Three Night Walks: 3 | Andrew Hirst

The third (and last) poem in Andrew Hirst’s Three Night Walks (from The Footing, due autumn 2012).

*

The last streetlamp at last far behind me
a carbon lump of land rises and dips, the residue
from a fable, although more tentative now.
This is the one I knew when we went back late
and caught the icy moon between bare branches
napping on the still lake, the blue black
of Pascal, thick breath clouds out, who threw his hands
over his last candle to silence it, a child’s tremulous murmur.

As I approach still further down the road
an old ewe, whose patch this truly is, bellows out a warning
- there’s no quietness here or anywhere tonight.
In deficit, the thin contemporary distance flattens
unfamiliar names on dry tombstones, a white alarm beckons.
I’m drawn to it just as I am to water
- the sound keeps me alive.

As if still in wet ink, I suddenly remember
those beautiful lines from St. John of the Cross
- There he stayed sleeping and I caressed him
and the fanning of the cedars made a breeze
And then right at the end the bit about being sedated by lilies
- I follow the moorland curvature until
residual light blooms over in the next valley beyond.
I don’t know where I am nor where
any of this is leading, but feeling my way over
the density or lightness of things I do not have
to think of memory very much
of foxhole, shattered meadow, oak’s bare branches.

As the late bus home pulls down onto empty outskirts
I again begin to draw the future from memory
- at Hope Wakes I watched a girl winched down
onto a white mare all the male villagers swished
with oak fronds as a symbol of renewed virility.
I don’t know if it works in reverse but within the year
my best friend became glacial and moved away.
We never spoke again but through photographs
- our marooned, irregular faces full of coyness.

*

Listen to Andrew Hirst reading this poem here.

A Reckoning | Chris Jones

Two men move from church to church in a remote valley looking for the remnants of Catholic wall art to destroy. Chris Jones’s sequence ‘Death and the Gallant’, which will appear in the forthcoming Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing, explores iconoclasm in seventeenth century English culture. The poems focus on the relationship between Brown and the narrator as they travel towards a final reckoning. This is the second poem in the sequence.

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I doze through storms in a godly farmer’s barn
while Brown lies coddled in his mistress’s bed.
I shouldn’t bemoan my hard and dusty stead
but when Brown crows in the grey light of dawn
More haste, old man, I’ve ached less o’ mornings.
A seven-mile trudge under skies of lead
toward a spire craning high above the woods
like a heron eyeing a poppled stream.

More reckoning – swift effacement and flames -
as if what’s blighted can be razed outright
and yet my wife is fourteen years a shade,
my five children I hold to my left-hand side
though to give each girl a name and age
would mean to clear the long grass from the grave.

*

To hear Chris Jones read this poem, click here.

Stannington | James Caruth

The first poem in James Caruth’s sequence Tithes (featured in the anthology The Footing, due from Longbarrow Press spring 2012).

*

Twenty-five years a foot-soldier,
pensioned to this high scrape
of heather and bracken.

Build stone walls
against the slow march of hills. 

Pace out the acreage:
Nethergate, Uppergate, Knoll.

*

You can listen to James Caruth read the poem here.

Princess Street to the Wicker, April 1925 | Rob Hindle

The opening stanzas from Rob Hindle’s ‘Princess Street to the Wicker, April 1925′ (from Hindle’s Flights and Traverses, a collection of five long poems and sequences due to appear in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing in spring 2012). The poem concerns the journey made by members of the Park Brigade, a notorious gang, following the murder of a soldier.

*

There is work going on in the English Pewter Company,
knocking and whirring through the windows, a radio.
On the bridge, green is spouting, nettles and ferns -
there must be rain trapped in the mortar, drip feeding
tap roots, each train’s quake slaking the filaments.
The river shudders, ripples like milk skin.

This is where they found mixing chromium with steel
stopped the steel corroding. 1913, all the world mustering
arms, a knife’s edge. You could throw it in the river,
it would still be there, flashing in the stones like a fish.
In Princess Street, the arches bricked in, windows blackened,
these last terrace houses are shiftless and feral.

They said the blade that killed Jock Plommer was a bayonet
kept in a black case, elbow to fingertip long. As he sits dying
in his doorway and his wife not touching or looking
at the dark wet pooling on her step, faces come with a light,
with their bits of story, the bottles and razors, the lead
and steel of the Park Brigade men, seven or ten of them.

They hit him on the head with a bottle.
They hit him on the head with a child’s scooter.

*

You can listen to Rob Hindle reading the complete poem here. From Hindle’s commentary on the writing of Flights and Traverses:

Over the course of about a year, I completed five walks and produced five poems, or sequences of poems, which attempted to illuminate both the events and protagonists relating to those journeys, and my experience of tracing their routes, years after.  I followed the bombing raids of 1940, the funeral cortege of the Chartist Samuel Holberry, and the Park Brigade Gang; and I retraced the journeys of Richard Marsden, an 18th century ancestor immigrant to the city, and Harold Hindle, a great uncle who spent his last years in the South Yorkshire Asylum at Middlewood.

The full commentary can be accessed .

Edgelands | Matthew Clegg

Five tanka from Matthew Clegg’s Edgelands (the opening sequence in The Footing, an anthology of poems about walking and landscape due from Longbarrow Press in spring 2012) 

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Edgelands. Showrooms, factories
Lapsing into pylon fields.
Where the road bends, fresh debris.
A hubcap like a felled star.
A severed tail. Grey. Still puffed.

*

Opposite the bakery,
A steelworks. Smells of muffins
Mingle with scorching metal.
In the road, men in visors
Cadge lights from men in hairnets.

* 

Hagg Hill Lane climbs sharply
On the turn. The inmost edge
Is cruelly scarred with welts
And divots. Not like a road,
More some cooled, volcanic flow.

* 

Under a dank railway bridge,
He can’t make a connection
Between a white bra and panties
And an oil-singed workman’s glove.
Does he mean can’t, or won’t?

*

Against the violence of drills,
Shunts and clatters, the love song
Ghosted from the factory floor
Makes him stop, squat in the road,
And add his voice to the tune.

*

You can listen to Matthew Clegg reading this selection here. A further selection of poems from Edgelands (recorded at the Derwent Poetry Festival in 2009) is available here. From Clegg’s commentary on the sequence:

On one level, Edgelands is about a man dealing with a painful separation by taking a series of walks into his locale – the edge of north Sheffield. On another, it is a work of what is now being called ‘psychogeography’. How do our built environments express elements of our consciousness or unconsciousness? How are we affected by the spaces we inhabit or move through? The environments in the sequence are not conventional pastoral. This is the world of abandoned car parks and factories; industrial estates; common land and woods on the edge of housing developments; all the neglected paths and conduits out of the city.

The full commentary can be accessed here.