Alison Brackenbury was born in Lincolnshire in 1953 and studied at Oxford. She now lives in Gloucestershire, where she works, as a director and manual worker, in the family metal finishing business. Her ninth and latest Carcanet collection, Skies, was published in March 2016.
Taken as Read
I love street maps. They demand no batteries. Unlike careless computer printouts, they patiently list every sly sidestreet. Clutched in my hand, they have been my companions on nineteen journeys during 2016, with my rucksack full of a new collection, Skies, bouncing on my back.
Some books are lucky. Skies was a lucky book. Its hares raced into Radio Four’s Front Row. Its lost elm trees came to life in The Guardian. The Observer called it ‘a humble, haunting and humorous collection’ and made it their Poetry Book of the Month. But Skies had no time to put on airs. It was bundled into bags, and swung out of the door. My year of readings began in February, in the frosty squares of Leeds. It ended in November, with the storm-tossed palms of Falmouth, and the discreet silver of Oxford’s Christmas lights.
Why? Readings do sell books, sometimes in surprisingly large quantities. As the poetry sections of bookshops shrink and the Internet is flooded with pictures of bright new covers, I know that some poetry-lovers buy all their books at readings. They have a powerful reason for doing so. For a reading can bring poems to life. Poets who do readings also listen. In Brighton, I sat transfixed by the daring rhymes and mercurial movements of Gregory Woods’ poems from his last Carcanet collection, An Ordinary Dog. I rushed to buy this, and pored over it during my travels. In Cheltenham, I read with Gillian Clarke. Here is Gillian, with a necklace of silvered seaweed, carefully considering what to read:
Her choice included a poem I had never heard before. It described how she had read, long ago, in a Welsh mental hospital. An ex-miner who had been silent for decades stood up and recited the whole of Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’. It is a poem I shall never forget. But the ‘Open Mic’ section of readings also leads to new discoveries. During my final poetry event of 2016, the occasional wavering shout of revellers passing an Oxford bookshop faded from mind as I listened to the thoughtful work of Theophilus Kwek. The last poem I heard in my year of readings was Romola Parish’s stark journey into another world: ‘Church Going – Rwanda’, with its ‘one heartbeat’ of revelation.
Where do the revelations of readings take place? Often, at festivals, in hospitable and lovely locations. Much Wenlock, close to my grandfather’s adored birthplace in Shropshire, could not be a friendlier place. But I cannot help seeing the stuffed guardian of The Raven Hotel as its darker presiding spirit:
Bristol Poetry Festival held its readings in a Gothic hall (no ravens!). Poetry Swindon rigged up a warm and rug-lined tent, under the trees planted by Richard Jefferies’ father, in the garden of the small farmhouse where Jefferies grew up. The mulberry tree has revived recently. Perhaps it appreciates the frequent descent of poets upon this tiny but beautiful museum.
http://richardjefferiesmuseum.blogspot.co.uk/p/museum.html
One of Swindon’s poets thinks the house still holds a strong sense of those who lived, and died there. I wouldn’t disagree. Certainly I bang my head on its low door frames each time I visit! There was no danger of that in Cheltenham Town Hall, in a high Edwardian room reassuringly packed with listeners. Second Light, the excellent organisation for women poets, also filled the Enitharmon bookshop, with men and women, for their Autumn Festival reading. Yes, I did sing a Lincolnshire song, about a white-footed racehorse, with another poet during the clearing up! No, hospitable as Second Light always are, I had NOT raided their white wine…
Now Creeping Jane she's dead and gone,
And her body lies on the cold ground o…
I'll go down to her master one favour for to beg,
That's to keep her little body from the hounds o…
It is a surprisingly sprightly song. The young Welsh poet, Meirion Jordan, sang and played his fiddle to us during his reading at the Cornwall Contemporary Poetry Festival in Falmouth. I have Welsh blood, but none of Meirion’s musical ease. I recommend him wholeheartedly to all festival organisers. Only this exemplary marriage of music and words could have tempted me away from the vast Victorian windows of the festival’s setting, the Falmouth Hotel. Built for the first tourists of Brunel’s railway, it looks out on an endless spread of sea, where, as in the days of the ‘packet station’, great ships, at anchor, quietly await their instructions. Even the festival’s open mic, where students and grey-haired poets rubbed shoulders, took place on a chugging boat…
Welcome to the Poetry Boat…
But Britain’s poetry has other safe moorings beyond festivals. Universities remain its good friends. The English Department at Leeds University is the home of the thoughtful, encouraging magazine ‘Stand’. I know of few journals with more integrity, and more openness to new writers of many kinds. The poetry readings at Leeds are open to the public and free. In a warm Victorian room, the audience on an icy February night included Helen Mort, one of the many younger poets I admire and read intently.
Bristol University’s Bristol Poetry Institute, by contrast, blithely decided to hold a week of free open air poetry readings, in England, in June, under an eighteenth century brick arch, the last survivor of a Bristol merchant’s terraced gardens. They generously asked me to read twice. I packed every kind of rain wear and expected to read to the kind organiser, (the poet William Wootten), and a couple of loyal, soaked students.
The sun blazed (all week). A Vice Chancellor came: the creator of this green oasis. The students gathered. The university’s office staff flocked out and sat on the grass of the University’s brand-new garden, with their sandwiches. It was excellent! But I think my Republican introduction to ‘1642’ from Skies, may have troubled the spirit of Prince Rupert, whose arsenal was stored where the University now stands. ‘This war has never stopped’. Here are Bristol’s latest, more benign banners:
Bristol Poetry Institute’s ‘Poetry Arch’ is usually called ‘The Ivy Arch’. Most of the ivy has been removed, but I spotted a tenacious spray in a high crevice. British poetry needs strong roots in stormy times. It finds them in the local groups of writers, readers and listeners, who are amongst my favourite audiences. I must, of course, mention the Oxford Stanza group who are a) extremely good poets b) bought ALL of my books! But I also enjoyed reading at Bradford-on-Avon, at Dawn Gorman’s ‘Words and Ears’, at Brighton for Michaela Ridgway’s ‘Pighog Poetry’, at Bristol’s lively ‘Can Openers’ and at Halifax for Keith Hutson’s ‘Square Chapel’ evening of poetry. Keith’s flock of beautifully tended sheep did not come along to the reading, but, as a shepherd’s granddaughter, I feel they offered valuable encouragement. Here are the Poetry Sheep…
The names of individual organisers, rightly, chime through my praise of the groups they organise. Jane Commane, of the excellent Nine Arches Press, not only arranged the Leicester Shindig, where I read in May, but insisted on giving me a lift round some of Leicester’s darkest, most baffling roads to my well-hidden hotel. I have never organised ANYTHING. I can only gratefully praise all those who do, month after month, year after year. Here is the Carcanet poet, Jenny Lewis, who generously organised my last reading of the year, in Oxford. She stands benignly behind my fellow readers, Rosie Jackson and Claire Crowther. I can only thank her for her time and diligence.
I think poets owe a particular debt to organisers who bravely bring them together with performers or experts from different disciplines. I was honoured to do a reading in North London with a jazz group of professional musicians who could play any song, immediately, by ear. I still hear their accompaniments when I perform the poems they enriched.
One of my largest audiences this year proved to be at the New Networks for Nature conference in Cambridge (who also invited musicians to perform). This admirable charity includes amongst its aims: ‘To challenge the low political emphasis placed nationally upon wildlife and nature’. This has never been more vital. I learnt much from the conference’s sessions on birds, and ecology. New Networks aims to bring artists and conservationists together. Following my Cambridge reading, two of my bird poems are flying off to an RSPB display. Look out for two very disreputable sparrows and a rather more dignified lapwing, who also dropped out of the sky into the conference report…
http://www.newnetworksfornature.org.uk/events_archive.htm
Unless you are a bird, Britain is not a straightforward country in which to travel. I do not drive long distances. So my journeys have often been complex and slow. But I have had valuable support, as on the tiny railway line I used to cross Falmouth:
I normally travel by National Express, whose staff show great kindness and patience to their customers. One Hungarian driver on the South Western routes is greeted with enthusiasm by every elderly passenger who knows him. He not only stows their cases in the boot, but seizes their smaller bags and guides the bags’ owners carefully up the high steps into the coach. I am also full of admiration for the driver from the North East who learned that a lorry had jackknifed on the motorway near Exeter. He had to race round Newton Abbot, relying on shouted directions from sympathetic lorry drivers to find a long, congested back road. He still got us to Bristol on time, and told us where to find all the connecting coaches, before heading off for a hurried lunch, then on to Newcastle…
Food…I have a secret weapon in my long journeys to readings. I catch an early bus to town, and with Skies, scarves and a sheaf of gardening magazines, I fall through the door of the small café next to Cheltenham’s equally small coach station. There two immaculate ladies, originally from the Philippines, ask me with amusement: ‘Where are you going TODAY? Do you want your usual….?’ The ‘usual’, dripping with butter and scattered with sultanas, will keep even the hungriest poet going through hours of National Express, blocked motorways and sudden vicious hailstorms on arrival. It is the Poetry Teacake…
The poetry world is not always as comfortable as this small café. When I drank a windswept evening coffee on the Pier, before my Brighton reading, I studied the wild turquoise waters flowing beneath my feet:
Poetry events have their own troubled waters. I think the word ‘venue’ is now engraved on many a poetry organiser’s heart. 2016 seems to have been a turning point, as rents rise steeply and terms become harsher. Small festivals in particular are struggling to find a venue which is central, safe and affordable (and where the readers are not drowned out by pub or traffic din). One of my readings, which shall be nameless, was briefly cancelled when half the venue went into administration the weekend before. Fortunately this did not close the half of the building where the poetry event was held. It proved to be one of my most enjoyable readings for 2016.
And audiences? Other poets have commented to me, thoughtfully, that audiences for poetry readings now do seem to consist largely of people who write poetry themselves. They are often very good, attentive listeners. I am very happy to read to them. My fairly long life has convinced me that most people will never go to a poetry reading, or buy a collection by one poet. But many people do appreciate single poems which come before them. They may even buy an anthology which includes those poems. (Poetry on the Underground has demonstrated this for many years.) So, as well as formal readings, I am always on the look out for other ways of putting poems before readers. I have not, of course, done enough of this.
Then there is life. Beyond the piers, teacakes and poetry, 2016 was an awful year. In my own small world, it was the year when our last old pony had to be put down. Like Creeping Jane, she was small and gallant, with ‘lily white’ socks. Unlike Creeping Jane, I suspect, she lived until thirty-one. Then she developed untreatable cataracts. So we are now in a new life beyond horses. In our smaller world, this means fresh woods, and walks.
But in the greater world, there are wars, tides of refugees – and Brexit. My first reaction to the referendum vote was ‘I did not do enough’. A Remain poster and flurried posts on social media were not enough. I should have poured in far more time and money. Will there be another chance? Probably not. It was a close vote. Brexit is a terrible reminder not to become too absorbed in specialised worlds… such as a year with nineteen poetry readings.
Next year I will sort out the garden. I have my own robin to pacify! I will finish at least some of the hundreds of poems in a cloth bag I can scarcely lift. But musicians who stay at home admit that they secretly want to start touring again. Soon I will make a few overtures for 2018…
Public readings and writing are not always at war. ‘Playground’, an audience favourite from Skies, was written as a result of conversations after my reading at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in 2013. I will place it at the end of this piece. Although fiercely felt, it is a poem I wish I did not have to write, or read. So, more seasonally, it will be followed by a Christmas poem, which I will be reading soon in a small local event. And then, as after my Cheltenham Literature Festival reading with Gillian Clarke, there is always the hope of going home by bus, under a rainbow!
Playground
Children, you lined up for your game,
one tall boy called, ‘Sheep, sheep, come home.
The wolf has gone to Derbyshire.
He won’t come back for seven years.’
You raced across the wind-blurred ground.
But he was wolf. He plunged, he pounced.
Each child, when he clutched coat or cuff,
straight-haired, scuff-toed, became the wolf.
Are you a wolf, grey, slender? Yet
as, elegantly, you stroll through
the café’s buzz, the city’s dome,
what is it you do not forget?
How even then they lied to you?
Still they sing out, ‘Sheep, sheep, come home.’
Alison Brackenbury
From Skies, Carcanet, 2016
December 25th, 12 noon
No, honestly, we are more organised than we look.
The piles of clothes are all washed.
I have fed the birds, then the cats,
Now the cats are out: catching birds,
It starts to unravel. The cream will not whip,
It mocks the whisk in white hissing waves.
The cat flies the long grass, scattering wings,
The creased pale blouses shiver and fall.
Time, I think, to drink, then wander
The flooded footpaths, to waver and call
And Christmas, and Merry, and to you all.
Alison Brackenbury
From Singing in the Dark, Carcanet, 2008
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Alison's ninth Carcanet collection of poems, Skies, was published by Carcanet Press in March 2016 and can be found here.
