'Now is poetry where a rubbish bin once stood ... '

With apologies to Ovid. And also, I suppose, Auden, although he is wrong about poetry making nothing happen; in fact, embarrassingly so, since it's on Auden Mead in Upper Horfield, Bristol, that the poetry installation commemorating John Keats stood, with a rubbish bin sited directly in front of it.

This is how it looked when fellow-IsamBard Dominic Fisher and I scoped out our Poetry Streets of Horfield Poetry Walk almost exactly a month ago. 

Reader, we were appalled. The fragmentary poem it was impossible to read without getting a noseful of Merde De Chien No 5 is called 'This Living Hand' and was written in 1819, when Keats was 23. He'd just coughed blood into his hand and, having seen his mother and brother die of tuberculosis, knew that he was next. He died in 1821, at the age of 25. It - and Keats - deserved more respect than Bristol City Council was showing them.

So we complained. And asked other people to complain. Which they did in their hun- well, a lot of people did, from even as far away as America. And the Bristol Post got involved. And the local councillors were alerted. And although we didn't get our promised response within the 10 day deadline, yesterday I had a message from a friend who lives on the same street to say this had happened. 

And shortly afterwards, this happened.

And all we have to do now is get up a petition to get remove her and her dog. 

Poetry-walking the poetry streets of Upper Horfield

Maybe we IsamBards were off our trolleys, holding a poetry walk through Upper Horfield estate on a hot August afternoon ...

... but it's something I'd wanted to do for ages. I first mentioned it to the Northerner probably back in about 2011, as a possible outreach event for one of the poetry festivals, but actually, I'd been fascinated by the poetry streets, where my father grew up, since I was a child. 

The Northerner's response back then was 'well, go ahead and organise it'.  I suppose I could use the excuse that the entire estate was being rebuilt at the time as an explanation for why it took so long, but the construction work was completed in 2013. Any delay was largely just a matter of me not pulling my finger out. 

But finally here we were, in Poets Park, waiting for our audience - always a nerve-wracking moment. But they arrived, and what brilliant listeners they turned out to be. 

For the first time, in addition to our own work, we were reading poems by other, famous poets, namely those after whom the streets are named, as commemorating them was the main purpose of the walk. So in the park, which is on Eliot Close, we read 'The Rum Tum Tugger' from T S Eliot's 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats' and, as we were within earshot of  Larkin Place, Philip Larkin's melancholic poem, 'The Trees'. 

Our next stop was Auden Mead, near Keats Close.  The installation here, which was designed by local school children and is inscribed with lines from John Keats' memento mori, 'This Living Hand', took on a life of its own in the run-up to the poetry walk. I tweeted my indignation about the positioning of litter bin bang in front of it, making the poem impossible to read without getting a whiff of dog poo, and it was picked up by the Bristol Post, an interview ensued and suddenly Angry of Bristol's diatribe got some traction.* 

The obvious poem, then, to read at this point was 'This Living Hand', which is fragmentary and very moving, written in 1819 when Keats' health was failing as a result of TB. He was to die in 1821 at the age of 25. 

Since we'd just walked up Shelley Way, we also read a few verses from Percy Shelley's 'The Mask of Anarchy', with a rousing 'Ye are many - they are few!' to end it, while Dominic read W H Auden's 'Refugee Blues', which is more poignant and pertinent than ever. 

On then to a little grassy spot on Thackeray, via Shakespeare Avenue, which prompted some Bard-related poems, and, in anticipation of our walk down Hughes Gardens, David's poem about his mother-in-law going fishing on the River Exe with Ted Hughes. And as we were just a street away from Macauley [sic] Road, where my father grew up in the 1920s, I read a poem not by Thomas Babbington Macaulay but me, about my grandfather and father's experiences of the first and second world war respectively. 

Leading the stragglers

Our destination was Horfield Library on Filton Avenue, where there was tea and cake waiting, courtesy of the Friends of Horfield Library ... 

... and poems about Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose streets are somewhat further afield than the route of our walk permitted us to explore.  Coleridge was particularly relevant here, given that he used to make an 80 mile round trip on foot between Nether Stowey, north of Bridgwater, to his nearest lending library, which was in King Street, Bristol. Thanks to its Friends, Horfield library is still going and residents are spared that effort ... for now. 

* If you think the Council should move this bin so that this installation and its poem can be appreciated properly, please contact its parks team. There’s a page on the council website called ‘Improve a park or green space.’ The name of the park is Auden Mead and you don't need to be a resident to make your suggestion.

A Poem for World Poetry Day 2018

Spring is a time of renewal, so here's a poem on that subject from my collection, Breadcrumbs. It has an epigraph from a letter written by John Keats to his brother and sister-in-law, George and Georgiana Keats, in which he says 'We are like the relict garments of a Saint: the same and not the same: for the careful Monks patch it and patch it: till there's not a thread of the original garment left, and still they show it for St Anthony's shirt'. 

Relict

‘We are like the relict garments of a Saint: the same and not the same’

                                                                                              John Keats

Her mouth forgets him first, her tongue

sloughing his aftertaste hours after their parting

Next, her skin divests itself. Within a month

there isn’t an inch that remembers his touch

Her quickening blood scours love’s taint,

the shadows darkening her heart retreat, grow faint

Three years and the hair he preferred cropped

falls past her shoulders in torrents, never the same river twice

and although she still feels him in her bones

it won’t be much longer before he’s gone

and she’ll be herself, the same yet different,

the relict garment of a saint,

a patchwork sail on the leafing mast

of Theseus’s ship

©Deborah Harvey 2016

Breadcrumbs is available to buy from Indigo Dreams Publishing and the usual outlets.

Pebbles On The Shore

On Thursday we were off to Teignmouth for the launch of Pebbles on the Shore, an anthology of poems about the town. We went via the scenic route. 

Gibbet Hill and Brent Tor

Cox Tor car park

My glee at being on Dartmoor under my favourite circumstances - bright slanty sun and pewter cloud - dissipated as rain rolled in over Tavistock and hit the moor. Hard. 

The same rook which had been preaching in the shade of the ice cream van almost exactly three years earlier was there again, but wetter.   

There was nothing for it but to retreat to the car and eat a Magnum.  My dog, Ted, kindly offered to do some of the driving through driving rain.  

By the time we reached Shaldon, the weather was brilliant and beautiful ... 

 ... though fitful.

  

I'd felt a bit apprehensive about returning here while I was driving down the M5.  The sudden death last spring of the owner of the caravan park, where my family had two caravans, had resulted in a massive hoick in ground rent, followed in September by two months' notice to everyone to get their vans off the site so that his sons could install a fieldful of lodges at £180,000 apiece.  

It was painful to lose what had been our home from home for the last 45 years, but the nagging fear inside that the landscape I loved had somehow abandoned me turned out to be unfounded. (Of course it did!) I'd simply forgotten Herman Hesse's wise words: 'Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.'

So now I was looking at everywhere with new eyes, stripped of complacency.  A new relationship, a fresh and fruitful way of interacting with a place that is part of my heart.  And still less than 100 miles from where I live.  

(Of course, we wouldn't be in this situation if my parents had bought this house, Thalassa, when it was offered to them decades ago, but £3,000 was a huge sum then and they couldn't raise it.)

I must have eaten dozens of meals in the Clipper over the years, but this was the first since they dismantled the glass-walled booth selling souvenirs of Devonshire pixies and unpinned the tea towels from the walls, and it was by far the best, being decidedly palatable.  The cider was pretty good too. And it's dog friendly. 

A quick wander up to the bridge ...

... a glimpse of a still rainy moor ... 

... a peep down School Lane, through which my sister and I would walk to fetch our dad's newspaper ...

... a peek at the river between cottages ... 

... and it was time to head to the Alice Cross Centre in Teignmouth for the launch of Pebbles on the Shore.  

As well as reading some of the poems, anthology editor Neil Howell explained about the work of the Centre and gave the audience background information about them, while the artist Maureen Fayle spoke about her ink illustrations, many of which were executed in part with twigs.  I love this one of the back beach she drew to accompany my poem, The Poet and the Boatman, which you can read here. 

The whole evening went well, and it was a pleasure to meet some of the local poets. Even Ted behaved himself, although in the penultimate poem I heard a couple of loud, theatrical sighs emanating from the back of the hall to signal that even dogs who are dark poets can sometimes get poetried out.  










Information about Pebbles on the Shore and where to buy it is here on Neil's blog.  

'The Poet and the Boatman' is from my collection, Map Reading For Beginners.

Romanticism Revisited : An Interactive Map

Back in April I was approached by the Department of English at Bristol University about an interactive, site-specific map it was developing concerning the literary heritage of the South West, in particular the area’s important and inspirational connection with major Romantic writers.  In short, it was seeking commissions from contemporary poets with a connection to Bristol and/or the South West, for poems written in response to any of the key locations of Romanticism.  

Well, this was right up my vernacular alley.  What could do I but submit my Coleridge and Keats poems? 

Well, I'm pleased to say that the map is now active, and the app can be downloaded to a smartphone, android device or on Apple.  And if, like me, you're not really sure what an app is, you can view it on the website also. 

Happy poeticking!

  

Inspiration : The Poet And The Boatman

I was recently approached by Neil Howell, who keeps a blog called Teignmouth in Verse. He'd come across my poem The Poet And The Boatman, about John Keats' stay in South Devon during 1818.  I gave permission for him to post it, found myself explaining to ex-pat actor and Romantics aficionado Ian Frost how I came to write it, and decided the story might make another post in my Inspiration series.  

My immediate family's connection with Teignmouth and Shaldon on the South Devon coast goes back many years.  My parents first 'discovered' Shaldon the year before I was born. My father said he walked onto the beach and had the sensation he had 'come home' - quite odd, really, since he is not at all given to airy-fairiness, as he would doubtless regard it.  They returned year after year with my elder sister and me. 

At first we stayed in Chez Nous B&B on The Strand with Mr and Mrs Cordon and their Jack Russell terrier, Jo-Jo.  (The house is now a bastion of UKIP, alas.)  And sometimes we stayed in the shabby grandeur of Manor House, two doors up, or the flat above the Clipper cafe or, more often, one of the caravans or chalets at the site by the bridge which now has mock-Georgian cottages built on it. When I was about 11 my parents bought a caravan at Smugglers Caravan Park in Holcombe and there we have holidayed ever since. (Obviously not still with my mum and dad - I grew up and had kids of my own, and now it's mainly just me and my partner and my border collie, Ted.) 

When I was about seven, I remember my father pointing out a yellowy house across the estuary in Teignmouth,  'That's Keats' House,' he said. 'Who's Keats?' I asked. 'A poet who stayed here,' my father answered cryptically.  

Any mention of poets, authors or artists filled me with great excitement as a child and I would walk very slowly past the house whenever I saw it, in case I glimpsed a shadow or a ghost in a billowing white shirt.  Although once back in Bristol, I would have trouble remembering who exactly had lived there - was it Keats or Yeats? Both, I knew, were poets, but apart from being dead, I knew nothing about them and had no idea what distinguished one from the other.  Eventually the idea of John Keats coalesced in my mind and when, as a teenager, I first read 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci', it was with the sense that we somehow had a connection.

Anyhow, about 20 years ago, my aunt who is married to one of my mother's many brothers but is actually a blood relative of my father (we'm a bit like that in Bristol, mind) received some documents from a cousin of hers who is into genealogy, and she forwarded to my father the information pertaining to the Harveys. In it we discovered that my great-great-great grandfather, James Harvey, a Somerset man from Weston-Super-Mare, worked as a boatman all around the peninsula in the 1820s and 1830s, marrying a woman from St Marychurch on the way and settling for a couple of years in Teignmouth, where two of their children were born.  It was, indeed, 'home'. I was wildly pleased by this, partly because of my love for Devon in general and the River Teign from source to sea in particular, but also because of the Keats connection.  I harboured a brief fantasy that James Harvey might have rowed John across the river to Shaldon or maybe my great-great-great grandmother laundered his shirts or served him a beer in a pub or even just greeted him in the street one morning.  Of course I soon discovered that this could never have happened as they didn't coincide in time, Keats having left Teignmouth in 1818, perhaps when it was clear that the sea air was not benefitting his brother, Tom, who was to die of tuberculosis just a few months later. 

I had it in mind to write a poem about this missed meeting - between Keats, James Harvey the boatman, and me - for some years.  When I finally found my way in, I decided not to be explicit about who the boatman was, mainly because his exact identity is really only of interest to me. In fact, people tend to think he might be Charon, which never occurred to me when I wrote it, fixed as I was on my ancestor. 

As for the poet, I didn't want it to be immediately obvious who he was either, although most people with an interest in poetry would realise within the first two lines.  Teignmouth has the reputation of being a rather stolid town - certainly Keats' skinny-dipping met with considerable disapproval - and it doesn't have a huge number of literary associations.  And even if you haven't rumbled who he is by then, well, the foreshadowing in the references to blood and drowning soon make it clear.  

The Poet And The Boatman

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

while over here a boatman’s sanding smooth

a newly mended hull. 

He’ll check the caulk is watertight

before he ventures out to rescue souls

condemned to watery death.

Both men are bright-faced,

close in age,

yet they’ll never share a jar

for by the time the boatman’s posted here,

John Keats is twelve years dead.

no one could have saved the poet

from drowning in his blood

Instead the boatman heads for breakfast,

and John is gone with a flap of his red-stained shirt

to flirt with the sleep-soft girls

stirring in their beds

above the bonnet shop.

© Deborah Harvey 2014

'The Poet And The Boatman' is published in my 2014 collection, Map Reading for Beginners, published by Indigo Dreams and available from their website. (Or from Amazon if you must, or all good independent bookshops.)

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.

Castles, Poets and the Usual Stuff

After all the half-timbered buildings in Stratford-Upon-Avon, it felt appropriate to continue the theme by going to Wales in Dru's Morris Traveller.

Having deposited Son the Elder in Newport for his Robot Wars sessions, we drove up the Usk valley to Llangybi, stopping first at the St Cybi's well which has A Literary Connection courtesy of T S Eliot, who wrote in his early poem, 'Usk':

'Do not suddenly break the branch, or

Hope to find

The white hart behind the white well.

Glance aside, not for lance, do not spell

Old enchantments. Let them sleep.

'Gently dip, but not too deep.'

Lift your eyes

Where the roads dip and the roads rise

Seek only there

Where the grey light meets the green air

The hermit's chapel, the pilgrim's prayer.'

This sounds a lot less mystical when you realise that the White Hart is a pub.  Unfortunately for the cash-strapped Dru and me, it's a gastro-pub so we had to make do with faggots and peas from the chip shop in Usk, but if you have a few spare coppers to rub together, it might well be worth trying, even if just for the channelling of the poet.   

Llangybi also has a lovely 13th/14th century church with mediaeval wall paintings and all.  See how the walls lean outwards? ... or is it me on the cider? ... no, they are definitely leaning.

This picture is a very rare type of wall painting depicting Christ with the tools of those who work on a Sunday in the process of wounding him.  Hmmm.  Begs the question, just how painful is a black Bic biro and a laptop?  

And this is the top of my favourite headstone in the churchyard.  It holds the bodies of Frederick Evans who died in 1831 aged 2, his father Evan Evans, died 1839 aged 59, and Sarah Evans, a widow until 1867, aged 82.  



'Long nights and days I bore great pain,
To waite for cure twas all in vain;
Till God above he thought it best
To take my pain and give me rest.'

After Llangybi Church but before the faggots and peas, Dru and I took the road less travelled by (probably because it is marked private) up to the castle, which is also known as Castle Tregrug.  En route we were joined by a black dog, which seemed fitting in this shadowy borderland, even if the dog in question was a Labrador with a red collar and a tag in the shape of a bone bearing a Newport postmark.  

Ted found the young whippersnapper a bit of a nuisance.  

The ruins were impressive, however.  I particularly liked the Tower House with its carved remains of fan vaulting amongst the ivy and umbellifers.    

Dru was able to tell me that what looks like an age-old holloway are, in fact, civil war fortifications.  

Having reunited the Labrador, who turned out to be called Sid, with his owners, we went three miles on up the valley to Usk. 

This is Ted waiting patiently for our dinner in the chip shop.

Usk is one of those towns that time forgot, apparently, and whilst not really being Tom Jones country, appropriating the title of one of his hits for the name of a shop selling undergarments doesn't feel like too much of a liberty (bodice).  

Usk Police Station.

'Hey, let's be careful out there!' 

While we ate our not very picnicky picnic we watched locals cooling off in the River Usk, non tidal here and not muddy.   Terrifyingly, some of them were jumping from the disused railway bridge into the not very deep water.  

Usk Castle is less hidden and neglected than Llangibby Castle, but it's still pretty far from being National Trustified.  

This is the view over the town with the Tithe Barn in the foreground.  Trelawney's Cedars to the right were grown from seeds brought back from the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, the last resting place of Keats' body and Shelley's ashes.  

The garden is sensitively maintained, with room for wild strawberries ... 

... and a fenced-off forest of Giant Hogweed.  

I liked the way the almost spent valerian seemed to flame from the walls under the hot sun.  

There was a service going on at Usk Church so we couldn't go in, though we did see the grave of the last Welsh martyr, St David Lewis, who was executed for being a Catholic priest in 1679 and buried in the churchyard.  

There was just time for a drink before picking up the Roboteer, so we stopped off at the Hanbury pub in Caerleon, again on the banks of the Usk, only to spot this plaque commemorating yet another poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson, who, like Eliot, was sufficiently inspired by the area to put pen to paper.  

'What have you two been up to?' asked Son the Elder, after our traditional post Robot Wars debriefing.  

'Oh, castles ... and poets ... and ... '

'The usual stuff then,' he interrupted.  

Well, quite.