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on Salford Quays, a stone's throw from the rougher side of town where Doddington Street was; it has now vanished and been replaced by a rundown 1980s council estate.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.