Three Riversdale Poems

Here are three of the ten poems for Riversdale, in situ.  

Lost But Still Visible

How it used to be - apart from the railings.

In Southport over the weekend for my parents' 50th wedding anniversary, a lovely day of champagne and cake and family.  We stayed on the waterfront overlooking the Marine Lake, so we had a landscape in front of us that was layered; sky, sea, beach, tree-covered islands, open water, promenade.  And it occurred to me that this was how this landscape - this waterscape - used to look before it was drained from the 1690s onwards.

The west Lancashire coast used to be a narrow strip of small vulnerable towns on a sandbank/series of high dunes.  I would have loved to see 'inland', a strange dark place called the Moss;  fens, marsh, small island-villages and lagoons of open water. St Cuthbert's body was hidden here from the raiding Norsemen, a furtive torchlit journey by night from island village to island village.  A fragile place; a strong high tide could send water surging ten or fifteen miles 'inland', and in the ugly 1970s suburb of Marshside I could still see the 'cops', a local word for earthen sea defences.  (Got me interested now - I will try and find some of my Mosswalking notes and upload them.)   

And I could see a version of this waterscape from the apartment window.  I once managed to photograph a room that was no longer there, a corner forgotten beneath a bathroom; I will try and find this as well!  The past is all around us and occasionally visible. 

Landscape Readings

I am reading Peter Fleming's account of a journey from Peking to Kashmir in the mid 1930s, 'News From Tartary'.  I find old books very attractive; the faded cloth spines, the heavier pages, the sheer weight of a hard back book.  I often find that these 'undiscovered' books have recently been reissued as part of a 'classic travel writing' series.  

I also find that there is a rhythm to travel writing.  I start the book - and so the journey - without understanding the rhythm and wanting to know everything the writer is trying to tell me.  But there comes a point where I realise that the names and the people don't really mean anything to me, especially as I don't minutely follow the journeys on maps.  This is the point where I would give up the book.  Then I let go of the factual element of the journey and try and follow it emotionally, by trying to understand emotions and experiences, not geographical distances.  Good travel writing does not bog the reader down in place-names and people, but rather allows the emotions of a journey to shine through; physical/landscape description is similar to this.  So that a sense of space and journey is what is left, not names and people.  

Calais

A Calais carved from blue dusks

Streetlights

Cheekbones

The dazzle of fairgrounds blaze

Unexpected trees

Indifferent towers.

And in the morning

The soft streets 

drenched in shadow

and long golden sunlight;

Whores smoking their uncertain way home

Pale as sunlight

Their dark pimps

Still guarding, fierce, stubbled.  

The second section needs some work; but this from two very short journeys down a shabby sidestreet near the old port, late July 2009.  

Eardisland

16th century building, window detail, Eardisland

Some time yesterday in a garden in Eardisland, a half-timbered village near here.  I am looking at ways of incorporating text into landscape; from large blocks of 3D text - probably impractical - to small poetic interventions and suggestions alongside pathways or in hidden spaces.  I am also looking at 'barn' poems - work which is site-specific and refers to the immediate experience of place - and some window poems which will make the view through a window take on new depth.  Hopefully my contribution to the h.Art 'Art in Nature' event at the garden will form a small journey - or series of poetic halts - in itself.  www.riversdalegardens.co.uk

The Hanging Gate

After the Great War, my mother's aunt ran a pub called the Hanging Gate in Salford.  My grandmother was staying there when she met my grandfather.  My sister-in-law and her partner now live in a smart flat on Salford Quays, a stone's throw from the rougher side of town where Doddington Street was; it has now vanished and been replaced by a rundown 1980s council estate.  On Saturday afternoon I walked from the Quays to Doddington Lane, which is all that survives - the name - of that area.  

I was walking between worlds, a hot stormy afternoon of sticky streets and heavy air, waiting for the storm to break.  I was walking backwards in time, tracing streets my grandmother knew in 1920, trying to see survivors of that time.  Street names, a church tower, a broader pattern of streets swollen for increased traffic.  Nothing to see, just graffiti and litter and modern decay.  I found Doddington Lane but no Doddington Street.  

It is 4.30 in another Salford.

Warm, a cast-over day, a work day.

A Saturday for shoppers and fat cars,

a view from a balcony.

4.30, they would have been dusting

polishing glasses

woodwork and brass

wiping stained glass clean for five.

Checking the pumps, the damp of the cellar,

cool on a day like today

(Even now I am drawn to cellars)

cobbles in earth, as if drowning.

The beer's brassy depths

settled and calm in dark vats

awaiting parties, laughter, 5pm.

I see my grandmother's room

settled and calm above the old words

saloon, snug, bar.

A room jammed into roofbeam, slate-space,

a Lowry rattle of window

opening onto chimney pots, brickwork, slops lane.  

And yet

Of the old city nothing survives above ground.  

Doddington Lane of the old names remembers

Youth and shaved heads and a wilderness of dogs.  

Landscapes and Music

We have had two days of pub rock from a beer festival here.  Not bad music and not badly played, but dull, old-fashioned, run of the mill.  Predictable, obvious.  The only piece that brought me up short was the Irish famine ballad 'The Fields of Athenry'.  It may sound obvious and predictable to play Irish folk music to an audience of beer  drinkers, but the context made me pause.  I have always heard Irish folk in (Liverpool) pubs, where it has real resonance as the music of poverty, despair and above all exile; but listening in Wales it had anti-colonial echoes, the music of history.  And I was reminded that even in the souvenir shops of Dublin this music was the sound of the country, that however weary and jaded the sound at least old songs and therefore historical memories were being kept alive, along with the skills to play traditional instruments.  How to maintain this without the overwhelming sense of political injustice (and even horror) is the key; but the Irish seem to have managed it.  

And I have been thinking about landscapes and music with regard to Liverpool in another context.  It always fascinated me as a child that anyone outside Liverpool listened to the Beatles, as they seemed so rooted in the city.  Their songs are full of references to landscapes and real places, along with the word play that characterises the city.  Why would anyone in America listen to that?  A strange idea, I know.

The Jackdaw's Tale

A monologue written for the Knighton Serendipity Festival in July.  I hoped to capture town mood and complexity, hidden lives, sunny cobbled yards and hot streets.  In 500 words!  Give or take.  It is bright and breezy and draws heavily on Under Milk Wood, as a lot of writing does these days, from 'Penny Lane' to Alan Bennett.

See all of town from up here.  Clouds on the hills, slow moving as old rivers, a Knighton day, bright as pies and dark as secrets.

   

Sun comes up, Young Evans is late for the late train - which is late.  Lucky it’s late every morning.  

Susan Jones and Wayne Thomas arguing again, look.  She could do better.  Give her a kiss, lad, say sorry.  

There’s Mr Peter Harris from Barclays, smart as a new pin.  Likes a sup with the lads, watches the match in the Plough on good days.  Woke up in Swansea once dressed as a mermaid, they won’t like that in the bank.  

Long Meg from the hill farm, in town for wine gums and dry peas.  Turns at Tuffins, bumps into James Robinson, visitor, stout boots; quick sorry, walks on, never forgets her eyes.  

Wayne Thomas, look, slouches by the clock tower, knows he’s in the wrong.  Nods at Dai Redbrick, in town for his hair, fresh from the rolling fields, not used to dry land.  

Lunchtime tummies rumble.  Costcutter girls run ragged, sandwiches out by the gallon.  Mr Pugh takes his pint in the George and checks his watch against Tom Brass the Milk.  

Hot and quiet, hot and quiet.  Asleep in the old school artists dream of paint and underwear.  Bells ring quietly in antique shops.  Stanley Paris trims Dai Redbrick, thinks of his watering.  Mrs Billie Williams with her organics and her good skin, gazes lustful at Mr Hughes the Paint, working opposite.  Really Mr Tom Lewis, on the run from another sour marriage.  Waves a brush and plots escape.    

Hot and quiet, hot and quiet.  Three women off the Shrewsbury train, here for tea in the house at the top of the hill. Cousin Ernest, home on his half-day, thinks of cream cakes and cousins.  

Hot blue sky and steep roofs.  Mr Edwards’ cat, look, fast asleep above his geraniums.  Children off the noisy bus, all suckipops and cigarettes like their parents, growing fast and thinking naughty.  Costcutter girls are polite but firm, no alcohol sold and no more than three dozen in the shop at any one time.  Poppi Thomas, does the cooking now their mother’s gone but no relation if you ask, calls in for fish paste and soap for tomorrow’s tea.  

Those ladies have reached Cousin Ernest’s house, look, all out of breath with the view.  Tea’s laid, scones and butter and jams.  Staying over, are they, or heading for the late train?  

Lamps being lit, pubs open again.  Tom Brass early in the George.  Wayne Thomas clutches Mr Edwards’s geraniums, off to do the Right Thing by Susan Jones.  Mrs Billie Williams lays the table for one and thinks bad thoughts as Mr Hughes take his overalls down.  Young Evans walks from the train past Mr Pugh, clicking the padlocks in the bank.  

Night falls, soft as eyes closing.  Tom Brass on his uncertain way home, waves unseen at Mrs Billie Williams.  Stanley Paris falls asleep in his roses, dreams of razors.  Wayne Thomas is forgiven, for the last time.   Clouds on the hills, slow moving as old rivers, a do-nothing day, a Knighton day.  

Cities and Melancholy

Stone Angel, Venice, October 2003

I have been thinking for some time of collecting my thoughts on cities, especially in contrast to the rural environment we now live in.  I have been thinking especially of Venice, a city I have visited only once, in the October of 2003 to celebrate my 40th birthday.  City-visiting to mark milestone birthdays is a good tradition; I was in Vancouver to celebrate my 30th and we were in Prague for my partner's 30th in 2001.  

Some cities have a greater pull on the soul than others; writing recently about sea-cities I wondered if this was due to an air of melancholy and lost greatness, what Orhan Pamuk calls 'a palpable air of ancient purpose'. His book on Istanbul has an undercurrent of melancholy and seems to suggest that gloom seeps through all aspects of the city, from architecture to the character of the inhabitants.  Istanbul, Venice, are they melancholy cities?  Can a place have an innate mood?  Is it about decay or dereliction, so are ruins innately melancholy?

What gives a city its mood?  Most modern cities are lively and bustling, most British cities certainly are either busy or hoping to be regenerated, even under the present economic downturn; there is a fashionability about urban life that transcends economics.   I suppose places are haunted by our knowledge; we bring our ghosts, born of our awareness of history, to a landscape.  Does Prague's Ghetto feel any different from any other group of narrow, just-off-the-city-centre streets?  No, not unless we bring to it a knowledge of history, an awareness that this was to be Hitler's dark memorial to European Jewry, the only place they were to be remembered.  

Knighton Serendipity

Small brook, Knighton; rocks and water all that remain of my images.  

Notes from a walk through Knighton, a journey to collect ideas for a monologue for the Serendipity Festival in July, when I hope to have a short piece performed as part of a walk of historical monologues through the town.  This kind of work overlaps areas of interest for me; urban exploration and 'urban aesthetics', inner journeys and stories and (in this case) family history; my monologue will have something to do with my mother's family visiting relatives here - but I don't know when or why.  

I have written about Knighton before in this blog but this was my first deliberate exploratory visit.  I took a lot of notebook-photographs - narrow Gothic doorways, dust, buried windows - but almost nothing came out. That's what comes of using a camera you don't understand!

The steep slate roofs, white paintwork and old rustic stone of the railway station, now a vet's.  A warm, still afternoon.  The river Teme, shallow, peat-stained, clear and swift, running beneath the road.  Yellow brick and red brick houses, thick with dust, unwashed windows, the dust-becoming-earth of busy roads.  A smaller brook rushing to join the Teme, many small bridges, a stream full of blossom.  A dipper.  

Brookside Square, once the site of the police station.  A 1977 Jubilee bench, paint rubbed and wood smoothed by countless bottoms, visitors, resters.  The war memorial, Turners and Ellises and Wagstaffs, names tumbling through the town's history like leaves.  reminded me of William Eyton Jones (my grandfather) probably knowing the men commemorated on the war memorial in Llangollen.  

Mrs Dalloway, a story told as an internal monologue; a model for this piece.

A journey through a town suggestive of lives and families passing through a town, as if the walk took decades.  

Ernest's family in a 1930s suburban house, waiting for tea; tablecloths, silver, wiped plates, cake, dusk, anxiety.  

Sunshine.  What year were they here?  What time of year?  Why did they come?

Cigarette smoke on the breeze.  

Welsh architecture - whitewashed walls and black woodwork.  The solidity of Welsh Victoriana.  Knighton as a town surrounded by steep fields and thick woods.  

How busy were the streets?  Less vehicle traffic, more people?  Streets of muddy farmers, their rolling gait, as if unused to dry land.  

The Clock Tower and up the Narrows to Castle Road, loops through the quiet part to Nelson Square.  Barns, stables, stone workshops - agricultural buildings buried into the fabric of the later town.   This part reminded me of St Ives; silent streets, cool sunshine, a high blue sky.  Whitewashed houses with blue/pale green or black woodwork.  An art shop/gallery.  

Poppies.

Dappled light on the page, sunshine through young leaves.  Sunlight. 

A jumble of narrow, twisting streets, tumbled slate roofs, chimney pots.  Jackdaws swinging on the wind, stretching down to the highest chimney pot.  

A ruffle of Welsh and English names, as indistinct as borders, as impersonal, as meaningless.  

End of Winter Musings: Cold Nice

A series of warm sunny days and it feels as though the year is struggling towards the warmth.   My year seems divided into hoping for a hot summer and hoping for a cold winter, which is why perhaps I am constantly surprised by my own pleasure in autumn and especially spring.

In March 2005 we spent a few days in a thawing Nice.  The streets were narrow and cold and sharply, crisply, divided between bright sunshine and dense shadow.  The hotels on the way up to the Villa Matisse and the Musee Chagall seemed half empty and the streets seemed full of real Nicois; walking babies, exercising dogs in a tiny gravel park reminiscent of one of the more densely packed areas of Paris.  In the old town the sunlight was thin on the facades, a soft uncertain light picking up on the faded pinks and blues.  The churches were cold and smelled of old incense; the ice cream stall was doing a half-hearted trade, but down on the shingle there were American girls sunbathing.   We made the most of our few days and went out to Vence and St Paul de Vence to see Chagall's grave and Matisse's chapel.  In these Provencal foothills it was appreciably warmer.  

These memories seem quintessentially Mediterranean to me, recalling a time of thin sunlight and cold shadow, of the land turning towards summer, of the light sparkling on the sea.  

End of Winter Musings: Ionia

I have been reading Freya Stark's book Ionia, about her journeys and explorations on the Turkish coast of the Aegean.  She uses Herodotus as a guide and describes a landscape of abandoned cities and intense heat; herds of goats wander through buried streets, shepherds sit on carved friezes in the shade.  She sits on dry grass headlands next to ruined stumps of temples and gazes out to sea. Very appropriate for early spring reading, this evocation of heat, dust, the blue sea, Greek and Turkish history, lost and forgotten empires.  

But the book was written in the early 1950s and is itself now evocative of a vanished world. There are rumbles of present history in the book, the removal of Greek people from Turkey and the arrival of Muslim Macedonians to the towns.  And now much of this quiet pastoral landscape is buried again, beneath Turkey's holiday industry; I would like to overlay Stark's map of Ionian and Greek towns with a modern one of roads and holiday destinations.  This is the first book I have stopped halfway through and started again, so powerful are her evocations of small journeys to hot and abandoned cities.  

End of Winter Musings: Virginia

In a doctor's waiting room at the end of last year I found a copy of an American railway magazine and an article about railway lines in Virginia.  The article was illustrated with some good photographs which placed the railway in a broader landscape, so that the train was a tiny element in the huge wooded valleys.    The article was about the lines in winter and especially at night, so on the pictures the trains sent a small weak beam of light into a vast impenetrable snowy American night; the writer spoke of abandoned branch lines and ghost towns abandoned when the coal ran out; of towns abandoned by the railway which runs through them but never stops; of great loops of railway running up into the hills to derelict mining towns.  And all under a deep blanket of midwinter snow.  The writer conjured a time of winter darkness, cold, empty forests, closed towns, a weak train light getting stronger, the mournful blast of an air horn...

There is a magic and a poetry in lost railway lines; we have a railway spur here which has been closed since the 1960s; a summer walk, I think.  

Salford Quays

Snow showers and driving sleet.  Thin ice on the water of the dock.  A post-industrial bridge, vast, derelict, repainted, a web or a bird's nest of red girders in a grey sky - snow driving through it, redundant Cold War architecture, a bridge left behind by history; as if time has swept round it.  'My very own Tyne bridge,' said Paul.  

Echoes of Amsterdam in a side canal.  Sculpted trees and a cold grey light, a silver quality to the air, the black water.  An open expanse of softened, uneasy water.  Canoeists, geese, swans, coots.  Giant, distant hulk of Manchester United, the bright red of the nameboard the only colour in a drab waterscape.  Water dominates this space;   the buildings lower, the water wider.  

A war memorial to sailors lost from these walls, this cold water.  A ruffle of red poppies.  

An expected tide of old-time dock waste; dead plastic, tar-stained, saturated woods, oil-soaked, splintered; haunted by a pied wagtail, cold and sifting, a rag-picker bird.  

A rhythm of trees, the rattle of dry leaves, a syncopation of landscaping like a drum roll around the Lowry Outlet.  A charm of goldfinches clattering the trees, a rare warmth of birds, a richness of bird life.  

A giant stretch of white girder bridge, a tubular arm reaching through snow across cold water.  The vast Lowry plaza, full of Spanish mums and tottering Japanese tourists.  A silence of snow, gigantic folded buildings, a reminder of East European cold; the idea of cold itself.  Snow in the wind, a thickening like an ingredient in the sky, the cold, the afternoon.  A woman waving from a balcony of coloured lights, the day darkening, failing, the promise of tea.

And with the dark ('the fading' too English, too soft, too chiaroscuro) a different landscape emerges; a light-scape, a view of reflected lights and gleams on icy roads.  A landscape of reflection and warmth - a Bladerunner world of soft music, big glasses, slow moving cars, the illusion of bullet-proof; and ice, ice in the wind, silence and cold and balcony candle light.

with thanks to Paul and Ali