A Poetry Spring

I've had an excellent couple of months as far as poetry's concerned, not least the chance to go to readings by some of the country's most celebrated poets, including ... 

... Don Paterson ... 

... Simon Armitage ...

Photo by Tim Woolf

 ... Alice Oswald ... 

and Caroline Bird, all of whom I've been privileged to hear, courtesy of Bristol Poetry Institute and the Lyra Bristol Poetry Festival. 

In particular, Alice Oswald, who was at St George's, blew me away, as she always does. I think this must have been the fourth or fifth time I'd seen her read, and as always, her performance was mesmerising. Except you can't really call it a reading because Oswald speaks her poems from memory. I was quite near the front of the audience this time, and I watched carefully as she announced the title of each poem, paused and then disappeared somewhere else altogether. Pure concentration. I was especially delighted to hear her speak extracts from 'In Memoriam' and most of all, 'Dart', as I'd travelled to Bath back in the early 2000s, I think, to hear her read it and she'd been unable to appear. It's been a lasting disappointment.

Walking back down Park Street to the car park I realised I had my hand clamped over my mouth. This has happened before, notably when I've seen my heroes perform; it's the principle symptom of Bowieitis, which is also known as Leonard Cohen Syndrome. I'm not sure if it's because I get dumbstruck or if I'm trying to stop my heart leaping out of my body through my mouth. I don't think it had happened after a poetry reading before, but there I was, having to remove it to speak to my fellow-IsamBard, David Johnson, at the bus stop. 

Talking of the IsamBards, we've been out and about, conducting a fourth poetry walk through the centre of Bristol, from Queen Square to Millennium Square, again as part of the Lyra Bristol Poetry Festival. Unfortunately we had to do battle against a rather loud funfair, which wasn't there when two of our members scoped out the route a couple of months ago, but poetry prevailed and our audience were enthusiastic throughout.

Cwtch the collie - photobombeuse extraordinaire - trying to include herself in the performance at the entrance to Queen Square

Dominic, David and Pameli by the Seamen's Mission and Chapel 

Photo by Tim Woolf

The final event of the Poetry Festival was 'City of Words', a showcase presented in partnership with the Bristol Festival of Ideas. It was a special joy to see my friend  Hazel Hammond on stage reading a poem, five years after a stroke that left her with aphasia.  

I read a commissioned poem I'd written called 'Psalm for the unnoticed Places'. It's about the local pockets of edgeland that are so important for wildlife, diversity and our own well-being, and which came into their own during successive lockdowns, when we were unable to travel outside of the city. It was good to have something to work on while I'm between projects.

Equally enjoyable - because it's a joy to see your friends excelling in their craft - have been the smaller readings, book launches and shows. Here's Melanie Branton taking us on a guided tour of 'The Full English' with her knickers on her head ... 

... Lizzie Parker launching her collection, Cormorant, for which I was honoured to write an endorsement, with support from Bob Walton and Claire Williamson ... 

... and Rachel Clyne returning to the city that hosted the launch, a year ago, of her collection, 'You'll Never Be Anyone Else'. 

Elsewhere, the first draft of my forthcoming collection, 'Love the Albatross', has returned from my publishers, Indigo Dreams, and is awaiting my attention. One of its poems has just come home flushed with success, having been highly commended in the 2024 Slipstream Poetry Competition. A second poem can be read here in Fragmented Voices, while a third found a very stylish home in the latest, 20th anniversary edition of 'Abridged', an compelling journal of poems and photographs based in Northern Ireland.

Also - very excitingly - the collection's artwork, by the very talented Katie Marland, is now in the world. It's way too early to reveal it, but here are some photos Katie took on her visit to Bristol City Museum, where - excitingly - staff brought her albatrosses to sketch. Admittedly they weren't Laysan albatrosses - the title of my collection is, of course, a nod to Wisdom the Albatross - but even so, they had, as Katie puts it, 'a LOT of birdy character and helped [her] to learn a lot about the way they work'. My grateful thanks to her and them. 

Horses on Horfield Common (again)

Every now and then I fall down a rabbit hole into the past, sometimes more than once. 

All these years later I remember what a treat it was to spot horses on Horfield Common just before Christmas in 2011, and last Friday there was an echo of that visitation when I saw more horse-drawn vans making camp on the common, alongside the rather more mundane motorised vans, caravans and camper vans that line Kellaway Avenue in these days of scant social housing. 

I was on my way to the reading by Alice Oswald and Kim Moore in town, so couldn't stop for a closer look, and since I was due to drive to Oxford the next day to take Son the Elder to a roboteering event, I concluded, sadly, that I probably wouldn't get a closer look at them. But in the morning, as luck would - or wouldn't - have it, my car started making disconcerting juddering noises before we'd even got as far as the M4, which meant the trip was off, and having driven it rather gingerly  to our garage in Redland, my walk home took me straight past the Common and the new camp there. 

Important, I feel, not to romanticise hard lives; nevertheless, both I and the little girl who used to hang around outside the blacksmiths at the bottom of nearby Bishop Road in the 1960s in the hope of seeing a horse in need of shoeing (but never did), felt all kinds of happy to see horses grazing the common. 

An Arising from the Settee of Suffering

I've spent a lot of time reclining lately, mainly because sitting upright is too agonising. When I hobble round to the surgery, my GP wonders if it could be fibromyalgia that is causing this widespread pain, as well as the increasingly well documented arthritis. Am I under a lot of stress at the moment? 

I wonder if he's come up with this by himself or whether he's swayed by the notes from the physiotherapist. It seems to me that fibromyalgia is treated much the same way as depression was in the 1970s - something women get, and just keep necking the valium, love. And anyhow, I don't really care what they call it; all I care about is that it hurts. 

Maybe, I concede.

I decide my strategy of resting up and only going out when I have to - which is most days anyway - isn't working. Alice Oswald is appearing at the Bristol Poetry Institute and I've missed hearing top poets read their work in Bristol since the demise of the poetry festival. Moreover, the last time we heard her, she was astounding. That evening remains the best reading I've ever been to.








Alice's latest book is 'Nobody', ostensibly about a bit-part player in the Odyssey: the poet who was charged with guarding Clytemnestra by Agamemnon, and subsequently marooned on a rocky island in the middle of the Mediterranean by the queen's lover, Aegisthus. Really it's a paean to the ocean, and as Alice recites it by heart in darkness, I find myself drowning in it. There's not so much as a cough to break the spell. Not a shuffle or a shifting, and when, after an hour, we can finally move, I find I can't. I can barely walk back to the car. Perhaps I should try swimming.

Saturday it's off to the Floating Market on the Kennet and Avon canal at Bradford-on-Avon with Hazel Hammond. I'm delighted to see that despite the manky weather, Dru Marland is doing a roaring trade in art on the tow path. She squeezes in a quick coffee with us between sales, and we repair to the pub for lunch with a haul of thirteen 2019 calendars of boating life between us. Twenty per cent of the profits go to the Floaty Boat Fund, which helps boaters keep their homes afloat when hit by unexpected problems.  You can get yours here.

As we leave the canal, a pair of ravens croak overhead. Hazel hasn't been inside the tithe barn so we drift through its cavernousness in almost darkness.

Back up on the tow path there's a lot of shantying going on, and the lights of the market seem to float through the twilight. 

Twenty days till the year turns and it starts getting lighter again. Not long to go. 

The Romantic Poets and Bristol: A New 'Lyrical Ballads'

Since I broke my leg, I've only got out of bed - or at least off the settee - for poetry.  A marathon 12 hours yesterday at Bath Poetry Cafe's annual event, Voices In The City, was preceded the night before by a remarkable gathering of poets at @Bristol, under the auspices of the Festival of Ideas.  

Both Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth had links with Bristol, and so to celebrate Bristol's year as European Green Capital, 23 of the UK's most prominent poets were invited to respond to poems from Lyrical Ballads, for this reading and a two-part Radio 4 documentary.  

The evening began with a series of introductions including one from Mayor George Ferguson, who spoke about how the evening would celebrate Bristol and the richness of its urban wildlife.  He also mentioned the city's commitment to promoting and developing poetry, especially for children.   Then it was the turn of the poets, the great majority of whom had been able to travel in person, to read their particular poem, each introduced by honey-tongued Ian McMillan, who also read a poem of his own.  

Gillian Clarke, the National Poet of Wales, remarked that it had been a long time since she had taken an entire reading from her pocket, and indeed it was odd to see such luminaries as Makar Liz Lochead, Sir Andrew Motion, Don Paterson, Alice Oswald, John Burnside, Paul Farley, Fleur Adcock, Jean Sprackland, Ruth Padel and Sean O'Brien shuffle on and off the stage as if they were at school assembly.  As much as I was delighted by the opportunity to hear so many of our best contemporary poets, I wished the event had been divided into several throughout the year, so that the poets had a chance to introduce us to some of their other work, to give these new poems some context.  My guess is that it was done like this partly to create a one-night extravaganza and partly to facilitate recording, but after a while I began to feel slightly sick, as if I'd opened a big tin of Quality Street and eaten all the orange and strawberry creams, one after the other.

My favourite poem was Alice Oswald's elegiac description of a dead swan, which she'd passed on her daily walk for a month earlier this winter, as a counterpart to the rotting albatross strung around the neck of the Ancient Mariner.  It was a beautiful, startling piece and I am in awe of her fearless nose.

Other quibbles - no, actually, these are complaints - include the description of the evening as a celebration of Bristol and its urban wildlife.  In fact, the city was largely overlooked, and when it was mentioned, it was in reference to the natives' 'somnolence' or as being a place where its inhabitants 'slur their words like drunks'.  Of all the poets present, none were born in the city and only one lives locally.  As for Thomas Chatterton, our own Romantic poet, Wordsworth's 'marvellous boy', he was completely ignored.

Finally, that far from promoting poetry, as the Mayor claimed in his introduction, the city council has this year ceased its funding for Poetry Can, the lone poetry development agency for Bristol and the south-west, thus jeopardising not only its programmes of work with school children and resident, council tax-paying poets, but also the biannual poetry festivals and the agency's very existence.  I saw quite a few seething local poets exit the reading, their faces almost as red as Mr Ferguson's infamous trousers.  

  Bristol urban wildlife

Photo montage © Dru Marland

Cider, Pigs, Two Interesting Gates and A Dead Squirrel (Not Necessarily In That Order)

When Alice Oswald said during a recent reading in Bristol that her favourite spot on Dartmoor was Chalk Ford, my heart sank a bit.  Lovely it certainly is, but getting there involves a hefty climb one way or another, and the instant she said it, I knew that the Northerner, being an ardent admirer of Alice Oswald's poetry and a rookie Dartmoor devotee, would want to go there.  And so it proved.  So first we had to fortify ourselves in the Tradesmans Arms at Scorriton, where they sell a damn fine pint of cider. It's the deep rosy red colour of Thatcher's Cheddar Valley but it's proper dry scrumpy, tastes of cheese and is called Thompstone's. 

I've walked a lot around Chalk Ford, but managed to find a route up to the moor that was new to me, from Combe to Lud Gate - a nice sunken holloway, or green lane as they are usually called in Devon.  The idyll included a dead squirrel, however.  

It would have been lovely to walk out on the moor - my original plan was to explore Huntingdon Warren, coming back via Pupers Hill - but the clouds were mist, so we decided to stick close to the edges of the moor.  

The conditions made for beautifully moody photos, however. 

Just before Lud's Gate we encountered this very pleasing fence made of old wheels, at a place called Strole.  

And here is Lud's Gate itself.  

After all that climbing, the views from the moor were even more spectacular.  

The hill shining all goldy in a patch of sun was just where we'd been (with the sheep).  

The clouds were closing in so we pressed on downhill to Chalk Ford, ignoring some rather evil-looking cows that were intent on following us. 

Lovely Chalk Ford, where the little River Mardle leaves the moor

Oak tree at Chalk Ford ... 

... with epiphytic polypold ferns like little green flags

Then we merely had to return to Scorriton via the bridleway - a pleasant enough wander downhill though it's attrition when you're coming in the opposite direction.  

Today we encountered a deer and ... 

... a pigling on the loose ... 

... who clearly couldn't find his way home.  I tried to drive it into its field but it wasn't having it and Ted, who was outraged by all the grunting, started to get rather protective from other side of the gate on the path, so in the end I left it where it was. 

Coming back into Scorriton 

The pub in Scorriton was closed when we got back, as was the Church House Inn in Holne. We did get to see another splendid makeshift gate, however, this one made out of horseshoes.  

Then home to the biscuit tin by the sea with its bottle of Tequila in the fridge ... 

 

Alice Oswald at the Watershed, Bristol, Saturday 11th May 2013

Photo by Antonio Olmos

I can't really tell you how excited I was at the prospect to seeing/hearing Alice Oswald read at the Watershed last Saturday ... nor how livid I was when, ten minutes before I was due to leave the house, my border collie, Ted, made a run for it up the park.

Now, when Ted's had a good hurtle after the ball, he's fairly biddable and easy to catch, but I could see from the expression in his eyes exactly what he thought as he barked peremptorily at me - Well, we're here now, so let's have a bit of fun for half an hour. Let's face it, you could do with the exercise.  In the end I hung the ball - which happened to be on a handy piece of elastic - on the branch of a bush and as he leapt for it, rugby-tackled him to the ground and hauled him home, thus getting to the poetry reading by the skin of my teeth, albeit flustered and earringless.  

I'm sure if I thought hard enough I could find a way of seguing from this image into a description of the reading, but I'm a busy blogger today so I'm just going to post the review I've written for the local rag.  

The last time I had a ticket for an Alice Oswald reading, ten years ago in Bath, she fell ill and was unable to attend, so I was delighted finally to catch her sell-out performance of a selection of her work at the Watershed, put on by the Bristol Festival of Ideas in association with the Bristol Spring Poetry Festival.

I use the word 'performance' advisedly, as Alice Oswald, one of our most intelligent and imaginative poets, learns her poems by heart and is thus able to summon an intense and dramatic delivery that grabs the attention of the audience from beginning to end.

I first encountered Alice Oswald's work when her long dream-like poem Dart was published in 2002.  At the Watershed, the focus was on her most recent collection, 2011's Memorial. Subtitled An Excavation of the Iliad, Memorial departs from the usual telling of the stories of Achilles, Paris, Helen and the rest to focus on the individual, named heroes whose fates are mentioned on in passing.  By providing the reader with sufficient telling detail, she brings them to life only to confront us with the pathos of their deaths.  The resulting work is a haunting exposition of the insanity of war, the enormity of its cost in human lives.  

Apart from Memorial, Alice also read from A Sleepwalk on the Severn, a long poem for several voices which was published in 2009, and earlier poems including Hymn for Iris, a prayer for bridges and connections.  Perhaps the most riveting of all was a poem about her village in Devon which described in the present inhabitants from generations ago, and which, despite its repeated exhortations to the reader not to be alarmed, was decidedly eerie.  

The reading was followed by a fascinating question and answer session chaired by the Director of Poetry Can, Colin Brown. 

The Bristol Festival of Ideas continues until the end of August; Bristol Poetry Festival will be back in the first week of October with an exciting line-up of poets and performances.