Bristol, the morning after the Saturday night before, after lockdown

I have a collection of poems mostly set in Bristol coming out later this year. It's called 'Learning Finity', and I need an arresting cover photograph, so I got up early last Sunday and went to town to wander the old lanes.

In my enthusiasm for the project, I'd overlooked the fact it was the morning after the Saturday night before, after lockdown, and it wasn't that pleasant down there. The Mud Dock car park was full of discarded food, take-away packaging and broken glass, and the stench of piss in the doorways and alleyways was overwelming. Not that this state of affairs isn't understandable, with no venues able to offer inside eating, and all the public toilets closed years ago on account of the council thinking 'let's try and keep within our meagre budget by making them use shops and pubs, because there will never come a time when those facilities are out of commission, will there?' 

Anyhow, here are some photos, one or two of which are contenders for a cover and most of which aren't. I haven't made up my mind which of my shortlist to use yet. 

St Augustine's Reach

The empty plinth where the slavetrader once stood

The old SWEB building, St John on the Wall, and St Lawrence House, where I worked in the mid 80s, now student accommodation

The bottom of Zed Alley

Looking up the upper section of Zed Alley. My great-grandmother used to go to school somewhere here in the 1870s

Looking down the upper part of Zed Alley

Christmas Steps, where my great-grandmother lived with her parents and sisters

I'd completely forgotten about these. I begged my mother for one for Christmas because I wanted to be a writer so badly - I think I must have been about five - only for her to point out - quite reasonably - that it wasn't actually a proper typewriter because it didn't have any keys. I was gutted ... 

Down Johnny Ball Lane

Looking through one of the side arches of  St John's Gate, up Broad Street

Leonard Lane

St Nicholas Street

Welsh Back

Learning Finity and the persistence of stories

I'm very pleased to be able to post that my publishers, Ronnie Goodyer and Dawn Bauling of Indigo Dreams, are going to publish my fifth collection of poems next year. It's called Learning Finity, and it's about mythic time and how a place might change beyond recognition but still retain an imprint of the past. It's also about getting old and the mutability of everything, except, maybe, stories.

I like to think that something of the past and its people, their lives, loves and disasters, remains in a landscape. That the trees that colonnade the nave of St Mary Le Port Church, now a bombed ruin tucked behind a curtain wall of 1960s brutalist office blocks, themselves empty, are engaged in rebuilding it. And that the valerian that bursts through cracks in walls on the hillside above where the ice rink and the Locarno used to be remembers when it was patch of woodland called Fockynggrove, and was a very well frequented spot indeed.

If you've read other posts here, you'll probably guess I'm talking about Bristol, the city I was born in and which I've never managed to leave. Here I am, hanging out with local poet and bad boy, Thomas Chatterton, quite a few years ago now. 

I mostly love my native city, though there are times I've been deeply ashamed of it, such as when Points West asks whether it should apologise for its slaving past and then does a vox pop stuffed with belligerent locals, who haven't fully grasped the implications of how our forefathers made its wealth. And the fact that if it weren't for Black Lives Matters protestors tearing down his statue, this city would still be commemorating Edward Colston right in its heart is excruciating. 

I often wonder what my great-great grandparents, who lived and worked on Christmas Steps, right in the centre of the city, would make of it all, if they had the chance to wander around their city now, which is so different from how they remember it and which will be unrecognisable to future citizens. Everything is mutable, but stories persist. 

'Fockynggrove' was first published in Atrium, May 2020

A Bristolian Winter Solstice

Getting up an hour before dawn on a Sunday - even if dawn is the latest one of the year - isn't that alluring a prospect, especially after a 330 mile drive the previous day. 

Solstice dawn on the Floating Harbour at Mud Dock

But I, and two of my fellow IsamBards, were reading a specially written poem about a certain festively-named thoroughfare in old Bristol ...

... and as it was being broadcast on local radio, which is famously haphazard with regard to timing, we erred on the side of being very early and waiting, rather than too late and missing it altogether.  

Which meant we got to walk though an almost deserted city centre over which the sun was rising ...

... before preparing to bard in our selected spot. 

You can tell by looking at them that most people using the steps apparently do so to one side (as do I), even though there aren't any railings to cling to. 

And then the Radio Bristol van came and it was time to perform our poem, which we did passing well, if I say so myself.

You can hear it here (for the next 29 days), at about 51 minutes in, while the fourth IsamBard, David, is on at 2 hours 29 minutes in.

Then we made our way back to Mud Dock via Zed Alley, which is rather less picturesque but has an atmosphere all of its own. 

Bollard made of a bomb casing by Pero's bridge

A City A-Bristle With Ships ...

It's the Harbour Festival in Bristol this weekend, and I spent a while at the Scout Hut on Redcliff Backs this lunchtime, with Dru who was selling some of her books and cards, alongside other Bristol publishers.  I had a thoroughly good time, drinking lots of tea and chatting to one of them, namely, Keith Taylor, who, with his wife Geraldine and son Peter, was lucky enough to meet and become the close friends of one of my heroes, the Wiltshire etcher, Robin Tanner, in the last few years of his life.   So good to hear that the great man, and his wife, Heather, were as kindly and humane in real life as I'd suspected.

Dru very kindly gave three copies of my book table space, though none of them sold.  In fact, far from making money, I ended up out of pocket, having succumbed to the lure of various local, heavily discounted publications.  Ah well, good to know I have kept several of the city's finest booksellers solvent for another year.

I had to get back to the car park at Asda promptly for fear of being clamped, so didn't really have time to linger in the harbour.  The day before, however, I'd had a post- workshop lunch at a very crowded Brunel's Buttery on Wapping Wharf with several of Bristol and Bath's finest poets, and had snapped these photos before the place really filled up with people.

I love it when the city is full of tall-masted ships. I like to think it must be a little like how it was when my great-great grandparents lived on Christmas Steps in the 1880s, selling faggots and peas in buckets to the men laying tramlines in the city centre.

                                The Mary Block

                                Pleasure, for my great-great-grandmother,

                                was always deferred.

                                You’ll get your reward in Heaven

                                the creed of her fellow Brethren

                                as they trod their narrow path towards

                                a stern, starch-collared God.

                                Abstinence deemed a virtue,

                                while hardship fell like blessings

                                on their heads.

                               Not that Mary never softened.

                               At times she pitied the wanting faces

                               of her offspring.

                               Scarlet ribbons … marbles … a waxen doll …

                               You’ll get it when my ship comes in!

                               Almost a promise when you live by the harbour

                               of a city a-bristle with ships,

                               and surely not idle

                               (for Mary Block was never idle).

                              Unlike her daughters, sent out for pig’s fry,

                              but sidling along the quays in search of adventure

                              amongst the stacked timber, the bales of tobacco,

                              the casks of amber Bristol Milk,

                              and finding a ship gilded to legend

                              by a shadow-shuttered dawn,

                              the name Mary Block engraved on her bows

                              and escaping like orisons from their mouths

                              as they hallelujah up Christmas Steps

                              towards disappointment.

                              Deborah Harvey ©  2011

My first poetry collection, Communion, published by Indigo Dreams, is now available, and this poem is in it.