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New Writing from the North West

Rebecca Irvine BilkauDavid TaitMichael CrowleyRon ScowcroftJim Turner

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This edition published in Great Britain in 2010 by Flax, The Storey, Meeting House Lane, Lancaster, LA1 1TH. Tel: 01524 62166. All works © their respective authors An Elastic Sky © FlaxAll rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the priorpermission of the publisher and the individual creators.Flax is the publishing imprint of LitfestLancaster and District Festival Ltd. trading as Litfest.Registered in EnglandCompany Number: 1494221Charity Number: 510670Editor: Sarah HymasDesign and Layout: Anat Caspi Kaivanto at LitfestPhotography: Jonathan Bean at Litfest

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Introduction page 4

Rebecca Irvine Bilkau Biography page 6 Angling at the Old Mill page 7 Postcard from Morecambe Bay March 2010 page 8 Absences page 9 Inheritance page 10 Now, They Tell Me page 11

David Tait Biography page 12 The Bell page 13 The Two Times We’ve Been Here page 14 Blue page 15 Strawberries page 16 Abseiling page 17 Michael Crowley Biography page 18 Close to Home page 19 Routemaster page 20 Shaving page 21 Game Over page 22

Ron Scowcroft Biography page 23 Peninsula page 24 Moon Garden page 25 Horsetails page 26

Jim Turner Biography page 27 Frost at Staoineag page 28 Attic Room page 29 Shifting light, Ardnish page 30 Cuckoo page 31

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n Once more Flax has delved into the region’s bottomless well of talent to come up with five fresh voices. Apart from the display of lyrical skill, what strikes me about this collection is its thematic cohesiveness. Despite the variety of perspectives, time and place, geographical and social, are always paramount.

Take, for instance, Rebecca Irvine Bilkau who can vividly evoke the atmosphere of a mid C20th night out, to then reveal it as the night of her own conception, handing her re-creation back to her parents as a gift, where … somewhere in the 50’s you kids are dancing, safe in the kindness of time.

Or consider David Tait’s exquisite ‘The Bell’. We are given the grounded here and now of the bell-ringer …talking to his wife, putting on his slim white gloves and then with a few deft couplets the poem swings: Everyone’s hand is on the rope, the catch of the tongue choked back.

Michael Crowley’s work focuses on the roots of personal memory, places, people and incidents, all with a finely-tuned sense of moment and transience. tomorrow waited like a substitute with something to prove.

Ron Scowcroft is able to take us elsewhere, places of solace, sufficiency, a peninsula where This year’s wine is left to warm, uncorked, unlabelled still but even so, elsewhere he is aware of the world’s darker side where horsetails thrive … like envy, black roots wired so deep in the past.

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And Jim Turner’s vivid language shows someone fine-tuned to his surroundings, whether listening to the cuckoo, lying in an attic bedroom or drawing his saw … straightthrough the tight rings of a fallen birch trunk. There is language here to carry readers down … ginnels where gleaming eyesare still as stags caught in a headtorch beam.

In the work of all these poets craft and poise highlight the emotional life of particular experience.

Mike Barlow

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A quarter of a century of Buddhist practice has made me increasingly aware of the potency of the moment. I am now attempting to encapsulate this jumble of history, choice and potential in my poetry. It’s an elusive, fascinating pursuit, one which I imagine I’ll be following for some time yet.

Read more about Rebecca on her profile page Listen to Rebecca read ‘Angling at the Old Mill’

Angling at the Old MillPostcard from Morecambe Bay March 2010AbsencesInheritanceNow, They Tell Me

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Angling at the Old Mill

Beside the rail-less shunting yarda glimmer slices the mill-pond’s dull sulkand wood raps wood at the blind window frame.

The boy gasps. I catch his falling line, swishfor the fish that isn’t there. I saw ittoo, I say. Soothed, he starts on: daft spot this

for a mill, leave off a station, you sure dad?And he’s scouring the dirt to prove me right,mimes up a fleck of cloth, a flake of card.

I shake my head. He doesn’t really wantthe facts, he wants to be scared sillyin the dusk, pretend it was a ghost mill

ghost train, wooh. I turn my collar down, dry my face in the cooling breeze, countthe cobble hollows, the ruts from last

month’s flood, grateful the shimmer’s an echoof fish, the cracking wood nothing butthe riverbank making the rubble its own,

not some miller-lad’s clogs clackings, slipping,not there. I unflask the tea, watch my boy drink.I’d squeeze his shoulder, but it’s not my way.

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Postcard from Morecambe Bay March 2010

Today, the bone-brown fracture of a carstruggles from the sand, sad as a mammoth’sskeleton and the dogs bark hymns of shock:

it’s moved. The shifty clutch of tide and sanddrive it, regular as the equinox, brutal as threats of mortality.

We ignore it, note instead the splintered lighton the flickering hills beyond the filling bay,and pull oil-coats to our chests, swap scallops

of frustration about the men we love so muchwe bring them with us, even though they’re missing,working at working. We don’t imagine

headlamps glimmering in the silt, horses screamingin the rising tide, the coach-load of humanspulling them down. We mark instead the ice

that levels gulley and marsh, how the dogs quiz the glazed grass. The ground beneath our gumbootscracks. We scramble, clutch each other, laugh,

we are safe; the silent tide has restoredthe car to obscurity, and us to the reliable shores of amnesia: it’s always lovely here.

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Absences

Out there, sharply, silences coincide, the last footfall outpaces earshot,a spent bulb divides the streetlamps’ plainsong and in the stammering language of the nightis the tension of every unsaid word.

Inside, the bed-locked woman is barely there, the dark grey of her veins outshines her skin,her half-bent fingers can’t quite crimp the sheet and her stilling body is worn by its chemise.She is learning to be outlived by lace.

Between insomnia and wasted meals, the watcher gropes for faith and finds the handthat used to be her mother’s, strokes in: Your work is done, which isn’t saying ‘die’. Come the endless breathlessness, nothing starts to be known.

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Inheritance

My grandmother left me her hands. Each time I see mine, apt to despise their fitness for nothing but labour, Nan’s echo nags me; You must be a duchess, not ours, she says.

Her knuckles were sore from the fight to keep us nit-free, clean-nosed, fed and, come hell or high, respected. She kept things in their place, did Nan: pans, religion, us. She scorned adornment,

flaunting my schooling was paste-ruby tarty, talked straight, but never open. If she admired my mum’s triumphal rise, I hope she let on, in the end. Surveying our hands I hear

her fret: Honestagod, all that thinking and you’re still on the fence. I had to jumpto conclusions. No time. But I watched youtracing the path of the planets. Chance your arm,

catch a star for me. And I think: leave me beI’m out of my depth or they’re out of my reach. But hark the herald, she’s at it again: where’s your hand? Look, there are moons in my palm.

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Now, They Tell Me

Now, they tell me nothing of themselves.

Then, it was the bright of summer, June, Julyand the heat, maybe, crackling those damp, flat lands, ripening the kids like wheat.

In the Parish Hall, windows flung wide, caution was pushed into corners; the dancers, dodging school-dinner smells, snapped through dreary shells

of war-diminished infancies. The older ones knew themselves young, weightless, gorgeous, freshly invented rebels with a cause, even there in Cheshire.

That night, maybe, a local band skiffled them to a smoochie, raggedy chords that ruffled lads’ hair out of Bryl-creem order, and crinkled girls’

blouses ever closer to their soap-scented chests.And when the doors were locked it was too earlyto sleep. Plans weren’t even planned. The kids

scattered, homing via fields, heaths, shadows of the water tower, anywhere indirect, half private, wholly forbidden. That’s where I came in unnoticed,

in between the nose giggles and the sleepy satiation.

And now, girl who kept me, boy who couldn’t stay, who tell me nothing, I give you back your night as you gave me life; it’s hot, and somewhere in the ‘50s

you kids are dancing, safe in the kindness of time.

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For me a poem starts subconsciously with a line or an image. Either of these two key things (which are sometimes mercifully the same thing) hover around the back-brain for a while and then eventually a poem (or the fragment of a poem) comes.

Read more about David on his profile page

Listen to David read ‘Blue’

The BellThe Two Times We’ve Been HereBlueStrawberriesAbseiling

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The Bell

The bell is tall with deep roots in the ground.It bears blossom, shines copper in its tower,

swings watchful on its haunches.It is grounded by the man with the rope.

Here he is now, talking to his wife,putting on his slim white gloves.

At the world’s other side blossoms fall,interns pour out sake in Ueno Park.

In Cambodia the monk tenses to wake the town, while in Paris the mistress considers ham and eggs.

Everyone’s hand is on the rope, the catch of the tongue choked back.

In the silence before the pull something gives.His slim white gloves reach out.

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The Two Times We’ve Been Here

Grandfather’s funeral. An untouched buffetin the middle of the room. Everyone uncomfortablein suits and silence as they wheel Nan clockwise, thank us for coming.

Seven years later it’s your girl’s 21st –food swept aside for a makeshift dance floorwhere everyone dances, talks nothing but marriage, how she draws our eyes like a fountain!

Both times we slip outside. You lighta cigarette, say something pointless.I breathe heavy on your smoke. I’m guilty

for feeling just as I did. And here she comes now in a clatter of jewels.Her smile is a good hand of cards.

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Blue if you love me love me here where the blue rolls in across the rocks where we sit our bodies shimmering

beneath a cloud-skirted moon

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Strawberries

Your mother has brought you strawberries.Has plucked them fresh before her flightfrom Buenos Aires. Has stashed them,your favourite, beneath her quick-packed clothes.

Won’t you try one? Won’t you put one to your lips?She left them on the table while you slept, their tops all cropped and bodies cleft.Won’t you look at them? Won’t you see their red hearts?

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Abseiling

I put on my coat and climbed mountainsto see you. Warton Crag, walking shoes.Ten of us in an old minibus that spluttered its waythrough Carnforth. You were a blast of wind in my hair, held me tight as I squatted, leaned back into pastoral. You were bruises on my knees,a taste of Mint Cake – safe and hard as a builder’s hat.

You were the smell of sweat and the sureness of rock,A partner easing rope through the karabiner –

a full group photograph of cold clenched teeth.

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Narrative is very important for me in poetry. I am interested in the story as much as the language. I love fictional voices in poetry, particularly historical characters; Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Crusoe in England’ for example.

Read more about Michael on his profile page

Listen to Michael read ‘Close to Home’

Close to HomeRoutemasterShavingGame Over

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Close to Home

It was an overspill, tipped into fields after the War. We played in woods held warm speckled eggs, frogspawn and newts caught in the tracks left by the diggers.

We lived in white semis and grew detachedbetween the one way system and the end of the line.Some of us knew the names of trees, some all the stops to Euston.

Nobody knew the fields better than me —the hour and a half of copse and grassthe dell, deep enough to abseil down bright red lines on my palms from the washing line.

Coaches came to take our parents to work along asphalt like liquorice.We spoke of where our families came frommade our voices belong.

My mother spoke about going home.Still there were always the fields, always a songIn the summer time when the weather is high You can reach right up and touch the sky

and her, standing at the edge of the pathcalling me in before the other boys. There was no adventure for the Famous One. We moved on. It became itself after we’d gone.

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Routemaster

He painted buses red for London one silver for the Jubliee. Our settee cushions wore double-decker upholstery our shed hid tins of paint, masking tape

in the kitchen drawer, cutlery stamped ‘LT’. Corporate walls and skirting boards on the door of the outside loo:No More than Twenty Standing. We lived

in a garage overflow, a set for children’s TV. There wasn’t much else for him to do:a break in Margate, a finger pointed at the news,clipping the hedge on a pair of steps - I swept,

on his knees clipping the grass; he showed me. At a bus stop he told me he’d painted this one earlier said there was a peg saved next to his. I lay awake in overalls that didn’t fit

making mistakes in the crashing darkness. And that was it, until silicone settled on his larynx like a snowflake, melting it. Then he wentalong with the conductor

and that platformfloating gently at the back of the bus slowing like a boat while we gripped the bar then jumped.

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Shaving

You’re waiting for it. That’s boyhood.I used to watch my father cooking up a clouda basin of blazing white lather air brewing with luxury and steam head turning like a dancereyes fixed as he sculpted the cream.

I wanted the bottom shelf of the cabinet. When it came to it, he bought me an electric and either it, or my face, wouldn’t work.Fathers may show their sons like ducks to the pondbut we’re all self-taught in the end.

The bearded are really naked. That’s why nudists have them and that man in The Joy of Sex.He did once say though:Son, it’s good to give your face a rest. Now I know, that wasn’t a tip about shaving.

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Game Over

On Saturdays at four o’clockwe headed for the shores of that parkcreeping back across riddled pitches to nylon studs applause on changing room floorswhere we gave post match interviews to fathers who walked us home like championsto a face flannel over my knees the inspection and re-enactment of bruisingthe results read out in black and white and tell her how I played.

I ran across October afternoonsahead of the sun’s raysalong the precipice of a touchlineand never looked down.We were stars tomorrow waited like a substitute with something to prove.

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I am interested in the layering of reality: what lies under the surface, liminal space. Listening to the stories of others is often a starting point – a man who survived Hiroshima, a fellow passenger on a plane to Faro, a compulsive painter of parrots!

Read more about Ron on his profile page

Listen to Ron read ‘Moon Garden’

PeninsulaMoon GardenHorsetails

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Peninsula

You know what it’s like:a bad day, a washed out summer,you google earth for something better,toggle down to where you might lie,the heat, tight on your cheekbones,bronzed fennel seeding aniseto the lift of an onshore breeze.

You take a plane, watch satellitesand falling stars overnight,take a car, drive until you ache,until the land narrowsand there’s a bridge, with cypress trees,and the ocean is hammered pewterwhere fishing boats are slow to harbour,their bow waves low and set like spent arrows.

You walk;somewhere on the dusty trackyou leave your shoes,and when there is no placeon either side you sit,breathe the blur of charcoal, sardines, the sear of olive oil,as, steep below, the village gives itself away:disembodied shouts,a huddle of laughter, dogs relaying claims from open doors.

This year’s wine is left to warm,uncorked, unlabelled still.There will be bread, there will be almondsfrom the nearby grove,and, looking out to sea, you say:If this is all there is, it is enough.

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Moon Garden

This is my Tranquility, my white dust.I signed false names, trusted no-one,fooled speculators, usurpers, spread rumoursthat it would be lunacy to take such a worthless patch as this,claimed my fallow space, piece by careful piece.

I dug for moon water. Made a moon-well, full and round,wished for grass and grass grew.In the shadowless night I dreamedsilver cattle at the crater’s edge,and in the haze of morning they grazed,gave milk at the pail, milk so rich and fat it fell to curds,waxed in time, halved, carved to a rind, to a cradle.

I dreamed of wheat, of flour new groundin powdered footprints by my window and my table,planted beans that broke to light like swans,that climbed with flowers so sweet they filled this airless airwith fumblings of silent bees.

When evening comes I wait to sleep again,place my back against the soil,raise my hand to a cloudless skyand cover the distant blue of earth with my thumb.

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Horsetails(Equisetum Arvense)

Or devils’ fingers we called them;plugged into towpaths, sidings, neglect,thriving like envy,black roots wired so deep in the pastnothing kills them,not even salt, not even flame.

Tear one and it spurts growthlike a green arterial bleed.Use blades for nurture,spades to propagate your own defeat.But lie and they fill your eyeswith forests, salve wounds, rise electric,cut through dereliction,impudent as hell.

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My poems may seem to go out of their way to avoid human concerns. Often they describe remote landscapes or encounters with animals and indeed many of the ideas first occur to me when I’m out walking in such places. They are not, however, escapist poetry; their primary concern is to reveal very human themes such as jealousy, power, sexual desire, loneliness and mutability.

Read more about Jim here

Listen to Jim read ‘Shifting Light Ardnish’

Frost at StaoineagAttic RoomShifting light, ArdnishCuckoo

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Frost at Staoineag

Yesterday the stream cracked and moaned shouldering uncomfortably the weight of a week’s hard frost. Listening, flushedand stripped to shirt sleeves, I drew the saw straightthrough the tight rings of a fallen birch trunk.

Now this world is quiet, nothing moves and eventhe steady easterly wind has sunklike the stream, below hearing. Stars, broken,crunch in ghostly grass, next to where my pissfreezes fast as I stare at the pale streakof a galaxy that stretches and snakes about the smoke that rises from Staoineag.

In the fire the birch wood whistles and shoutslike larksong the warmth of spring brings out.

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Attic Room

Above us a drum-tight skin of roof thrumsin the downpour, shrugging off the wet dark,the branches, their black sluice of sodden leaves.They’re all strangers to us in our warm, lit ark;even the roar, the wail of eavesseem alien, like the distant car alarmsstruck up down the street by that same hail-thrapwhich, on the cheek of our skylight, stings.

I turn over. My fingers on your skinare dark, cold, like blown leaves trembling.

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Shifting light, Ardnish

Clattering out of this hunkered down dawn,a steady rhythmical clunk and then slaprepeats as if some phantom machinehas struck up unseen in the shifting light.One moment the light is industrial, grey, the next it could lift away from the heatherwhich tops the crumbling walls of the village,then whisk your thoughts over oceans and time,skip with them past echoes of warehouses,deftly shirk the ginnels where gleaming eyesare still as stags caught in a headtorch beamand slink on to a queasy halt, lappingat the greasy wharves of the dockyardsin Glasgow, Liverpool or New York;

but it doesn’t. The morning’s sober skyscuttles by past a half frozen lochainand blows with it the steady slappingof wind-harried waves on hollow ice.

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Cuckoo

I should hate you,hate your joy in someone else’s nestwhere taking their warmth,you sprawl into their shape.

I should hate you as I lie back in this morning’s dewy lightwith flecks of your clinging spittledrying on my shirt.

I should hate your lack of shame.Shame for the pipit worn to the quickfor your over-sized appetite,thickening flesh and heavy wings.

I don’t.All I can hear is your clear callleaping the coire floor,its fat joy, its life.

022

New Writing from the North West

Rebecca Irvine BilkauDavid TaitMichael CrowleyRon ScowcroftJim Turner

022

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