National Poetry Day at Her Majesty's Pleasure

Two things I like very much - which also happen to coincide - are the Somerset Art Weeks Festival and National Poetry Day. On Thursday I joined with other West Country poets to mark both, by reading poems on the themes of imprisonment and freedom amid the art installations in B-Wing at the now disused HMP Shepton Mallet.

I'd visited the prison back in May, as soon as I was asked to be part of the project. I knew a place like that would have a grim effect on me, so I wanted to make sure it was a familiar grim effect. Although the addition of some very provocative art installations added another layer of challenge. 

So much of the prison already resembles ladders that lead nowhere, even without the addition of new ones. The only clear view, through non-obscured glass, is of the sky ... Oscar Wilde's 'little tent of blue'. 

Dominic Fisher

Poets waiting in cells to read

In addition to our own poems, works by Homero Aridjis, Dennis Brutus, Imtiaz Dharker, Osip Mandelstam, Harryette Mullen, Irina Ratushinskaya, Marina Tsvetaeva and Oscar Wilde were read.  

The delivery of the poems was excellent throughout; the audience intrepid in the face of distinctly chilly conditions. 

Even though I couldn't read it properly, as I was standing behind it, I was impressed by Kate Semple's poem Unheard Prayer, which was unfurled on a banner while the everyday sounds of prison life, hugely amplified by the acoustics of the place, were played. Its point - the inability to escape sensory overload in prison, and the withholding of silence in which to hear yourself think -  was cogently made, and later, when it started to rain and the noise was amplified on the high glass roof, I was reminded of it again.

The poets with organiser Rosie Jackson.

Afterwards we went up to the third floor where some of the poems were on display. They'd been printed on thin paper so that the light shone through them, and looked as frail and beautiful as hope.

Here's Rosie with her poem ... 

... and here's mine.

It might be presumptuous, but I would like to think that a small restitution had been made. 

The Biggening Skies

With Son the Elder deposited at the seond day of Robot Wars events, my partner and I set out for the Norfolk coast.  After all, if you are this close to the edge of the country, you might as well continue until you can go no further.  'Anyhow, I've heard East Cromer is really nice,' said my partner.  A little later on, however, he decided that he might be thinking of East Coker.  'Well, my mate Steve definitely said Cromer's worth a visit,' he persisted. 

First, though, there were a couple of churches I wanted to stop at, although things didn't go quite to plan, as when tasked with directing us to Little Witchingham, the sat nav dropped us in the middle of nowhere - in fact, I began to wonder if the witches had bewitched the village away.  In the end I had to resort to reading a signpost.  Crikey.

Then there it was - St Faith's - no longer in regular use (owing to a lack of same?) and in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust.  And open!

And what a church, covered in wall paintings dating from the middle of the 14th century.  And to think they were almost lost for ever, having been discovered only in the 1970s when the church was in a ruinous state and earmarked for demolition.  

 

  

Not all of the South Wall appears to have been painted, but Eve Baker, the art historian who discovered the murals, believes that it had been prepared for painting and that something had intervened to stop it happening, almost certainly the Black Death of 1348.   

Outside I was still keeping an eye out for one of those bigenning skies and I wasn't going to go home till I saw one.  This at least was a start ... 

and this not a bad continuation ...

BUT there was something wrong with the qualitative flatness of the place.  I'd been expecting somewhere like the Somerset Levels, where the roads are raised and called causeways, and every winter the land remembers the implications of its name and floods.  But Norfolk - or at least this part of it - is quite bumpy, with hillocks and rises.  Not really flat at all.

Then I realised what was bothering me.  In Somerset your eye runs over the terrain until it hits a range of hills - the Mendips, the Poldens, the Quantocks, the Brendons, the Blackdowns - which accentuate the flatness of the low-lying land, whilst in Norfolk there are no ranges of hills.  It is a different sort of flat, and therein, I'd wager, lie the bigenning skies.  

Relieved, I drove on to Thurgarton, our next stop which boasts a towerless thatched church.  All Saints did once have a tower which fell in the 1880s.  The church was eventually abandoned altogether and only rescued in the 1980s, again thanks to the Churches Conservation Trust. 

Outside there was a pleasingly chubby cherub flanked by two toothsome skulls ... 

and inside a series of carved mediaeval bench ends.  Here's a man (a huntsman or wild man?) creeping up on two dogs fighting ... 

... a liony creature and a man playing the bagpipe, though the bag bit has been lost ... 

... a creature - possibly a gryphon? - holding a man's head in his paws and a dragon ...

... a rather more convincing elephant and castle, than the one I saw in the Choir at Chester Cathedral ... 

There were also some fragmentary Elizabethan texts on the walls.  (Not everyone was impressed by the litany that is the Ten Commandments.)

  

My favourite things were the sense of space you get - always a feature of Conservation Trust Churches which are stripped of all clutter - and the amazing hammerbeam chancel roof, which put me in mind of the final section of Seamus Heaney's sequence, Lightenings.

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise

Were all at prayers inside the oratory

A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep

It hooked itself into the altar rails

And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope

And struggled to release it. But in vain.

'This man can't bear our life here and will drown,'

The abbot said, 'unless we help him.' So

They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back

Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

  

Outside big skies were filled with sea gulls as a tractor ploughed the stubble.  We headed on to Cromer.  

Apparently the artist Algernon Swinburne visited Cromer in 1880 and said that it was 'an esplanady sort of place' ... 

... and in 1892 Oscar Wilde claimed he found Cromer 'excellent for writing, golf better'.  We struggled to find a decent pub. 

The colours, however, were gorgeous ... 

  

... and the skies, yes, the skies were very big indeed.