely in magazines and anthologies. Most recently in The Blue Nib, The Fenland Journal, Artemis, The Alchemy Spoon, The Bangor Literary Journal, Geography is Irrelevant (Stairwell Press), Bloody Amazing (Beautiful Dragons/Yaffle). She’s had poems shortlisted or placed in many competitions, recently being runner up in The Trim Poetry Competition and Second Light Competition.

What draws a reader’s attention, apart from the titles, are her concerns and her craft:

 Myra Schneider identifies an imaginative engagement with “the relationship between birth, life and death” and also her writing which is “…. in deft and sinuous language, deconstructs and reconstructs our relationship with nature and mortality.”

James Nash focusses on the way  “She reflects and pays homage to the work of other artists, and shares her very own particular vision, in poetry that is fiercely intelligent, celebratory and beautiful. “

And after that, you’ll be wanting to read the poems. The ones I asked for all illustrate three qualites Myra Schneider highlights…language that is intense, tactile and energetic. Let me add that its often uncomfortable, too.

The first poem is about shapeshifting, and it’s unsettling because it’s constantly fluid. I was never sure who was telling me the story. There was a time some time  ago when the selkie was a fashionable feminist trope in poetry. But none of the poems seemed be as deliberately ambiguous and ambivalent as this one.

Skin Trade

Once hands turned her soapstone smooth

          ran thumbs over flesh and fur, took measure.

.

Wrapped mother and child in pelted warmth.

. 

Eyeless skin stretched keeless boats 

          slipped silent passages through frozen seas.

.

The soft pulse of ferries shivers skin,

          a quicken of gannets slick as flick knives, slit the sea.

 .             

The torn fishnets had rankled 

          caused an underwater roar, falling on her deaf ears. 

 .

The last ferry slides like a birthday cake, 

          candles burning, off the plated sea.  

He comes with the twitchers, the hikers, 

          occasional bikers. The divers of dreams in neoprene.

 .

After a skinful, pissed on myth and mist, 

          he gives her the present; a seal skin. 

 .

Water-marked, mottled, in the corner a faint blue stain,

          half-formed letters, clear as a fingerprint.  

 .

She rides her past in a blast of black sea squall. 

 .       

On the wet quayside they are gathered, bodies shimmering. 

.

She watches the totter, the flop across the bonnet. Hears a clink of glass,

          bottle rolling, head lolling, hands flapping. 

 .

Watches the bend in, taking of a lighted cigarette. Hears the unzipping

          of black, skin-tight jacket. 

 .

There on pale skin, a heart, three faded blue letters; Mum.

 .

Liquid eyes turn towards her. Strands of damp hair flick back 

          like seaweed rolling off slim shoulders of rock. 

 .

She remembers her fourteen years old stepping out of the bath

          patting dry the new tattoo. She hands her the sealskin.

.. 

I come away asking whose hands turned ‘her’ soapstone smooth even as I relish the texture of the phrase.

I’m bothered by the abrupt shift from a protective warmth to the skin of a boat in icy seas, which morph into a harbour where the last ferry  pulses and slides like a birthday cake off the plated sea. Every one of the phrases rings true, but belong in different places in space and history. I can make connections with the typical folk-tale of a man who steals a female selkie’s skin, finds her naked on the sea shore, and compels her to become his wife, and how the wife will spend her time in captivity longing for the sea, her true home,.  She may bear several children by her human husband, but once she discovers her skin, she will immediately return to the sea and abandon the children she loved. But then I have connect that with what well may be an Orkney harbour, a CalMac ferry, the shimmering bodies, the skintight suit that may (or may not) be a diver’s wet suit. Everything is real and baffling. And everything is precisely placed, filmic. I love it. Just don’t ask me to explain it. I keep coming up with different answers.

.

I asked for the next poem not only for its passionate concern for the balance in things which is challenged (as in so many other ways) by the impact on the migratory cycles of one beautiful northern bird, but also for the texture of language, and it’s cinematic eye. This one insists on being read aloud.

Journey of the light travellers                                                                            

‘Red-throated diver sees off consortium of energy firms, as wind farm plan axed.’  

This is the treeless land you moved through, 

         were born to, left and returned to. 

The land where you stared into the midnight sun,

         peered through a green glass sky.   

                                   Where sun dogs pant at sea ice melting. 

.

Where an Arctic fox crouches, blurs, dissolves, 

         white as sea salt sinking. 

This is where your North is turning 

         ice needle sharp, towards the sun. 

                                   In the twilight of the thaw you are waiting.

.

This is a land where darkness stalks you 

         will snap your wings, if you leave too late. 

They found you on a broken Northern shore. 

                                   Twenty three years old.

.

Claimed you were old, for your kind.

         Scraped a body, red-eyed and grey, 

pinstriped, a triangle at your throat 

                                   the colour of blood or was it wine?

.

Hunched over as if you had just fallen from the sky 

         or pulled the earth up from the bottom of the sea

or seized a titanium flag glinting like a speared fish 

                                   from under a water sky. 

.

Your slender body slathered in black gold 

         and the ring; a travel journal of your life

tucked beneath a wing. Your haunting wail; 

                                   a tarred and feathered ghost.  Lame duck, loon.

.

Your kind arrived in winter, stumbling onto our shore. 

         Hungry, pale faced migrants. 

Light travellers.   Gavia Stellata.

                                  Your backpacks stitched with stars.

.

Bewildered by an array of verticals;

         a sea-forest of white arms rising in unison.

And then the fall like dense bones diving

         the sky dragged down through mist and cloud, 

                                   a search for light in dark waters.  A slow rise. 

.

On the shore they counted the numbers, 

         decided no more.       Heads held high, 

                                    bills like glinting sailmaker’s awls.  

                                                           You’re sailing close to the wind.

.

.

The first two stanzas set up a rhythm that might be a hymn to a place 

      This is where your North is turning 

         ice needle sharp, towards the sun. 

There are three points of colour- green glass, blood and gold- in a monochrome landscape in which everything is at risk and vulnerable. The fox dissolves, the ice is melting, the dark will snap your wings/if you leave too late. The birds are refugees rather than seasonal migrants in the face of change; stitched with stars and also tarred and feathered.  We are all sailing close to the wind, not just these birds, warns the last line of a poem that insists we acknowledge the loveliness of endangered birds whose bills glint ‘like sailmakers’ awls’.

One more poem to end with…and another bird. If it is a bird. Whose is this ‘last quickening’? I keep asking questions like this as I read Marion Oxley’s poems. Always, it seems, there’s some shapeshifting going on. 

Death of a Humming Bird

Is this how it will be 

the last quickening?

A chest full of flight, 

wings beating backwards.

.

Your tiny body hovering 

just out of reach.

Pale petalled hands grown old 

withered in the waiting.

.

The darting in and out of memory 

sweet rush of longing 

withdrawn on a tongue 

sticky with lies.

.

A torpor of hope 

weighing less than a feather

balanced on a finger 

stroking a cheek 

soft and damp as moss. 

.

Lips crusted in sea salt 

speaking only of the past.

The air between us hanging 

white as a sheet ready 

to be pegged out. 

.

A flapping, slapping space  

a nest full of bones,  

skin pulled tight as a lampshade 

stitched around a glow.

.

Racing over waves, tides revolving, 

flumes of feathered plumes

sparkling and dipping. 

And there you are sipping 

from an Angel’s Trumpet.

.

When Clive James wrote about a poem declaring itself a poem by the moments that draw you in I think he had in mind images like this:

The air between us hanging 

white as a sheet ready 

to be pegged out. 

It’s such a packed image that synthesises all those ideas of separation, of being unable to communicate, of being blind to another, of ‘pegging out’…and at the same time of a shared task, like two people folding or unfolding a white sheet. It’s the washing day of my childhood and also an image that takes me to rooms I’ve known where someone is dying and at least one of us is wanting it to come soon and gentle. Someone with a cheek /soft and damp as moss, with Pale petalled hands grown old , and Lips crusted in sea salt . 

I’m pretty sure that I’m pulling the poem out of shape, making it fit me. I think I need to accept it as a poem that understands our ambivalence about death, and especially that of someone we are close to. And while I’m typing this, I realise I’ve never written a blog post which so frequently confesses to puzzlement about poems I know that I like very much.

Maybe I’ve been trying too hard. And I realise that I’ve not shared any of the poems specifically about taxidermy. I’ll just say that I like everything in this pamphlet. It’s a remarkable debut. What can I say? Thank you Marion Oxley for being our guest, and if I failed to do you justice, please forgive me.

At least I can remember to tell everyone to instantly rush out, virtually or otherwise, and buy the book.

In The Taxidermist’s House: Publ. 4Word Press 2021 £5.99