Helen Tookey: Writing from the Edgelands

Helen Tookey, author of Missel-Child

One of the most intriguing things about putting together a book of poems is that it enables you to discover, retrospectively, what it is that you’re interested in. In my case it turns out that I’m fascinated by liminal spaces, edgelands, transition zones, and what they may contain and conceal. Many of the poems in Missel-Child deal with some variation on this theme, but that didn’t become apparent to me until quite late on in the process of putting the book together. Iain Bamforth sent me the following very perceptive comments: ‘Transition zones are where interesting things happen, in culture as well as nature. Every boundary has its own niche conditions and translation potential, and the ability to exploit the properties of two or more media! It’s a bit like stepping inside a translation. I guess that’s why you have so many foxes in these poems; they exist on the margins and edgelands and seem to move between feral and habited worlds at ease.’ He’s right, of course, but I hadn’t initially noticed the way foxes kept appearing in the poems.

Robert Soden, ‘Sheeps Head a Pound!’ Hendon Road 2013
Watercolour, gouache & acrylic. 75x105cm 

One context for this interest in boundary zones is the fact that I have lived for the past thirteen years in Liverpool, which is on the estuary of the Mersey and next to the Wirral peninsula, which has the marshy Dee estuary on its western side. The coastline to the north of Liverpool, meanwhile, is a shifting landscape of sand dunes and pinewoods notable for the prehistoric footprints preserved in the mud layers. It’s very much an edgelands place and one that finds its way into a number of the poems.

Edward Chell, M2 Junction 3

There is an earlier context, though, biographically speaking. I was born and grew up in the Midlands, a few miles west of Leicester, in a place that – although it still thinks of itself as the village it originally was – is now joined to the city by the miles of continuous ribbon development along the A47 Hinckley road. To come from the Midlands is already to belong nowhere, to be neither one thing nor the other; to come from a place that’s neither city nor country, even more so. There is also, I think, a strongly cultural element to this. The bourgeois suburbs are places of conformity, where appearances must be kept up and where everything operates on the principle of pas devant les enfants. No surprise, I think, that someone growing up in this environment might develop something of an obsession with secrets and hidden narratives, and with those small corners where the neatness and control appear to end – the tangled patches of wasteground, the places where streams disappear under roads, the fenced-off dangers of railway embankments or electricity substations.

Laura Oldfield Ford, M6 Junction 9, Bescot, 2011
Chalk, acrylic & ink on watercolour paper. Collection of Moses Luski

All of this is captured perfectly, it seems to me, in the work of contemporary visual artist George Shaw. Shaw grew up in the Tile Hill suburb of Coventry and he is best known for his precise paintings of locations in Tile Hill, based on his own Polaroid photographs and painted using Humbrol enamels. When I first saw Shaw’s work I felt an immediate affinity with it – partly because the features of the scenes he paints are completely familiar to me, but more so because of what he uses these scenes to convey. The paintings never include any people: they are simply places, odd bits of wasteground or corners behind municipal buildings, lock-up garages or pedestrian underpasses. But the paintings are full of implied narrative, of the sense that something has happened or is going to happen; they have a deeply unsettling quality that exactly captures, for me, the nature of such places.

George Shaw, The Gamble, 2012
lithograph 25.2 x 35.4cm

Shaw is one of the artists featured in the exhibition currently at the Bluecoat arts centre in Liverpool, Soft Estate (until 23 February). The exhibition explores, in paintings, drawings and photographs, the ‘non-places’ that Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts designated and depicted in their book Edgelands (they are giving a talk to accompany the exhibition on 6 February): the soft verges and embankments of motorways, pedestrian walkways beneath the M25, the allotments and scraps of land that make up suburban landscapes.

George Shaw, The Other Side, 2012
lithograph, 57 x 66cm

I shall be reading from Missel-Child at the Bluecoat on 13 February and, with the Soft Estate exhibition as a perfect backdrop, I am looking forward to discovering what might emerge, like those unexpected foxes, from the spaces of the poems.

All artwork from the Edgelands exhibition; copyright belongs to the artists. Text copyright © Helen Tookey 2013. For tickets and information for all events at the Bluecoat, telephone 0151 702 5324 or see www.thebluecoat.org.uk.

Helen Tookey was born near Leicester in 1969. She studied philosophy and literature at university and has worked in academic publishing, as a university teacher, and as a freelance editor. Her short collection Telling the Fractures, a collaboration with photographer Alan Ward, was published by Axis Projects in 2008. Her verse was anthologised in New Poetries V (Carcanet, 2011). Missel-Child is her first full collection.

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Missel-Child

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Missel-Child
According to the seventeenth-century herbarium The Garden of Eden, a ‘missel-child’ is a mysterious being found beneath a mistletoe-covered tree – a changeling, perhaps, ‘whereof many strange things are conceived’. Helen Tookey’s first full collection of poems starts from the missel-child to explore archaeologies of identity, place and language. She is a formally inventive writer, using collage and syllabics, exploring elegy and myth. The poems in this book create a space in which language enables something to be said and also to be shown.

Missel-Child is an exceptional volume. Some of the subject-matter is ‘found’, some comes from a powerful and intelligent imagination and from keen observation. All is embodied in a language that is sensuous and strong. 
Jeffrey Wainwright