I’ve been sorting and clearing old photos and old poems. It reminded me of trips out into Derbyshire with friends: taking the cable car up to the Heights of Abraham, walking through the historic centre of Buxton. The Buxton Baths date back to Roman times. In the Georgian and Victorian period these were developed. Buxton is the highest market town in England. Easter can be early or late – walking through snow or sitting out in sunshine. Enjoy your Easter, wherever you are.
Buxton Centre
Buxton, 2pm
Here is Buxton Spa, Easter, green hills. Not a credit card between us.
Good intentions: it’s the year of the Pig.
We’ve been to China, lugged back soldiers from Xian, wrapped in towels.
Now they’re resting under the Red Cross.
For our next birthdays, we say, we just want Prosecco, book tokens, no bric-a-brac,
but our hands are restless, our fingers flick through a tray of rings.
It is a great pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet Rebecca (Becky) Cullen. Her poem February appeared last month. Becky and I met on a poetry workshop where I bought A Reader’s Guide To Time. This was the winner of the 2021 Live Canon Collection Competition.
Here is Becky’s biography: Rebecca Cullen has a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing. She was the second poet-in-residence at Newstead Abbey, ancestral home of George Gordon, Lord Byron. Director of the Writing, Reading and Pleasure (WRAP) extracurricular programme at Nottingham Trent University, Rebecca also curates and presents the Notts TV Book Club.
Photo credit: Fabrice Gagos
The collection is divided into eight sections, each representing a different kind of time. Becky ends her prologue with It’s time I love, winding as a cat wraps round an ankle. Here are four poems from Historical Time (n.b. timelines, clocks), Deep Time, Poetic Time (also ‘of Reading’) and Subjective Time (‘of our lives’), respectively.
Paris, Grands Passages
To enter requires trust: you can’t see the end from the beginning. You can’t see the next beginning.
Shop names are the contents page; each entrance is a diorama. Post yourself into the future.
At Hotel Chopin, climb the three red stairs. Would you like to buy a sink? A model of a carousel?
The tiles are monochrome and harlequin. The gates can keep you out, or keep you in.
In the window of the librarie, two wax children read a book, sitting in a rowing boat.
Claim a tall-backed chair at the café draped in vines, warm beneath the glass roofs pinched like fish spines.
The taxidermist stitches swans’ wings to a fox. Come, watch the past play, hear your heels knock.
Night Fragment
He wakes her with a ball of sorry. He wants her to hold it, keep it, as brash and bold as the coin in her lungs.
His sob comes, warms her gut, the flex of his young arm gone.
In the four o’clock light, her face is crumpled, dirty.
Garden at Newstead Abbey
Peacocks at Byron’s Pile
I had a dream of Newstead Abbey, that I was drifting through the garden and the blowsy flowers were heavy on the walls.
The words are just ahead of me this morning, the word for a large purple or white blowsy flower, a climber, and a tree’s branches so they grow
outstretched in two dimensions. Espalier. Both these things are in my head, somewhere, but the sparrows roost near the monk’s pond,
which also has its own name, and overlook the stump of oak on a lawn where a raven has been adopted by two geese;
they are always in correspondence, everywhere the remnants of a godforsaken kiss, the three of them, like this. Clematis.
My Father and I
Sometimes we didn’t get on. The songs I sang would please his ear. But I would over-act, embarrass him.
Now we go to appointments more often than we go for lunch. After the last tests he couldn’t be left alone. I spread across one sofa,
he slouched on his, and we watched a documentary on Howard Hughes; I didn’t know about the aviation or the Hollywood years.
So. We both kept turning up, not giving in. Lately, I’ve taken to calling him daddy.
This coming Tuesday it’s Valentine’s Day. Here is an early poem that hasn’t featured on the blog before. It was published in the Tees Valley Writer, Autumn 1995, and Highly Commended in their annual competition.
On the beach
Against the sinking sun gulls ride the waves. Our dogs bark and chase their tails. Try to run with a lone jogger who braves
the east wind whistling. Your son trails in your wake, attempts big steps. Laughter peals: a scene lifted straight from some fairy tale.
Heaped grey boulders mimic a colony of seals. Not long before love winters in my heart. I need to tell you how it feels
to be together, yet growing apart. Your craggy face seems so much older clouded in a bluish hue. I brace myself to start
as you place a hand on my shoulder but all I can say is It’s getting colder.
Speak Easy was formed at Stretford’s Sip Club by Dave Hartley in August 2015 as a spoken word open mic before the team of Andy N, Amanda Nicholson and Steve Smythe joined forces to take it over at the end of 2017. The night moved to Chorlton Cum Hardy’s Dulcimer Bar in August 2020 and has carried on being a welcoming, supportive, friendly and encouraging night since welcome to both experienced and newcomers with all acts given equal opportunity to perform with everybody who reads being headliners.
(See the end of the post for details and links to social media for Speak Easy, Andy N, Amanda Nicholson.)
Andy N
Andy N is the author of 8 full length poetry collections including ‘Return to Kemptown’ and ‘The End of Summer’ and co-runs Chorlton Cum Hardy’s always welcoming Spoken Word Open mic night ‘Speak Easy’. He runs / co-runs Podcasts such as Spoken Label, Cloaked in the Shadows and Storytime with Andy & Amanda and does ambient music under the name of Ocean in a Bottle.
Three x Winter Haiku
Walking in darkness your front door briefly lights up in the heavy rain. * Ripping out the trees lighting hit the forest hard flooding the river * Sleeping in winter the trees hibernate alone awaiting for Spring.
*
Amanda Nicholson
Amanda Nicholson is an author, poet, podcast co-host and copywriter. She has written several books as Amanda Steel, including Ghost of Me. Amanda’s poetry has been broadcast on BBC Radio Manchester. She Has a Creative Writing MA, and has had articles published by Jericho Writers, Reader’s Digest UK, Ask.com, and Authors Publish.
Do All These Labels Make Me Look Fat?
Like blank sticky labels pressed to my skin I write on some myself While people scribble their own words Over time, the ink fades on some and others fall off The one labelled daughter is half peeled off now Older labels remain stuck fast But buried by new labels So people rarely see Unless they get close enough And there is always room for more Some are like tattoos Only more painful And others wash away easily
Last Saturday I had to go to the pharmacy in Playa Blanca, Lanzarote to get some over-the-counter medication. It’s an ode of sorts alright…
Normal service will be resumed…
To ‘my’ condition
I salute you: you have staying power. You arrived out of nowhere 28 years ago. How odd you only woke up in Manchester, while you slept through London.
I refuse to call you mine, the two ‘ ’ symbolise handcuffs, shackles. On long journeys (flights, trains) I wear dark trousers, a dark dress.
You have grounded me many times, I’ve been bent over, clutching my bike, scared to go to the shops in case I don’t make it to a loo.
An acronym close to that computer firm. There are dress codes at IBM, I have you know. Irritable? Yes, often. I’ve been pissed off, imagine bowels as a curled-up, snarling cobra.
Syndrome is, I believe, where spectators gather to see retired pilots take off in noisy small planes. Banking is a dangerous manoeuvre.
Yesterday’s journey: comfortable Eurostar from Rotterdam Centraal, a sit-down at Soho & Co, Liverpool Street Station for food. The unexpected ‘red signal’ at Colchester turned out to be ‘waiting for British Transport Police’. They escorted a couple off the train. Missed connection at Ipswich gives an unexpected hour to mull and ponder. The friendly taxi driver from A2B and warm welcome at The White Lion where the bar is still open.
Over half a century ago I shared a room in an Earls Court hostel with three other Dutch women. P&O Lines Ltd had just taken us on as WAPs (Woman Assistant Pursers) and we were to be employed in various offices while waiting for a ship to become available. I did secretarial work for a Scottish marine engineer, struggling to capture the technical terms – about bulkheads of a vessel that was being built at the famous Cammell Laird yard in Birkenhead.
We have kept in touch all those years, and celebrated in the Eye, Amsterdam with lunch in 2019. The film museum is an iconic building just the other side of the railway station. A short ferry journey is a good way to get there. Our plan for an annual reunion had not taken a pandemic into account and now one of us has health issues. Fingers crossed for September!
Our language skills had got us the job: Dutch, English, French and German. The photo is from S.S. ORCADES where I was Supernumerary, translating the news, and holding daily meetings. Here I am with the small group from Germany and Switzerland.
Assisted passage
You’re on F deck aft, an alleyway away from your spouse, also sharing with five strangers.
Time to fold over your memories, freshly laundered. You don’t need memories where you’re heading.
You saw the Fire Dance in Dakar. Days of sea, sun, and sky. Cape Town with Table Mountain.
Nine grey days of swell. Freemantle, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney.
Shake a leg, show a leg. You’ll soon be down under. Your new upside-down lives.
Fruit & veg, toms, salad, mayo, salmon, ½ loaf … I’ve not yet managed to write a shopping list in Dutch even when the words are shorter (sla) or similar abbreviations (gr & fruit). It’s too much hard work late on a Thursday evening when I’m sitting with a glass of wine (wijn) and contemplating the moving project: flooring, top-down & bottom-up blinds, two chairs – ordered; research on fridge/freezers needed, also a new GP practice and pharmacist.
Here in the Netherlands the distance is important: the GP must be able to get to your home within 10 minutes. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to register. In Scheveningen (where I spent the winter) three practices did not take on new patients or had a four-month’ waiting list. A tomato a day may keep the doctor away …
Tomatoes
I am stepping away from my life, my life as short as a haiku. I have turned biographer, am writing vignettes, pale green, the length of celery.
My vignettes may concern elderly mules with dental decay, the struggle to remember maternal aunts. I am numbering my vignettes 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D – narrow seats in the small airplane Aer Lingus would use on the late Saturday flight.
I could write a vignette about the plastic dummies they use in ambulance training. Today I’m going to focus on pretend tomatoes. My invisible friend has started her new diet.
It’s a huge pleasure introducing this month’s guest poet Carl Tomlinson. Carl and I met on a w/end poetry workshop some years ago. He was born in Lancashire – where his father’s family had farmed for 150 years. He now lives in Oxfordshire and is a coach and part-time finance director. His poems have been published in magazines, anthologies and online.
From his debut Changing Places I have chosen one poem that has a personal meaning to me: I was living in Southampton in 1976 and my late husband supported our local team. The other four poems are a moving tribute to Carl’s personal land and heritage. The cover picture was taken by him.
Picking sides
FA Cup Final. 1 May 1976. Southampton 1 – 0 Manchester United
Bobby Stokes made me a Red one Spring day at Wembley. He broke my heart in a moment scuffing that shot past Stepney.
Although I wasn’t football mad you still had to pick a side and a playground full of Saints fans said Man United were mine.
Four years after moving South my accent was still abused. Flattened vowels lurked in my mouth and echoed round the school.
All that week I learned their names eager to share the glory, but sometimes, as the pundits say, the Cup’s a fairy story.
Nil-nil at eighty-three minutes, the telly rings with cheers. Stokes shoots. He scores. Saints win it. This was what I’d feared.
Bobby Stokes made me blush deep red at hymn-time in assembly, For all the saints, the teacher said. Every face was turned on me.
Baling
I’d just got my A-levels out of the way and was spending a week with my Aunt in the house her grandfather’d built in the garden behind the farm, in a place that had seemed like forever, aged eight. She said “Derek Fitton wants a hand with his hay.” As kids we had loved helping Grandad, chasing the baler round Tandle Hill’s haunch riding the trailer back to the barn echoing Tarzan calls under the bridge. We lived with the itching and the seeds in our hair because that was the way we were made. It was ten years since the pain of the sale and I wanted to feel like a farmer again. Derek was glad of my help that day. It was fun enough, in a blokeish way. He gave me a fiver. Later, I drank it away. The twine cut my fingers, my back complained the welts sprang up on my arms again. You wouldn’t know, I guess you’ve never baled but it’s a different kind of ache when it’s not your hay.
Coming to grief
We were most of the way to Middleton when I discovered that grief doesn’t always dress in death. One of my parents said that Three Gates Farm – where six generations had tilled the last of Lancashire’s silty soil – was being sold that week.
In the winter of sixty-three my Grandad made the front page phoning for a snowplough because the lane was six foot deep. Now we were in ‘th’Observer’ again in the back of the classifieds along with all the other lots due ‘Under the Marshall hammer.’
Reading the paper emptied my eyes. I realised whatever childish plans I’d made for those fifty acres of gentle land nudged between mill towns and millstone grit were to be knocked down (for twenty-six grand in the end) in Ye Olde Boar’s Head by an auctioneer I never met.
And by my father’s teenage need to leave that land and make his life his own. And by my uncle’s trying to stay where I was sure we all belonged. And by Grandad’s explaining that even the hencotes would go. So the scheme to keep one to use as a den, that went south as well.
The parlour’s long since seen a cow, there’s nothing like a farm there now but the breath of beasts on a winter day and the sweetness of cowshit and hay surprise that grief back into me.
Inventory
Accounts and correspondence, attached with failing staples, complete the detail of a sale of Live and Dead Farming Stock.
Dead just means inanimate, not deceased.
Then, in the Particulars, I find the line that honours my line, and all they left here ‘The land will be seen to be in a high state of fertility.’
Harvest
“Oh bugger!”, the words thud. I’ve just put the fork through a spud.
I’m showing our son and daughter something I learnt from my father which my Grandad had taught him before.
“You start a bit off, away from the green, keep the fork away from the tubers, you want to lift ‘em, not pierce ‘em, and they’ll not store if you fork ‘em, they’ll be no good if you fork ‘em’.”
Again the fork sinks, again the soil shifts and this time a big‘un gets stuck on a tine. “Oh bugger!” I thud before I’m stood up and quick as an echo the lad pipes up with “That’s what our Grandad said when he put his fork through a spud.”
1 I discovered Pome only a couple of months ago and am enjoying the poems very much: an interesting range and they are short, even very short. As I understand it, Matthew (Matt) Ogle originally posted the poems some years ago and the project has restarted via Tiny Letter.
Here is an Issa haiku, translated by Robert Hass. Since I am a paid-up member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to House Dust, it speaks to me …
Don’t worry, spiders, I keep house casually
2 Monostich – a poem or epigram of one single line. The title is important and may be long, longer even than the poem. My recent example from a course I’m doing:
While it rained, we went out and put the poster on trees and lamp posts in theneighbourhood
It needs heart and courage (lebh in Hebrew) to wear a pochet with conviction.
3 Here is a short poem by Carl Tomlinson from his Changing Places. It has a haiku-like quality. Carl is the May guest poet. I look forward to sharing more of his poems with you then.
August
All along the bridleway some kind of rain is trying to shake off the wind. The land feels thinned.
Acacia Publications 