Project Boast, and a poem for International Women's Day 2018

'These poems disturb the peace with a loudness hard won from centuries of humility'

If you're into poetry, you're usually spoilt for choice for readings on International Women's Day. Last night I went to the launch in Bristol of Project Boast, which was dreamed up by Doctors Rachel Bentham and Alyson Hallett, inspired by the Victorian engineer and inventor, Sarah Guppy. 

Amongst other things, Sarah, who lived in Bristol, came up with a samovar that made tea, cooked eggs and kept toast warm; a method for preventing barnacles from clinging to a ship’s hull; and an exercise bed for women to use at home (since exercising in public was deemed inappropriate for them). Her patented design for making safe piling for bridges was used by Thomas Telford (free of charge), and as a friend of the Brunel family, she was involved in the Great Western Railway project. However, there are no statues erected to Sarah Guppy, and her achievements have been all but dismissed. She herself once said 'It is unpleasant to speak of oneself – it may seem boastful particularly in a woman.' 

It was this quote that prompted the good doctors mentioned above to 'seek out contemporary women poets who are speaking out and who are making a fresh mark, registering the straitacket they have had to wear and celebrating the emerging possibility of real change'. And this, in turn, led to the book, the proceeds of which will go to the Malala Fund.

Last night women of all ages travelled from all over the West Country to read at the celebratory launch ...

... with Penelope Shuttle headlining  a packed venue.  












One of my poems included in the anthology was written especially for it. It's a period piece (of sorts), which takes as its starting point assertions by Pliny the Elder in Naturalis Historia on the subject of menstruation: namely, if a menstruating woman walks barefoot through fields at sunrise, with her hair dishevelled and her girdle loose, the crop will wither and dry up. Her glance at this time will dim the brightness of mirrors and dull the edge of steel.

Blooded

Then let’s blind this tyranny of mirrors

blunt the blades of our bright pink plastic razors

Let’s not be neat, compact, discreet

hide who we are in the palms of our hands or up our sleeves

We’ll smear our foreheads, noses, cheeks

not with the blood of hunted creatures, stain of killing sprees

but with our blood, this ferrous musk

fecund, nurturing, the russet of red fox

vixen-masked, in long soot gloves

we’ll blaze our clamorous ways through scrub

burn ash paths through suburbs, towns

singe the edge of meadows, commons, forests, downs

scratching sparks from burnt-out stars

chasing flames that leap from heart to heart

©Deborah Harvey 2018 

Project Boast is available to buy from the Triarchy website and usual outlets. A Kindle version will be available from April. It is hoped to raise enough money via crowdfunding to equip every school in Bristol - or the West Country - or the entire country - with a copy.

Review of Map Reading For Beginners in Reach Poetry

Reach Poetry magazine contains a lengthy review by poet Lynn Woollacott of my latest poetry collection, Map Reading For Beginners, which I'm reproducing here.

Map Reading for Beginners is Deborah's second poetry collection and follows Communion, 2011 (Indigo Dreams) and a novel, Dart, 2013 Tamar Books (Indigo Dreams).

I was enchanted by the cover illustration of Map Reading For Beginners.  The image gives us a place to begin, under a blue sky, a river running through hills, deep places with symbolic creatures scuttling around and rooks flying overhead, mystery and surprise mirror imaging the opening poem and title of the collection '... the tunnelling lanes that take you down / to where the stories first began ... '

Cover illustration © Dru Marland 2014

In lyrical contemporary language Deborah's collection takes us on a journey through ghostly land/seascapes, historical stories and poems of a mystical/spiritual nature. For example, 'The Bakestone' in nine couplets and sparse punctuation, Deborah conjures history and mysticism from a simple object.  There are other half-familiar stories, 'Fallen Woman' (1885), whose skirts ballooned and saved her from a suicide attempt when leaping off a bridge, to 'Mr Brunel's Atmospheric Caper' (1848), the railway which ran for eight months.  Other poems drew me in with their intriguing titles, 'William Wyrcestre Dreams Of Brygstowe', for example, a topographer who lived in Deborah's home city of Bristol in 1480 and links in to the book title.

A most beautiful poem is 'The Poet And The Boatman', not surprising the poem came 2nd place in the Chipping Sodbury Poetry Competition, 2012. Here are the beginning stanzas:

Tidal here and salt

the final turn of Teign

before its fretful merging with the sea

creates a harbour in the lee of land,

this curved blood-coloured beach.

Through mist that lifts like linen wraiths

I glimpse the poet stripping off his white

ballooning shirt and britches,

bathing in a manner far from gentlemanly

the water's cold, he'll catch a chill

The story behind the poem is about Keats and his brother's consumption, the emotion comes through, and Deborah later in the poem refers to a boatman (mystical association with carrying the dead across water), and the symbolic colours, blood-coloured beach, linen wraiths, and later in the poem, a red-stained shirt. 

Deborah explains in footnotes on the historical poems to fill the facts. I didn't read them until after I'd read the poems, which made me re-read them, which is always a good thing, and though I understood the poems without footnotes there were moments of clarification.

Shipwrecks and land/seascapes feature: 'Cailpeach', a mysterious white horse at the shore, 'The Wreck of the Nornen' full of imagery, and there are contemporary ghosts, 'The Dream-Catcher' ... 'He's attached a discarded dream-catcher / to his trolley, now it is state-of-the-art; // the same sky above him swabbed of beauty / by an always falling rain that shines / a universe of gum on wet black tarmac', lines that leave an after-glow of images and sounds.

Couplets, triplets, sonnets abound, and occasional techniques such as anaphora, which propels the poem 'Winterset' forward, 'Between dark and dawn, the sleep-smudged sun / between sun and moon, the scavenger flood ... '  Other poems have a subtle rhyme, never forced because beautiful words are appreciated in the collection.

For me the contemporary poem, 'The Seventh Sign', sums up the links: snakes, corvids, coast/water, history, churchyard, love and the number seven. There are so many poems I'd like to have shown you, so please visit Deborah's Indigo Dreams book page and see some examples referred to here and others.

I leave this review with two stanzas from another favourite poem, 'An Approximation': 

... late autumn days

out on the Levels

mistletoed trees in orchards flutter

star-scattered wings

and as countless cacophonous voices fly

I might dream

an approximation of angels 

on Peckham Rye.' 

Reach Poetry is available from Indigo Dreams.

Walking The Chains, The Passenger Shed, Temple Meads

I went to see 'Walking the Chains'*, about the building of the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol (before I broke my leg).  Here's a review I've written about it for the local rag.  

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the 150^th anniversary celebrations of the opening of the Clifton Suspension Bridge had culminated with December’s firework extravaganza, but just over a month later, along comes this baggy and at times slightly exasperating celebration of our most famous landmark and the ‘little giant’ whose vision and drive brought it into being.

For the sentimentalist, the idea of staging ACH Smith’s play in the Passenger Shed at Temple Meads was inspired. More practically, the acoustics aren’t great and this meant it was occasionally difficult to hear what was going on.  Moreover, the way the action jumped back and forwards through time, with episodes such as the attempted suicide of Sarah Ann Henley (you know, the jilted Victorian woman whose voluminous skirts filled with air and parachuted her onto the muddy river bank) preceding the completion of the bridge, made me concerned that anyone unfamiliar with its lore and stories might be irredeemably confused.

But for all that, it’s a gutsy show, and with performers from theatre company Show of Strength, Circomedia and the Suspended Voices Choir – a cast which seemed to be of the clay of Bristol itself – you’d have to have a heart of Avon Gorge limestone not to be captivated by its exuberance.  

Perusing the list of financial supporters in the programme, I spotted a shocking omission. Sometimes it seems that Bristol has again been split in two, this time by a council that parachutes in expertise from elsewhere to promote our city’s status as Green Capital while ignoring the local talent of its citizens, and blows thousands on the nonsense of fake grass and trees in Park Street, a stone’s throw from Brandon Hill.  (Hardly very green.)  Meanwhile, Show of Strength, along with b-Creative, Bristol Ensemble and Poetry Can, have lost all their modest council funding. It took Brunel, an incomer, to bridge the great divide 150 years ago.  Now we have another, and maybe it’s time our Mayor reconsidered how best to support the arts, and the interests of those Bristolians who practise them.  

*'Walking the Chains' refers to the practice of 'interviewing' prospective maintenance workers on the bridge by making them walk its great supporting chains (without a safety-harness) to see if they had a head for heights. All other skills could be learnt.  

Inking Bitterns on the North Bristol Art Trail

Here are the Isambards - David Johnson, Pameli Benham, Stewart Carswell and me, reading poetry on the North Bristol Art Trail this Sunday just gone, and yes, we did trot out a few Brunel-themed pieces, but Stewart and I also read our contributions to this brand new and fantastic poetry bookette, Inking Bitterns, lusciously illustrated by Dru Marland and costing a mere £5.

'Inking Bitterns' - a book of poems and pictures for wild places, illustrated by Dru Marland - is published in association with Poetry Can and available from Gert Macky books and good independent bookshops - in Bristol, this means Durdham Down Bookshop, Standfords, and Foyles, price £5. 

  

For more peeks inside this gorgeous book, take a look here!

A Voyage Around Brunel and Bristol's Floating Harbour

The weather forecast had been grim - heavy rain for Saturday afternoon - but as it turned out, it turned out nice - warmish, definitely dry, rather grey admittedly, but a beautiful soft grey, the sort that makes you think of the end of the world (but in a good way).  

The inaugural event of Bristol Poetry Festival 2013, the intrepid IsamBards' celebration of Brunel, was all set.

Having discovered that Temple Meads Station - that masterpiece of Brunel-designed architecture - was even noisier than we had envisaged, we beat a retreat to Temple Quay rather sooner than we had planned, there to finish our railway poems before embarking on the water-borne part of our voyage.

Having discovered that Temple Meads Station - that masterpiece of Brunel-designed architecture - was even noisier than we had envisaged, we beat a retreat to Temple Quay rather sooner than we had planned, there to finish our railway poems before embarking on the water-borne part of our voyage.  

Mal dressed for the occasion 

Then we were off on a quick detour under the first of Brunel's bridges over the Avon before executing a nifty turn in the allotted space and heading off on the first leg of our journey, to the SS Great Britain. 

Passing St Peter's on Castle Green, bombed during the Bristol Blitz and now a memorial to Bristol's civilian dead.   

Dru just before she gave me an impromptu physics lesson on 'How concrete barges float' 

Brunel's Severn Shed, now a restaurant, previously a storage facility for the luggage of SS Great Britain passengers.

Now another restaurant, The River Station was formerly the HQ of the Port of Bristol Police. 

The familiar landmark of Redcliffe Parade.

Thekla ... 

... with her very early Banksy. (An even earlier one was painted over by the Harbour Master who failed to appreciate the fine line between vandalism and art.)

Proof that the Press Gang is still operational in Bristol. 

A fishing boat from Fowey moored near the Lloyds Bank HQ.

The replica of Cabot's Matthew heading for SS Great Britain.

Two iconic ships

At the SS Great Britain, we stopped alongside its bows and poeticised, which seemed to go down well ... at least, none of our listeners took advantage of the drowning option.

Then it was on to the Underfall Yard, a historic boatyard dating from the early 19th century, with improvements by Brunel in the 1830s.  

The name Underfall comes from the series of sluices Brunel designed to keep the harbour as silt-free as possible.  

The Matthew seemed to be following a similar route to us.  

At the Yard we disembarked for more poetry.  

So good to see it still being used for its original purpose also. 

A short distance on, and our last poetry stop of the day, at the lock, considerably enlarged and improved by Brunel so that his SS Great Britain could pass through.  Looming above it - as if you didn't know - is that other iconic emblem of Brunel's Bristol, the Clifton Suspension Bridge. 

Colin Brown of Poetry Can with two IsamBards, Stewart Carswell and Pameli Benham 

IsamBard David Johnson

Returning below Clifton Wood ... 

... and past the SS Great Britain again. 

Passing Cabot Tower

Approaching St Augustine's Reach, with the Arnolfini, far right  

The spire of St Mary Redcliffe and Prince Street Bridge

Pero's Bridge 

The Reach

Very pleased to be from Bristol on a day like this. 

The Little Giant ... 

For more photos, see Dru Marland's photostream on Flickr!