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. 

For the Silent - an anthology of poems in aid of the League Against Cruel Sports

Yes, foxes can be a pest on farms, and sometimes their numbers need to be controlled, but I've never been able to imagine my way into the mindset of someone who would hunt animals to the point of exhaustion, and then kill them and call it 'sport'.

Nor can my publishers, Ronnie Goodyer and Dawn Bauling of Indigo Dreams, and to spread the word (literally), they have produced this beautiful anthology of poems, For the Silent, proceeds from the sale of which go to the League Against Cruel Sports.

I'm delighted to have a poem in it, rubbing its humble shoulders with poems by Mary Oliver, Simon Armitage, Thomas Hardy, Margaret Atwood, Pascale Petit, Liz Berry, Seamus Heaney, Alison Brackenbury, Siegfried Sassoon, John Clare, Ted Hughes and many more.

If you have a heart and a soul, this book is for you. It costs £10 + p&p and is available from the Indigo Dreams website. (Buying directly from Ronnie and Dawn will maximise funds for the League.)

Ye Grete Derknesse

Every autumn equinox, I run through a quick refresher course on how my trusty Lumie Bodyclock works and tell myself it's going to be fine this year - I'm not going to be such a big baby about winter and Ye Grete Derknesse, I'm going to light candles and wrap myself up in colourful handknitted blankets and get out somewhere beautiful and sustaining on every single bright and sunny day that is granted to us. 

But some days there seems to be no daylight at all, just continuous dusk and it's exhausting. And the bright days always seem to fall when I'm due in work, or I've agreed to drive my mother half way across town to buy a packet of Cathedral City mature Cheddar cheese because it's 30p per 350g cheaper in a supermarket there than it is locally. ('That's six shillings!')

So has it been this November. Instead of a bit of easy living post poetry festival, there's been the torment and tedium of funding bids. Two days out arranged - to Dartmoor and South Somerset - didn't happen through no fault of anybody's. And though these last two weeks there has been much chauffeuring of Son the Actor to be done - about 450 miles altogether, to a beautiful location the other side of the city with stunning autumnal walks - it's all been done under cover of darkness, the first round trip through the evening rush hour and the second last thing at night. We've seen a total of four foxes and something that looked smaller and somewhat malevolent in the headlights as it pushed its way through a hedge. Gollum, or a svart maybe. 

I did manage to fit in Simon Armitage's reading at the Bristol Poetry Institute. He read mostly from his new collection, The Unaccompanied, plus some older poems, including an extract from his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which I love. If you haven't ever been to hear him read, you are missing a treat. Armitage is the Jack Dee of poetry. His poetry-reading persona during his introductions is downbeat and self-deprecating. Then come the poems which are engaging and often very funny. I think I must have heard him read half a dozen times over the last - I don't know, 15, 20 years? - and I enjoy it as much as I ever did.

Between chauffeuring stints I also fitted in the launch of Anna Bianchi's book Becoming an Ally to the Gender-Expansive Child. The evening consisted of readings, conversation and questions, and I gained fresh insights, not just about questions of gender and identity, but privilege too. I was expecting an intimate evening, but I've never seen the upstairs room at the Greenbank in Easton so packed, which was fantastic and a great tribute to Anna, the quality of her writing and her indefatigable heart. Oh and there was a big urn for the making of tea too. Inspired. 

The Valley of Desolation And The Infamous Strid

Yesterday was earmarked for visiting Mother Shipton's Cave in Knaresborough, since I was up visiting Daughter the Elder in Leeds.  Unfortunately no one told the people who run it and it closed for winter yesterday.  Really, People-Who-Run-Mother-Shipton's-Cave?  Seems to be missing a trick to me, what with Samhain being celebrated from sunset on 31st October to sunset on 1st November.

Anyhow, that meant going elsewhere and I knew just the place - Bolton Abbey near Skipton in the Yorkshire Dales.  Because when it comes to the Day of the Dead, you can't really beat The Strid. And yes, I do think the The should have a capital T. 

You wouldn't think this pastoral landscape - a slice of managed pseudo-countryside - could harbour such a terror as The Strid.  It's more Gainsborough than Gorey.  

Although of course the dissolution of the monasteries was hardly the oh-OK-we'll-call-it-a-day-then process that its name suggests.  

 Not that we lingered long in the ruins, or the Priory Church of  St Mary and St Cuthbert - a rather sanitised place of worship with some unattractive windows by Pugin.  No, we had more pagan places to walk.  

First we set off across the River Wharfe in the direction of the Valley of Desolation, the name of which originates from a massive storm in 1826 which did much wreaking of havoc.

Before we reached it, however, we turned off along the river, heading upstream and climbing through gloriously autumnal woodland.

We soon had our first glimpse of what we'd come to see - The Infamous Strid.  

Not sure what The Strid is?  Well, it's a section of the normally placid River Wharfe that is anything but.  

Here's the Wharfe just a little upstream and from the opposite bank.  In the space of a few hundred yards, it is squeezed into a narrow rocky gully, reducing in width from maybe fifty or sixty feet to about six or seven.  You can see the way this affects the nature of the flow in this photo. 

Hold on a mo, let's go down for a closer look. 

Yet the water isn't overflowing or anything, so where has it all gone?

Well ... here I am going to pinch a clever analogy coined by someone else.  It is as if the river has been turned on its side, so whilst it is the width of a brook and looks as if you could paddle across it, it's actually nobody-knows-how-deep because the powerful undercurrents make it impossible to fathom.  These same currents have undercut the banks, carving out caverns in the rock beneath the surface of the water. 

So, if you try to leap it and miss the wet, mossy rocks on the opposite bank - or simply have the misfortune to slip and fall into the tumult as you walk alongside it or over its stones - you will be sucked down into a watery grave.  It is said that no one has ever survived falling into The Strid.

'Wharfe is clear and Aire is lithe

Where Aire kills one, Wharfe kills five.'

I felt a malevolence there, as did Daughter the Elder, and as dusk fell, we were glad to move away somewhere safer.  But before we did, we read Simon Armitage's poem 'The Strid', about the tragic drowning of a newly-wed couple in 1998, to appease the river spirit as it slid into calmer waters.  

The Last Days of Troy, the First Day of Manchester

Frazzled and stiff from the purgatory of a five and a half hour drive north through endless M5/M6 roadworks, we hobbled into our seats at Manchester Royal Exchange with moments to spare.  The play we had travelled for so long to see was Simon Armitage's 'The Last Days of Troy', in which he reworks - and fills the gaps in - the conclusion of 'The Iliad'.   

It's a stunning interpretation, well worth seeing and also at the top of my books to read next pile.  One thing that struck me was the number of strong roles for women in a story that stinks of war.   I particularly admired the portrayal of Thetis, goddess-mother of Achilles,  and Andromache, the wife of Hector, by Clare Calbraith.  Also, in the difficult role of Helen, Lily Cole.  Of course, it helps that the actress has an extraordinary physical presence, but to suggest that her portrayal relies on that is to do her an injustice.  She is convincing as a woman who is constantly reflected and refracted through the eyes of men, but who has more intense relationships with women. 

From the Victorian splendour of the Palace Hotel, we stepped out the next day into a bright Mancunian morning. Apart from the odd half hour spent on the platform at Manchester Piccadilly thirty years ago, whilst en route from Lancaster, where I was a fourth year student, to Bolton where my future ex-husband was working, I had never visited Manchester before. My escort, on the other hand, has lived there before moving to Bristol, but prefers our next destination, Liverpool, so I had but an hour on Saturday morning to get a feel for the place.  This I failed to do, although I suspect it's because I didn't get to see Salford Quays.  Somehow my idea of a living, breathing city involves water and a waterfront.  

I did catch a glimpse of Bridgewater canal through this railing. No sign of Dru and NB Eve, however. 

I liked the reading room in the Central Library with the following quotation from Proverbs:  

'Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding. Exalt her, and she shall promote thee: she shall bring thee to honour, when thou dost embrace her. She shall give to thine head an ornament of grace: a crown of glory shall she deliver to thee.'

If only wisdom could be learnt from books.

I also really liked the Town Hall extension, built in a modern Gothic style in 1938.  The same architect, E Vincent Harris, designed the neighbouring library and Bristol's Council House (or 'City Hall' as we are now supposed to call it) but I much prefer this to neo-Classicism.

There were surely lots of other places to explore, had we had time, but Liverpool was calling loud and clear and so my first proper visit to Manchester ended after just a few hours.  Maybe I'll be back some time, though best not to leave it another 30 years ... 

     

Setting the Darkness Echoing: A Literary Wake for Seamus Heaney

And so to the Festival Hall for Seamus Heaney's Literary Wake.  

For some reason the woman who, less than five years ago, couldn't pluck up the courage to look at her car as she walked past it, parked outside the house, thought it would be a good idea to drive there.  And actually it was, quite.  (It probably helped that I hadn't cleaned the inside of the windscreen for a while so I couldn't see just how scary all the other traffic was.)  Though I don't feel a pressing need to repeat the experience any time soon.  

Riding shotgun were Colin Brown and Hazel Hammond.  Upon arrival, we wondered around for a bit - helpless Southbank virgins - until we met up with the far more organised Rachael Clyne, who'd sensibly made her own way up from Glastonbury.


The evening got off to an intriguing start when Hazel's glass of orange juice, untouched on a table in the bar, unilaterally upended itself all over the floor tiles.  I suppose such a happening could have been construed as inauspicious, but actually it felt like the prelude to something special.    

Here's Hazel and Rachael, waiting for the show to start.  

At this point, we had a wager about how long it would be before we got emotional.  Rachael claimed she was already teary just reading the programme.  Predictably, I held out only as long as the final line of 'Mid-Term Break', Heaney's early poem about the death of his little brother, read by Bernard O'Donoghue.  

I have a bowl of shell buttons on my table through which I like to run my fingers.  Choosing highlights from an evening featuring so many heroic poets would be as impossible as choosing a favourite button or two.  Except that I did love Paul Muldoon's reading of 'Death of A Naturalist' ...

  ... and Carol Ann Duffy, again accompanied by John Sampson, reading 'The Blackbird of Glanmore', another, later poem about Heaney's little stillness dancer ... lost brother ...

... and Edna O'Brien. who is, unbelievably, 83 now, giving an object lesson in how to read poetry.  And such poems! ... 'Punishment' - so loving, so tender - 'At the Wellhead' - 'Postscript' ... God, I'd've crawled on my hands and knees to London and back to hear her read them, and there she was, alongside the likes of Simon Armitage, Paula Meehan, Tom Paulin, Michael Longley, Christopher Reid, Charlotte Higgins and the actor, Ruth Negga.  Just how lucky were we?

And as if they weren't riches enough, there were reels, jigs and a Lullaby for the Dead from The Chieftains ...

... and the mesmeric sound of the uilleann pipes played by master piper and Heaney collaborator, Liam O'Flynn, with Neil Martin on cello.  

Ooh and as we left, my cup overflowed just a tiny bit more at the realisation that I had been sitting within spitting distance of the lovely Michael Wood for the whole evening!

Anchor for the night, Andrew O'Hagan conjectured that Heaney would have been 'embarrassed but secretly pleased' by the evening's event, and said he might have once more quoted Hugh MacDiarmid - 'it was excessive, but not enough'.  I could have listened for hours longer, but it was time to head west through the London traffic and along the rain-dark M4, cupping the flame that is Seamus Heaney's legacy.