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BETWEEN RIVERS SUMMER 2024: PAT SUMNER, POET – ALAN HORNE

BETWEEN RIVERS is a quarterly series edited by Alan Horne. It is focused on the area bounded by the rivers Alyn, Dee and Gowy, on the border between England and Wales in Flintshire and Cheshire. You can read about the background to Between Rivers in the Introduction.

In this quarter’s edition we have four poems by Patricia Sumner. Brought up on the Isle of Anglesey, Sumner was a writer from an early age. She took a degree in English Literature and Philosophy, trained as a teacher, and then taught in a primary school for ten years: she has written extensively for children, publishing picture books, adventure stories, factual books, teaching resources and a novel. She studied creative writing with teachers including Dr Gladys Mary Coles, who featured in the Winter 2024 edition of Between Rivers. As a poet, Patricia Sumner has published two collections and has won prizes for her poetry and plays. At the moment she is editing a further collection of poems by herself and three other poets, which will come out under the Veneficia Publications imprint.

She now lives in the Vale of Clwyd, runs Cilan Proofreading and Editing, and teaches creative writing to adults. One of her projects is the creative writing class Ruthin Writers, which she teaches alongside poet and sound artist Diana Sanders, who was featured in the Spring 2023 Between Rivers.

In this selection of Sumner’s poems the fundamental elements of our region – landscape, weather, climate and the passage of day and night – take on a highly physical presence, becoming the stage over which the (often troubled) human and animal actors make their way.

We begin with her poem Border, originally published in Sumner’s pamphlet Beyond the Glass, produced by Thynks Publications. The poem takes us straight into the uplands surrounding the Dee and Alyn rivers, and to the question, ever-present in Between Rivers, of boundary and frontier, given fine emphasis by the slightly hunted tone of voice in the poem.

 

BORDER

Snaking through Nant-y-Garth shadow,

I’m glancing back. Crossroads, Llandegla,

the dusk monotoning colour, I push on

up towards empty moorland,

bleak as doors slammed shut.

 

Somewhere here, where hills are waves

on a heather sea, a border lies.

Meaningless to straggled sheep, but map-real

our animal instinct, our territory marking,

our keeping out and keeping in.

 

The ribbon road meanders

through a land of no man.

I follow its fading thread

as tired sun abandons an indifferent sky

and night falls too heavy.

 

Past Rhydtalog, bedraggled ponies

and scattered farms, I think again of home,

our huddled fire and walls

we’ve built like borders

to keep unbounded dreams safe.

 

Another poem from Beyond the Glass is Early Morning. This is also found in Sumner’s book The Promise of Dawn: Rites of Passage for All Beliefs, produced by Veneficia Publications. Early Morning inhabits the valley just as Borders does the moor, and in this more benign environment there is an everyday transformation: the coin-flip of dawn.

 

EARLY MORNING

Dew glistens the grey meadow. Light seeps

through cloud strata to silver the vale.

Treading the field in reverence, heads bowed,

silent heifers commence morning prayer.

Even swishing hooves are stifled

by the closeness of cloud, the stillness of air.

 

From somewhere, a rook scratches at sky –

its wings, snagged threads in silk –

till reluctant mist dissipates

and pine trees castellate the hill.

 

Now, like a tossed coin, night flips

and the vale is gilded with morning

and every tree bursts with blackbird and robin

singing the promise of dawn.

 

Also from The Promise of Dawn is the poem Unfolding Like Lilies. This time we have a strictly urban poem, but now our vulnerability to the elements comes most to life, as the wind-whipped speaker is blown from one location in the city of Chester to another, hoping for a sanctuary. Weather and climate in our region are mostly addressed through clichés about how wet it is: this is a more considered treatment.

 

UNFOLDING LIKE LILIES

March’s blast assaults us.

Mugger-gusts knife through alleys.

Toiling up Frodsham Street, they thrash us,

then hurtle, remorseless,

over rooftops, braced

and clinging.

 

Storm-blown ships, we pitch on the Eastgate Rows,

where timbers groan in momentary lulls.

People group, conspiratorial,

in penguin huddles by the city wall,

or loiter in synthetic precinct

to creep out stiff as spiders.

 

Reminding us to be gracious,

the woolly capped faithful

stand buffeted beneath Bridge Street Cross,

handing out hot cross buns

to the reluctant grateful,

who snatch, nod, hurry off.

 

In Northgate Square, we are spun

in a cyclone of leaves.

So we plunge

into cathedral shadow

to find ourselves held

in rare and sudden stillness.

 

Entering the nave, we sigh,

unfolding like lilies on gentle water,

blossoming into

a pool of peace –

that quiet distillation

of centuries of prayer.

 

The final selection is a new, presently uncollected poem, September Evening. Now the weather has changed, and Sumner evokes the end of a hot day, the oppressive atmosphere relieved only in part by the starlings which gather as dusk approaches.

 

SEPTEMBER EVENING

The day had ached and creaked with heat.

As afternoon smouldered towards night

and the sky ignited

with magenta, gold and flame,

a murmuration of starlings

swept, swirled and dived

above undulating hills fading blue-grey.

 

Tiny fleeting forms on ecstatic wing

melded into breakers;

alive with flight

and their cooling breeze,

they doused the shores of evening.

 

Back and forth along the vale,

shrill chatters rising to shrieks,

they spun and soared

above regiments of weary maize,

stretching sycamores seeking air

and hedges sinking

into a sighing land.

 

I hope you have enjoyed these poems. Patricia Sumner’s The Promise of Dawn is available here along with a number of her books for children. You can find out more about her writing, teaching and other activities on her Facebook page.

 

 

 

 

 

A ROOM WITH A VIEW

I was a scholar at a grammar school

founded by Henry VIII after he had

dissolved the monasteries, stolen their land,

destroyed their hospitals, tortured the odd

abbot or two and trousered their cash and plate.

The school, a Victorian extension

of the original, was ‘in the shadow

of the cathedral’, as the head would say –

an Anglican canon, MA Oxon.

There was, in the Canon’s dismal study,

a portrait of the priapic monarch.

The reverend would order those he caned –

for smoking, chewing gum -‘Face the founder’.

 

When I was in the fourth form, we learned about

the Kings of Israel, ‘The Merchant of Venice,’

the Armada and quadratic equations.

The Virgin Queen, Portia and Jezebel

would glide through the algebra. Our form room

overlooked the cathedral’s coke store

and was level with steps visitors would take

to the monks’ dormitories now Sunday School.

Americans predominated, mostly

elderly or so it seemed. Sometimes

a pretty girl would stop and turn and she

and I would briefly see eye to eye

before our lives diverged forever.

 

 

Note: On September 16th 2016 the school celebrated the 475th anniversary of its founding.

 

 

 

SUBURBIA

Along the avenue of shorn maples,

leaded lights are discreet – distantly,

the cathedral darkens in a rose sunset.

A piano lesson begins, as cars turn

into drives and a door opens broadcasting

the six o’clock news. At an upstairs

window, a woman holds a baby, sees

nothing in the crepuscular room, hears

only the snuffle of breath on her neck,

the small heart’s beat, the swaying lullaby –

amid ordinary, pink perspectives

of curbed greenery, herbaceous living

and bells telling the hours.

 

 

 

LA CATHÉDRAL SAINTE-MARIE D’AUCH

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read460 views

This is the first church she has ever entered.

She likes the thudding noise of her pink trainers

with the flashing heels on the limestone flags.

She stops and points. She has seen, in subtle,

Renaissance stained glass, Jonah emerging

from his whale. She sees a kneeler, lies down

before Adam and Eve and pretends to sleep.

The cathedral was on the pilgrim route

to Santiago Di Compostella

so is a place of consummate skill,

vaulting beauty and Christian arcana –

a wonder no greater or lesser

than Iggle Piggle or The Gruffalo.

Keep the faith, little one, keep the faith!

 

 

 

 

JUBILEE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read535 views

‘Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubile to sound…and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.’ Leviticus 25:9 & 25.10

 

Much of the chapters and footnotes of England’s,

though not Britain’s, history are scribed here

in stone and iron – Roman Walls, Norman weir,

marshalling yards – the rest is on paper,

of course, and from hearsay. It is said,

for example, for Victoria’s Jubilee,

in our street, lilac trees were planted.

Some have survived changes of taste or neglect.

 

This city, where I have lived most of my life

by chance then choosing, is shaped by the Dee,

that brought wine and the Black Death from Acquitaine,

powered the long defunct tobacco mills and still

draws occasional salmon from the oceans.

I imagine them waiting in the deep currents,

fattening on sand eels, squid, shrimp, herring,

and then the long, fasting haul from west

of Ireland, homing for their breeding grounds.

A cormorant perches on the salmon steps.

The last of the fishermen is long dead.

 

Like the calls and wings of Black-headed Gulls,

blown by April storms, the names and titles

of princes echo from the neutral sky

and sound through the deferential streets.

No doubt, there will be the splendid nonsense –

the cathedral’s ring of  bells will peel

and the Lord God Almighty will be urged

repeatedly to ‘save the Queen’. So,

let the ram’s horn blow like a trumpet

through Mammon’s and God’s obsequious temples –

and ‘…proclaim liberty throughout all the land…’

 

Almost which ever road you take westward,

in the distance, are the Welsh hills. The Legions

exiled the Celts from here – Saxons et al,

with legal threats and occasional killings,

kept them out except for trade and prayer

but forbade their songs. Now, waiting, we

are everywhere. Let the ram’s horn sound.

 

 

LLECHWED SLATE CAVERNS, GWYNEDD

The quarried cavern is vast as the

proverbial cathedral or, perhaps more

properly, higher than a chapel ceiling.

Amidst the rubble on the floor is a caban,

a small, slate lean-to. Though on piecework,

the quarrymen, erstwhile farmers and shepherds

driven here by poverty, stopped, at noon,

to sing, recite, debate for an hour –

their knowledge the power to sustain them.