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