In the unhealthily warm days before Christmas, an email arrived like a breath of fresh air. An American musician had lost his copy of ‘The Divers’ Death’, a dark, fierce poem from my very first collection. I sent him the whole yellowed book.
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| Alison Brackenbury |
It opened with a poem called ‘My Old’. My parents, in their vigorous forties, were not amused. Now I am twenty years older than they were then. ‘Badger grey’! declares my new book, briskly. I may have to hide the radiant covers of Skies, my ninth collection, from a new generation.
For one of the opening poems of Skies, innocuously titled ‘And’, has featured in a Penguin anthology and The Guardian. Many readers praised it. My family will not, if they read the first line: ‘Sex is like Criccieth’…
No tourist board will sponsor me, either, for my cheerful description of a crumbling resort. But a poem should not be judged too quickly:
And yet, a giant sun nobody has told
of long decline, beats the rough sea to gold.
The Castle rears up with its tattered flag,
hand laces hand, away from valleys’ slag.
And through the night, the long sea’s dolphined breath
whispers into your warm ear, ‘Criccieth’.
(‘And’)
I have Welsh blood. But it was in Lincolnshire, where I grew up, that I heard ‘both songs and stories / from my mother’s father’s war.’ That was the ‘Great War’, when my grandfather watched delightedly as ‘the mule kicked the Major’. Those mules have kicked their way into this book. So has the marching Vesta Tilley, music hall star and recruiter, still proud of ‘the night she sent three hundred boys / straight to the Western Front’. At last, a woman’s voice came back to me from that war: my mother’s mother. ‘She knew fear, but also found / new freedom’…
The middle years are not always kind to poets. But age turns memory sharp, like cold air. A sonnet in Skies recalls an old playground rhyme from my Lincolnshire village school:
Children, you lined up for your game;
one tall boy called, ‘Sheep, sheep, come home.
The wolf has gone to Derbyshire…
But the wolf had not gone. He was the boy, the catcher in the game. The children’s game is now lost. The poem speaks to adults:
How even then they lied to you.
Still they sing out, ‘Sheep, sheep, come home.’
(‘Playground’)
Fred Brackenbury, my father’s father, was a famous shepherd. I remember his prize-winning sheep, photographed here in a high lane, fattened, cosseted, and completely vulnerable.
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| Three fat sheep |
I have no nostalgia for the 1950s, when this photograph was taken. Nor do I have any sense of superiority over the people I knew then: the countrymen who worked with my father (first ploughboy, then farm lorry driver). I also remember, respectfully, their wives. One, Mrs Haywood, kind and desperately shy, scrubbed floors for my mother (a village teacher). I once helped her free a trapped mouse. Skies has a new urgency, as the poems face all that has happened since then:
We feasted, flew. We melted the far ice.
Mrs Haywood, quiet village soul, is dead.
Now, rustling through the world, I hear the mice.
(‘In the spare room’)
How far have we come, I wonder, looking back on my grandmother’s life:
She fed her neighbour’s hungry son,
I find tinned beans for a food bank.
(‘January’)
But poems celebrate. They can’t help themselves. Sometimes they have small successes to record. In Gloucestershire, where I now live, hares have multiplied on farms in the EU stewardship scheme. This makes farmers leave (as in my youth) wide green field margins, which hares love. In the 1970s, walking with my university boyfriend (now my husband) I saw hares, boxing. Now, as Skies records, I can glimpse them again:
One broke,
tore past us to the rough safe hedge.
She crossed the sun. Her colours woke,
ears black, back russet, earth new-laid.
Her legs stretched straight. The late showers made
bright water fly from every blade.
(‘Down Unwin's track’)
That poem was written after I rode our old pony, with my husband walking ahead, down a green field path. I can no longer ride her. She is thirty-one, and almost blind. But here she is, like me, part-Welsh, the quiet gateway to many of my poems about Gloucestershire’s stony and surprising hills:
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| Woody in an old farm stable |
I don’t think I have written my last poem about her, nor about those hills, where I do not live, but still walk, doggedly, as I did in the winds of Lincolnshire. Then I already knew Edward Thomas’ words by heart. I never dreamed that, forty years later, the BBC would take me to visit his last, troubled home. Skies records my strange encounter with his wild garden in Steep. The collection ends with a sympathetic poem briefly considering Sylvia Plath. She and Edward Thomas did not live to be old. Their work survives them.
Skies’ penultimate, galloping poem is in praise of furious work – and Charles Dickens. It draws on my own decades of manual work in my husband’s family business of metal finishing: ‘The scrapman’s son bangs at our door’. It ends in a London which is both Dickens’ and our own. For Dickens walks all night
until the dawn strikes London’s walls
and clangs Good morning from St Paul’s.
Waitresses, Poles, striped bankers pour,
your million words. Sleep, river.
(‘Dickens: a daydream’)
Writing, like time, is a kind of dream. Where have the thirty-five years gone since my first book? I never dreamed then, as I scribbled intense epics, that my poems might become funny. Or short.
8 a.m.
I am cycling, in a sensible, bright coat.
A girl comes pedalling quickly by, loose shawls
skidding from shoulders, hitched skirt, silver pumps.
I was that girl. O may she ride her falls.
There was no Internet when I was that cycling girl. But I am very glad to have a bicycle and a blog. In its cycles, it considers Brecht – and buses. Its last four posts are about my favourite poems in Skies. You can find this blog-cum-website, with a fine photo of a hare, new poems, and a contact page, at
I also haunt Facebook, (as Alison Brackenbury). Do feel free to send me a Friend request! I have a Facebook group, called ‘Poems from Alison’, whose kind members receive a free new poem, every couple of months. You are most welcome to join. The hares don’t appear too often!
Finally, I am on Twitter, which I love. My passion for it led to my inclusion in an article on Twitter – and its poets – in The Independent.
I think Twitter remains a splendid meeting-place for harmless enthusiasms. So I twitter about bumblebees, cats and biscuits. I post quotations from other people’s poems, which I have discovered in coffee-stained books at breakfast. Is some of this serious? Yes. Bumblebees should not be out all winter… Those frantic wings mark the record-breaking warm air of December. But my jokes are frequent. And terrible. I am on Twitter as
@ABRACKENBURY
Yes, I left the shift key down… I try to follow all the poets who cross my path… and all bumblebee enthusiasts! So do get in touch. Publishing is no longer a one-way street. I am glad of this.
The title poem of Skiesis one for which I care very much, yet scarcely feel is mine. It begins ‘in the village’s dark huddle / which I can never visit, like a star.’ I was being carried, by my father, through the village one winter night. I was very young. Poems are cheerful liars, but I do remember this. Here I am, perhaps a little later, with one of my grandfather’s orphan lambs:
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| Alison and lamb |
But that night, it was the stars that transfixed me: ‘above my wreath of breath…
beyond Back Lane and Temple Garth’. My father
could only name the tilted Plough
he followed with the snorting pair.
But I found Pegasus…
Pegasus, of course came later, as I searched atlases of stars. For ‘Skies’, too, is a poem of age. So much is gone: my parents, their families, even Buttons, the shepherding pony:
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| Buttons with some very young shepherds |
The books are laid aside. I see
new roofs, more weak lamps. Whirled and free
the stars, my calm dead, walk with me.
(‘Skies’)
Yesterday, in the weak light of a small screen, I received another, welcome email. It was from a writer who had read, in a magazine, some brand new poems of mine about my grandmother, her generosity, her endurance – and her handwritten recipes. Would they appear in a collection? I hope, I said, they will be in my next book.
The Carcanet Blog Sale
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For the next two weeks, we're giving you 25% off Alison Brackenbury's Bricks and Ballads
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