Poems in a Garden and the Graveyard Shift

One of the most enjoyable things about poetting in the summer months are the beautiful places you get to read in, such as the Polygon communal garden. This was thanks to Lizzie, the proprietor of Heron Books, who arranged an invitation for me and fellow Bristol poets, Bob Walton and Jo Eades, to share our poems there during the Clifton and Hotwells Open Gardens weekend.

The garden was reclaimed by residents from longtime neglect, overrun by brambles and bindweed, but although it now looks rather gracious, there's a wild patch and a mini-meadow. And poetry!   

The audience looks a bit sparse in this photo, but there were actually more than thirty people spread out through the garden. (We were glad of Bob's mic.)

The last poetry walk the IsamBards held before lockdown was one around Arnos Vale in March 2020. We've often mentioned it as a favourite between ourselves, but it's taken us more than four years to organise a rerun - or rather, re-amble. 

The forecast was dodgy all week, but improved the closer we got to the appointed hour, and by the time we'd parked in the street next to the top gate and wandered down to the East Lodge  through sumptuous summer overgrowth, it was fine, if a little breezy. 

One of the especially enjoyable things about poetry walks in Arnos Vale is that the poems are interspersed with information from one of the guides, in this instance Alix, an English teacher at nearby St Mary Redcliffe School. 

Our first stop was the memorial to the stillborn, who, in previous decades, had been buried without ceremony or respect and often even the knowledge of their parents. I read my pantoum 'Small Lives', which is dedicated to my late godmother, Betty, and her son, Richard, who was stillborn in Bristol in the mid-1950s and who might well be buried here at Arnos Vale. Aways an emotional one for me to get through, especially in conjunction with poems by my fellow IsamBards that remember similar losses.

Pameli reading at the Matthews' tomb

mackerel skies

After the performing was done, there was cappucino and cake in the cafe, followed by a wander back up the path to the car. 

Forsooth, shut up now poets, it's time to go, says Cwtch.

My final poetry outing for June (so far) consists of three poems from my forthcoming collection, 'Love the Albatross', newly posted on the website iamb ~ poetry seen and heard, in written form and recorded. Thanks very much to Mark Owen for including them. You can read/hear them here.

If you go down to Sheep Wood today ...

It was a mild day with sunny spells, and for once there was no named storm battering us, so Cwtch and I went a little farther afield, for a walk at Sheep Wood, which lies just to one side of a ridge of land between the suburbs of Westbury-on-Trym and Henbury. It's one of those not much frequented pockets of land where nature is in charge, something that's to be valued in a city. What makes this one really special, though, is that it contains - or is overlooked by - the original frontage of the Lord Mayor's Chapel, which dates from 1230 and was removed from its original site in the 1820s, when the level of Park Street was raised to improve its gradient. It was rebuilt four and a half miles to the north by (possibly) Henry Brooke of Henbury Hill House to act as a picturesque Victorian folly on the boundary of his garden abutting Sheep Wood.

I'd been itching to see it since I visited the Lord Mayor's Chapel just before Christmas. I thought I might have to hunt for it, but it was the first thing I saw as I entered the wood at its mid-point. 

Cwtch, on the other hand, was far more excited by the wood itself - all those new sniffs to sniff - and was motoring around, exploring every inch, so I decided to save closer inspection of the frontage for later. 

my first snowdrop of the year

two magnificent beeches

I felt I ought to have known of the wood's existence before my poet friend David Johnson told me about it a year or so ago, since it adjoins what used to be Wesley College (and before that, Didsbury College). Being Bristolian and raised Methodist, it was ... well, maybe calling it a familiar place in my childhood is a bit of a stretch, but I do remember going to see a production of 'The Crucible' there when I was about 12, and also having a picnic in the grounds when my own children were small. But walking Sheep Wood felt very much like a first footing. 

You can just glimpse the former college (now a nursing home) in the background of the photo above. 

If Cwtch was expecting sheep, she was disappointed, though we did pass a herd of yews at its south-west end. 

Being higher than its surroundings, on one side at least, there were some pale but interesting views of the suburbs to the west. Above, in wintry sun, the dreaming spires of Brookridge House, Henbury, which you can also see from the farmland where we more often walk, a mile and a half to the north-east.  

A huge burr at the foot of an oak. All the trees in the wood are under a preservation order.

'Aren't I more interesting than some old tree?'

CLOCKWISE from top left: stump puffball; velvet top(?) and black braacket fungus; oak bracket fungus (the oak is completely dead; the misleading leaves are from a nearby tree); King Alfred's Cakes; slime mould; hoof fungi

We then explored the north-eastern end of the wood. As we approached the Chapel facade on our return, the path ascended to its foot, so you could get a much closer look. 

There's also a sort-of viewing platform built lower down on the side of the hill, which is accessed by a dangerous-looking flight of steps. I've been nervous of any sort of step or stair since I broke my leg stepping off my doorstep back in 2015 - once your body has let you down so comprehensively, it's difficult ever to trust it again - but they still looked a better option than slithering down the slope, because obviously I couldn't pass up the chance of another, slightly different view of an eight-hundred-year-old wall. 

And there it was. A bit magical, really. Cwtch says we'll come back again to see how it looks in different seasons, and I think she's right. 

Two poetry walks and a funeral

The IsamBards had two attentive and (comparatively) sizeable audiences for their poetry walks at the University of Bristol Botanic Garden Bee and Pollination Festival the weekend before last. 

This is not a bee, of course, it's a hoverfly, but a useful pollinator for all that; the festival doesn't discriminate and neither do poets.

a Common Carder bumble bee

another hoverfly

Apis mellifera mellifera (so good they named it twice)

It's unusual to get four IsamBards together and looking in the same direction as each other. We so very nearly managed it. 

A few days later I was at Arnos Vale cemetery for the funeral and woodland burial of John Terry, one of the first people I met in the Bristol poetry community after I plucked up the courage to go out and read my poems. John, who'd died after a long illness, was a fine poet and it was a joy to hear his voice again, reading his poems, in recordings made some years ago at Bristol Acoustic Night. 

During the gathering, crows and ravens flew overhead, as did an aeroplane, which was entirely appropriate, John having been an engineer at Aerospace. It was an absolutely fitting farewell in a beautiful spot.