Peak Poem # 1 : High Peak
He stands there
Face folded in and flattened
Rock face and rucksack
Wind washing away his words
Over Glossop’s jaundiced roofs
The path winds away
Freeform or furrowed
Trench-foot soldiers marching
Towards Pennine pre-history
It used to be all fields round here
No, it used to be forests
And deserts
It used to be seabed and sanctuary
She sits there
Legs folded over and furnished
Scrubland and salami
Rain rinsing away her sins
Under serpentine passes
The gate stands upright
Barrier or boundary
Landlocked anarchists meeting
Reclaiming lost history
It used be our land here
No, it used to be nobody’s
It still is
And no hand can sign ownership
Peak Poem # 2 : Map Re-birth
Its foetal position
Demarcates the borders
Curled around for protection
Against the forces of man
The world outside the womb
Cotton, steel and clay
Water, soil and blood
Boxed in by design
The contours describe the past
Glacial ghosts haunt these hills
Water
Soil
And blood
Water
Soil
And blood
Belief is no substitute
For this landscape
Carved from chemical re-alignment
Molecular moors, amniotic streams
Lifeblood
Brotherhood
As it should be
Kinder Scout
Bleaklow
Saddleworth Moor
Death has visited here before
Human stains
Yet life remains
Water
Soil
And blood
As it should be
The Fisher-Man
He is not a fisher
Of men
Not this fellar
He is a fisher of
Fish
Sand Tracks
These silver trees bear witness
To our vanities and self-delusions
Here in the old quarry where I carved my name
And where G.F. Ormsby carved his in 1903
Where a cross stands at the foot the cliff
Garlanded in the colours of the boy’s regiment
Wayne O, MUFC, 1995
This valley of aspic sand, excavated
To construct vainglorious totems
For desert Gods yet unborn
When these fossil rocks first fused
Before there were men or Gods
Before our fathers even left the sea
What marks of men are left once the snow falls
And the leaves drop as silent as ghosts?
Calligraphy For Beginners
He pretended to like calligraphy
Thought that was the kind of thing
That’d impress her, make him look
All cultivated, when in fact
He could barely write his own name
In symbols every pre-school kid knew
He painted a few Chinese and Arabic letters
On a scrap of phony papyrus
Meaningless to his eyes and hers
Yet in that act of duplicity
He discovered the real beauty of art
Of line and form expressing
Not truth, as much as abstraction
In this appreciation he took shape
And wrote himself into history
Hide n’ Seek
Go and place the flowers on the stone
Whisper those incantations here
I can read your lips, I can see your thoughts
Go and dress that grave for tea
Buy it cheap wine
Feed it best steak
There’s a few bob left in that old tin
He won’t miss it, he never does
The girl in the photograph died of TB
When she was fifteen
Right here in this room
In nineteen thirty three
The linen cupboard smelled of damp
The plaster was jaundiced and cracked
A draught blew in through the window pane
I caught a fever there myself when I was six
Saw the ceiling rose ensnare a fly
Thorny tendrils crept down the walls
And took hold of my feet
She looked at me lying there and said
‘Is it time for me? Is it time for me?’
Go and place the flowers on the grass
Sing your lullabies and lovesongs there
Dress your daughters in lace and frills
Feed their bellies and their minds
There’s a fiver in the old man’s coat
Hung up under the stairs
He won’t miss it, he never does
Who Are Ya?
Hard stone.
Cold water.
Harsh light.
Dull shadow.
He joins the crowd and feels alive.
He claps his hands and shouts and cheers.
He elevates himself, anoints himself.
God is in me, God flows through me.
Hear his voice and feel his power.
Hard boiled. Soft focus.
Vague outlines.
See the shape of the man against the multitude.
I am here. Here I am.
See me. Hear me.
‘Who are ya? Who are ya? Who are ya?’
He leaves the crowd and feels dead.
He puts his head down. He pulls his collar up.
Against the world. Against himself.
God has deserted him. Where is God tonight?
In this house. In this body.
Cold blood. Hard tissue.
Hard stone. Cold water.
I believed in you because there was nothing
Before you or after you.
Before me or after me.
Just a vague outline of a man
Lost in the loneliness of other men
‘Who are ya? Who are ya? Who are ya?’
Purification
When it comes my time to die
Play James and Bobby Purify
To wash away my sins forever
And dress my feet in finest leather
Tie the laces tight together
Fix my tie and clean my teeth
Pretend that I had true belief
Make me look all spic and span
Lash my body with fake tan
Light a candle, say a prayer
Place a pebble on my chair
And gather round but never sit
Pretend that you once gave a shit
Hold your nose and count to three
Deliver up my eulogy
Bite your tongue and hide your hate
Tell them all how I was great
And ask the priest to sanctify
With James and Bobby Purify
For My Nans
Sweet Annie Nolan
Sweet Annie Jones
Sweet treacle toffee
Sweet senile moans
The bungalow’s half empty
With everything she owns
Sat in the day room
She’s all skin and bones
There’s racing on the telly
And nobody phones
There’s cricket on the courtyard
Traffic in the cones
Ladders in her stockings
Sitting on the wall
Kettle in the microwave
Barely there at all
The milk is in the dryer
You hear her deathly moans
The ash is on her apron
She’s all skin and bones
Sweet Annie Nolan
Sweet Annie Jones
Sweet apple crumble
She’s all skin and bones
Ataraxia
The night comes, slowly
The clouds dissolve
The sun dips down towards the horizon
The light still shining on the waves
The day disappears as we turn
Turning but not feeling ourselves turn
And the breeze feels colder now
And the waves sound louder now
And I turn away from the sea
And I breathe heavily
Because there is something of death
In every sunset
Each sunset
Feels like a wake
A farewell to the future
A mourning for the day’s light
Meat
The hut where we waited
For our dad to shower
Smelled of sweet grease
Of sweat, soap and steam
We’d sit on the wooden bench
Adjacent to an entire wall
Plastered with pornography
A pink pussy mosaic
The dockers would smile at us
As they dressed, half-naked
Scrubbed clean of the chemicals
They’d unloaded to be taken
By trucks and trains
To ICI’s Castner Kelner
And Rocksavage plants
They’d crack jokes and tease us
But the wall of flesh fascinated me
Sat with my younger sister
Trying not to look at all those tits
But sneaking quick blimps
Before being taken to the pub
For a coke and a packet of crisps
Waiting for me mum to pick us up
The butchers where we waited
For me mum to be served
Smelled of sweet blood
Of sawdust, skin and sinew
We’d stand next to sides of beef
Hung on the white tiled walls
Exposing raw flesh and fat
A pink-yellow mass of food
The butcher would wink at us
As he wrapped without looking
Parcels of mince, chops and sausage
In crisp brown paper
To be taken home and cooked
On silver black rings
In thin steel pans
He’d wipe blooded hands on a striped apron
But the bubbles of fat intrigued me
Stood with my younger brothers
Trying not to stare at the carcass
But sneaking sly glances
Before we were taken to me nan’s
For plates of cold mince and runny spuds
Waiting for me dad to finish his beer
Sunblast
From the radio
Cuneiform inscriptions
Transcribing Gilgamesh
Outside the women’s college
Headscarf matriarchs
And young concubines
Forbidden no longer
Express their supplication
In elegant camouflage
If you count all the leaves
On all the trees
In this small car park
How many would there be?
And if every hieroglyph
And clay indentation
Told a story so familiar
To those we already know
Would we be less impressed
With the ancients?
Their mysteries and rituals
Just another way of hiding
Another form of deceit
Written out to transform
Thought into symbolic shapes
From the café
The drone of smalltalk
Drifts into dead air
And hangs over the street
The same streets as Nineveh
Cobbled together with myths
To make sense of the world
I can smell the blossom
I can feel the strength of the sun
On my skin, in my bones
I can hear the great rivers
The Tigris and the Mersey
Flowing through to the sea
And that is enough for me
Route Sign
The coast road took us along past Porlock
Up into the hills where we paid a toll
I was indignant at paying it
This surcharge on beauty
A tax on our limited freedoms
(Such as they are)
At the sea we threw pebbles
Took the lift up to the café
From Lynmouth to Lynton
Drove back in the rain
Took wrong turns in Exmoor
Unfamiliar terrain
What surcharge on beauty
What tax on happiness
Can spoil a day like this?
Tunnel Visions
Black stone
Green rock
Red brick
Silver rain
From one world to another
From one life to the next
The light blinds me
The dark scares me
Black reflected back on glass
I feel the need to reach out
And touch what I know isn’t there
Feel the cold, infinite space
Between myself and the world
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No matter how much modesty you relate of yourself, the long and short of it all is that you write bloody good poetry.
ReplyDeleteI would have liked to comment on each of the poems here, but you’re too lazy to separate them into separate posts.
So I’ll comment as if reviewing a volume (which, in effect, I am).
What I like about these poems in general is their unEnglishness. The first Peak poem is a good example: The narrative doesn’t suggest an English peak; though the term ‘peak’ suggests an English expression. The figures in the poems could be anywhere in the world and the figure moves about, within each poem. For example using ‘foot soldier’ is great, that is what a walker does: soldier on against the inner and outer forces of nature. But also the term conjures up images of war, and WW1 in particular. This seems to beg the question ‘Why do we do this?’ Also we are not given any detail about the figure. You use the description ‘she’, but the line ‘Scrubland and salami’ suggests (albeit in a crudely comical way) an amaphrodite. This falls in well with that theme of freedom which the poem (to me, anyway) suggests. That is affirmed by the last line.
Peak poem 2 maintains that optimism of the first. There is a sense of bleakness that runs throughout (this is a very English thing) but the rejection of the negative comes with the line ‘Yet life remains’ and the affirmation of that with ‘as it should be’.
‘The Fisher-Man’ is a very American type poem. It has its humour and that is the problem with these poems in that they can be dismissed easily. Whatever your intent, the fact remains that the poem can be read on many level, the role of the poet, being just one.
Sand Tracks is outstanding. This starts with a line that actively invites the reader into your world. ‘The silent silver trees bear witness’ demands that the reader bears witness too. Increasingly each line unfolds a world where the reader has never been and has never imagined.
‘To our vanities and self-delusions’ forewarns the reader that they will not understand and thus forces the reader to attempt an understanding.
The following five lines begin with a signpost (‘Here in the old quarry . . . ‘) but what follows, up to ‘What marks of men are left once the snow falls’ is your world. ‘What marks . . .’ is a statement of what the reader should understand thus far. But they won’t understand as you do.
‘And the leaves drop as silent as ghosts?’ A brilliant last line except for the inclusion of ‘the’. The question mark suggests that you don’t know (and neither does the reader). So the statement has nothing definite about itself. Yet the inclusion of the definite article is awkward and doesn’t feel right. The question must lose ‘the’ if it is to maintain its ambiguity (which I think is the better) or lose the question-mark and make the line a definite statement.
This is my favourite of yours and rates as one of the best poems I’ve read (I cut-and-pasted this bit about Sand Tracks, should it sound familiar).
‘Calligraphy For Beginners’ is written in a very English way; well the narrative is. In that sense it shares something with less metropolitan poets like Simon Ambridge. This is quite odd because the theme is far from parochial and the layout has a sonnet feel to it, where by the turn in the argument is at the line ‘Yet in that act of duplicity’. It is a skilled piece of writing because the narrative, for the first nine lines is inward looking (in that it is the effect of the character has in taking up calligraphy. The last five lines denote the effect of calligraphy on the character. This gives the poem a feel of the fable. At one sense the poem seems simplistic but it is far from shallow.
‘Hide n’ Seek’ is one where you use language to great strength. The poem is, overall is very tight. It has a feeling of darkness about it in the same way that the nursery rhyme, Ring-A-Ring-A-Rosies, does. The ‘it’ in lines 6 and 7 is great as the reader is not sure what that ‘it’ is. There is a lot of playing with time here and for me it is the flow of time and its lack of consistency that I get from the poem.
‘Who Are Ya?’ has an Irish feel to it, it reminds me a bit of the Cork poet Maurice O’ Reardon. The flow of it is great and the repetition works well as the reader gets the feeling that they cannot be sure that they fully comprehend what is going on.
The poem is very playful on the senses.
With ‘Purification’ we are back with the nursery rhyme feel. The way that the poem is laid out is great because we are presented with a grown-up’s view in a child-like manner. The rhymes work brilliantly. Oddly enough, this poem does not have that feeling of darkness and seems to treat its subject in a light-hearted way.
‘For My Nans’ cries out for a tune. As a lyric it works well and I could imagine some bearded fella with one of those Shetland jumpers joyfully singing this in a small pub in the middle of nowhere, with a similarly attired audience joining in on the refrain. As a poem it has that celebratory feel to it that a lyric should have. Even the despondent lines like ‘And nobody phones’ have a feeling of jollity to them.
Pathos, I suppose!
‘Ataraxia’ is, in my opinion, the weakest of the poems here. I think it is the use of ‘the’ and ‘and’. That said though it is a clever device because it suggests the freedom from care that the poem conjures up in the title.
Not my favourite, but not crap either. It probably gains something with re-reading.
The parochialism of ‘Meat’ is great; the use of ‘me’ instead of ‘my’, for instance. It has a strong musical feel to it but also it is one that an audience would benefit more from hearing it read-out.
There is a feeling of disgust with sexual imagery to this, which can come over as that Christian prudery. That said a line such as ‘A pink pussy mosaic’, which goes beyond petty double entendre, suggests that the concern is with the image only. This is one that can be read on many levels. Not least of all on the use of language, which is very precise.
‘Sunblast’ reminds me of Heaney, only it’s better. The portrait approach to this (drawing images with words) is skilfully done. The language is great and never goes above the level of the subject, by trying to elevate it onto some mystical plane.
‘Route Sign’ is great. It is a protest poem that does what poetry should do and that is create an otherworldliness in the reader. Thus it could conceal the theme. It is good to come across something that makes a (social?) statement without being hectoring.
‘Tunnel Visions’ suggests that it carries on from ‘Sunblast’ but I think it has that theme of going in and out of worlds, both internal and external. Using a car journey to portray that is, probably, not novel, but the way that it is executed in this poem is. I think that these last two poems should come under one title but be treated as separate within that form.