Tag Archives

Liverpool

SLAVERY’S DIVIDENDS

The Duke of Wellington vowed he would never

travel by train again – and, while still alive,

kept his vow. (His corpse was conveyed in state

by rail from his house in Kent to London).

The official opening of the Liverpool-

Manchester railway ought to have been one

of unqualified celebration: the first

passenger train journey in the world hauled

by a steam locomotive; with VIPs

and a military band – albeit

seated on benches in open wagons,

except for the Duke, then Prime Minister,

and his party in a bespoke, covered carriage.

 

The dual track line had been built to convey –

more quickly than the horse drawn narrow boats

on the canals, or carts on the unmade roads –

the raw cotton unloaded at Liverpool

to Cottonopolis (i.e. Manchester)

and its satellite cotton mill towns

in south east Lancashire – and transport

the finished products back for export

to the growing British Empire’s colonies.

 

George Stephenson, who designed and built the line,

in order to show off the commercial

versatility of the dual track approach

on the day employed two engines – both of which

he had designed and built: the Northumbrian –

the Duke’s train, as it were – pulled rolling stock

from west to east; the Rocket east to west.

They met half way – at Parkside Station –

to take on water. There, the MP

for Liverpool, William Huskisson,

became the first railway fatality.

He fell on the north track, and the Rocket

crushed one of his legs. The Northumbrian,

pulling the first of its wagons – the one

the military band had been travelling in –

took the injured man to Eccles, where he died

in the vicarage. Meanwhile the bandsmen

began to march in step – or attempted to

given the sleepers and rubble

laid between them – back to Liverpool.

 

The much delayed train arrived in Manchester

in rain. A large crowd of mill workers,

remembering the Peterloo Massacre,

jeered loudly, and threw things. Wellington,

always a defensive general,

refused to alight. The train returned

to Liverpool – passing the still stumbling

and wet bandsmen – to a civic reception.

 

I first learned about Huskisson’s demise

in a history lesson in school – just the sort

of Goon Show/Pythonesque fact to appeal

to teenage boys. We did not learn about

how Stephenson was able to build the track

across Chat Moss, a peat bog, thousands

of years old and many metres deep,

a permanent way that operates now,

an engineering feat of genius,

a joyous testament to our large brains.

Nor did we learn that the whole business venture –

each spike, each bolt and nut, each foot of wrought iron

rail, and each of the many, expensive

courses at the celebratory banquet

in Liverpool’s town hall – had been funded

by the enslavement of Africans.

 

 

 

 

MENLOVE AVENUE: VARSITY DAYS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read511 views

Exiting Liverpool, on a whim, eastwards,

parallel to the river and then across

the Mersey Gateway Bridge – not as usual

through the Kingsway Tunnel – I took a wrong turn.

I found myself in Mossley Hill driving past

my old hall of residence. Another

wrong turn took me down Menlove Avenue.

A tour bus idled outside 121.

‘Though I know we’ve seen this place before,

someone keeps on moving the door’. Passing

the Jewish cemetery on Hillfoot Road

and a sign for John Lennon Airport

told me I was on the right road for home.

 

As I drove onto the Gateway Bridge I thought

of what I had learned in Academe’s Groves:

that Aristotle knew how many teeth

a horse has, and Bertolt Brecht was a fan

of Rudyard Kipling. Beneath me the river

was bright, and stretched like a silver lining.

I remembered, one damp November night,

walking from my lodgings near the Art School

down to Victoria Street’s sorting office

to catch the last post to faraway you

with my regular letter of love and longing.

Near Mathew Street, three working class teenage girls –

thirteen, fourteen, still in their school coats – sang

‘The world is treating me bad, misery…

I’ll remember all the little things we’ve done…’

I wondered then when and how I would use

such a piece of theatre.

 

 

‘AI’ & ‘REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST’: POEMS & GRAPHICS

David Selzer By David Selzer9 Comments2 min read1.5K views

The poems were inspired by conversations with the artist, Evie Chapman. The poems, in turn, inspired Evie Chapman’s artwork.

 

AI

For Evie Chapman

 

 

Not ‘artificial insemination’, nor

a cry of dismay or woe, nor a

two letter word approved by Scrabble,

nor a three-toed sloth from the Guianas,

but ‘artificial intelligence’.

 

***

 

I set the computer on my exercise

bike – with its read-only-memory –

and, as I pedal nowhere in the study,

sometimes to engage my mind on the journey

I pick a book at random from the shelves.

Today it is THE FACT OF A DOORFRAME,

Adrienne Rich’s selected poems.

Again at random, I access it

at page forty six. Helpfully the poem,

entitled ‘Artificial Intelligence’,

is dated: 1961. The poet

has been bested at chess by a computer.

‘I’m sulking,’ she says, ‘in the great tradition

of human waste’ and, deliberately,

personifies the ‘digital’ machine,

addressing it directly: ‘…denied

our luxury of nausea, you

forget nothing, have no dreams’.

 

***

 

We live much of our lives in metaphor,

frequently when ‘the tables have been turned’

and life becomes ‘an uphill battle’.

We often like to think ‘the grass is

always greener on the other side’,

especially after ‘it’s been raining

cats and dogs’. ‘Artificial intelligence’

was ‘coined’, yes, in that great tradition –

by USA computer scientists

nearly seventy years ago. So

why the current razzmatazz, the last ten year’s

of increasingly noisy razzle-dazzle,

about what AI will do for us

or to us now, as if it were some

recently arrived sentient being,

a software Golem come to redeem us,

a binary Godzilla bringing

the end of days – not something that needs

the electricity to be switched on

to work? Maybe somebody somewhere

is looking to make a fortune or two

out of  our gullibility – yesterday’s

news become today’s snake oil?

 

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

For Evie Chapman

 

 

Now that I have been summoned to bear witness

to the ‘swinging sixties’, a decade

half my lifetime away – when Liverpool,

according to the poet, Allen Ginsberg,

was the centre of ‘the human universe’,

when the empires of the USA

and the Soviet Union curtailed

the lives of millions, and raced, like small boys,

to be the very first men in the moon –

I shall make some notes in order to

blow the dust off the archived albums

of my memories: I was 17

when it began, a high school student,

and a poet, and 27

when it ended, husband, father, teacher,

property owner, and still a poet;

from adolescence to adulthood,

from dependence to independence,

in ten long sometimes joyful, sometimes

unsteady steps; from falling in love

with a pretty girl, and staying in love;

from youthful insouciance to the pride

and awe at having a daughter; commonplace

wonders, shaping futures.

 

 

GRAPHICS: ©Evie Chapman 2024

BETWEEN RIVERS WINTER 2024: A SELECTION OF POEMS BY GLADYS MARY COLES – 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.

For our February 2024 issue Between Rivers features the work of the prolific author Gladys Mary Coles, who has not only published ten volumes of her own poetry, together with a novel, but has also edited thirty anthologies of poetry and prose, and produced volumes combining poetry with visual arts, while teaching Creative Writing at Liverpool University. Her writing has won many prizes. Born in Liverpool and with a longstanding connection to Ruthin in Denbighshire, she writes with an international scope but often with a close attention to the local: Liverpool, the Wirral and the Dee estuary, north-east Wales and the Clwydian hills. In addition to all this, she has a profound engagement with the early 20th Century novelist Mary Webb, author of Precious Bane: Coles’ Flower of Light was the first major biography of Webb, and she has published two further books about the novelist, edited a selection of her poems, and is President of the Mary Webb Society.  Webb’s vivid feeling for the natural world in her Shropshire home plainly resonates with Coles’ own work.  Of which there will be more: in preparation is a further volume of poetry and a book about Webb’s Shropshire.

One way into Coles’ earlier poetry might be through the volume of new and selected verse published by Duckworth as Leafburners in 1986. This includes the poem On Offa’s Dyke, about the eighth century structure which marked the boundary between Mercia and the Welsh kingdoms. Originally published in the 1984 collection Stoat, in Winter, the poem was used in the reopening of the Offa’s Dyke Centre following the recent pandemic. One of the ideas behind Between Rivers is that complexities of border and identity can be found right here, at the heart of the United Kingdom. So, one of the characters in Clay, Coles’ novel of the First World War, announces himself as the Irish invader of a Liverpool street built, named and inhabited by the Welsh. In addition, Coles observes in her biography Mary Webb that, for Webb, “the Border Country that merges into the Beyond” is also a border country of the mind and spirit. On Offa’s Dyke traverses these territories.

 

On Offa’s Dyke

 

Once a concept, now returned to concept

except where the mounded soil

hints of activity, toil,

scoopings, bendings, craft

of earthwork unknit by wind-work.

 

Once a long snake, sinuous over the land,

over hill heights, above cwms:

now it’s disintegrated skin

is ghosted in the ground,

buried in its own earth

yet visible here and there

like the life of Offa, Mercian King.

This, in itself, evidence of him,

hegemony’s power, fear –

the tangible remains.

 

Their truths the walls of history hold:

Hadrian’s, Jerusalem’s, Berlin’s –

humanity walled in, walled out,

a wall for weeping on, a wall for execution;

and all our inner barriers, divisions

numerous as the species of wild growth

embedded in this dyke –

taken by the only natural army.

Leafburners also includes poems from her Liverpool Folio, also published in 1984. Printed in a large format, Liverpool Folio combines her poems with many photographs in an evocation of personal and family memory of the city and its environs. As the child of Liverpudlians I was pleased to find it a world away from media clichés about the city. Liverpool Folio meets Between Rivers at the extremes of the range of each: on Hilbre Island in the Dee estuary. Coles’ poem From Hilbre Island is accompanied by the photograph of the same name by Lindsay Coles.

 

From Hilbre Island

 

Dissolution of day

on the estuary;

night’s vast advance

on the evening tide;

and I, rock lichen, cling

listening to sea-distance,

the murmur of a harmony

within a greater harmony

 

while from the fretted shore

humanity emits

a thousand brutish sounds

diffused and lost:

 

as on a distant plain

the sound of centuries repeats

and noise of conflict boils

from blue-skinned warriors

or scaly knights who swarm

like early amphibians

floundering, sea-emerged.

 

Poems from the 1985 collection Studies in Stone are also represented in Leafburners, including a remarkable sequence, Winter in Clwyd, where close observations of the natural world, built up line by line, open out into an understated drama.

 

Winter in Clwyd: A Sequence

(for my mother, Gladys M. Reid)

 

  1. Snow takes the mountains
    advance forces the frosts:
    no field escapes
    each blade sprigged
    like blast-dust on trees
    the fright-white ghosts of summer.
    The vale in frost-sprayed gown
    a thin hemline of mist
    below the hills.
  2. The Clwydian’s great white shoulders
    nude giants turned to stone
    hiding their faces.
  3. A farmer’s fence along the topmost field
    is a charcoal line demarcating
    from white hill to white sky.
    In the distance sheep move in flock –
    a yellow turgid river
    the dog fussing on its banks.Before me, pencilling of undergrowth
    pointillism of stubble. Closer now,
    I see bird-pricks, flick of wings,
    fox-marks narrow with long central toes,
    indentations of dragged tails – rats
    or slender weasels – the matchless blobs
    of rabbits and, behind, unmistakable
    manprints. Secretly in snow
    new graphics have appeared.
  4. Light breaks over eastern Clwyd:
    the hill hollows fill like breakfast bowls
    milky to the brim. Snow on the tops,
    crystalline mounds dissolving
    at the edge. Changing light eludes
    no matter how long I stare.
    I notice how mountains, their fronts
    in deep pleats at early morning
    become smoothed out by coffee-time.
    I hold a steaming mug: froth clings
    like stale snow the rain disperses.
  5. On the chess board of fields
    a dark King stands cornered
    in check to a white Queen:
    the heavy oak, immobile, hedged in
    before a silver birch, slim
    moving in all directions.
    It’s the wind’s game.

 

A later collection of poems is The Echoing Green of 2001, and our other selections are taken from that. This book contains two sequences about the Shropshire landscape which are outside the remit of Between Rivers but which reward attention: Kingdom of Sphagnum relates to the north Shropshire mosslands and is used by Natural England in its presentation of the area; and The Land Within deals with the life and experiences of Mary Webb. But the first poem from this collection which we will present here is Convolvulus, which picks up on the Roman Catholic tradition in Flintshire.  Note that Coles makes use of the word Nain, Welsh  for grandmother.

 

Convolvulus

 

Mid-July, the bindweed high in the hedge –

a ‘tatty’ hedge Nain calls it, sitting in the yard,

tilting her kitchen chair, as sunlight pinks the sandstone

of soot-crusted walls. The tall house casts its shadow

over the dusty privet, shades Nain’s face.

 

She tells me of the day before –

the large white coach packed with mothers

winding through Flintshire lanes, higher into hills

by Halkyn mountain, to the sheltering greystone Friary –

and how, uncrumpling themselves, the mothers stood

in the peace of Pantasaph, a peace so palpable

they felt they could touch, hold it in their hands,

bring some home with the Holy Pictures.

 

Each one chingled a rosary, processing uphill,

kneeling on the bare ground of the path

at every Station of the Cross, until at last

they formed a circle round the crucifix,

huge, tethered to the hill-top like a mast.

Here they prayed, made secret requests.

Nain wouldn’t tell me hers, but smiled,

whispering as if the wind would hear –

‘A poet, Francis Thompson, once stayed there.

We were shown the window of his room.’

 

Afterwards, downhill to Holywell,

a blessing at St Winefride’s ceaseless spring.

Some mothers wept in the candle-lit shrine,

clear waters calling, reflecting inner wounds;

and constantly rising from the source

its bubbles seemed, Nain thought,

a waterchain of souls, renewing forever.

 

I wanted to bring her flowers, plucked convolvulus

but the white chalices folded in my hand.

 

Our final selection, also from The Echoing Green, is a markedly different poem. Augury draws on the legend of Blodeuwedd from the collection of Welsh folk tales known as the Mabinogion.

In the tale, Llew Llaw Gyffes is unable to marry a human wife, and a wife, Blodeuwedd, is made for him out of flowers. (In English, Blodeuwedd could be translated as ‘Flower-Face’.) She and her lover, Gronw Pebr, conspire to kill Llew. He is injured with a spear but survives and takes his revenge. Gronw is forced to suffer a similar spear-stroke, and is killed, while Blodeuwedd is turned into an owl. Readers of a certain vintage of children’s novel may recognise here the source for Alan Garner’s The Owl Service. In a way, Coles takes the story up after the legend’s endpoint, creating a remarkable contemporary myth. Rather than any conclusion from me, I think we should end with the poem.

 

AUGURY

 

Blodeuwedd, The Mabinogion

 

Tall bedraggled pines, the day’s incessant rain

early nightfall and a river-road. You plunged

swift whiteness into the stream of light

intent on some small creature spotlit

on the camber, caught in my car’s beams.

I felt your winged death impacting,

kept steady as you were woven in

becoming one with metal, rubber.

Not an everyday extinction. Born

of need, and one I saw as a portent.

Next morning, cautious, tense,

I looked at last around the rim

of tyre, wheel-arch, finding you

translated

from feathers into fur into flowers.

 

And death followed three-fold.

 

Last night, one year later, your return

waiting on the wires, intent

close to the cottage eaves.

Your ululation as I arrived,

how you opened your wings like a cloak

to enfold me; how you became

one with the moon’s translucency

your call dwindling into the blackness of Bryn Alyn.

Today, on the slate path to our door, I find

three gifts – your feather, white-tipped,

a dead but perfect field mouse,

a sprig of broom.

 

 

ROYALE DE LUXE

We’re crossing the Mersey on the Dazzle Boat

aka MV Royal Daffodil. A breeze

is blowing from the river’s mouth. Sun lights

the Cunard Building like a palazzo.

 

We’re crossing to see the Giants from Nantes

on the Pier Head and at Mann Island,

along The Strand and in Canning Dock –

here by way of the Loire, Biscay Bay,

the North Atlantic and the Irish Sea.

 

We’re standing with tens of thousands of others –

a dense gathering by St George’s Dock Gates

of sardined and cheerful human beings –

watching the Giant Uncle, who is

four storeys high and has melancholy eyes,

walk – with the aid of gantries and pulleys

and costumed human counterweights – towards us

down Water Street to meet the Little Boy,

a thoughtful-looking black child, with his dog.

 

We’re crossing on the Royal Iris home.

Our bodies’ imaginations still tingle

with street theatre. Scores of Liverpool’s

serious windows are burnished gaily

by the sun setting over the sea.

 

Note: Royale De Luxe

 

NORTH COAST, ANGLESEY

This is a coast of wrecks, of conventional

tempests and unexpected rocks, mists, fogs.

 

St Patrick, not long from dismissing

the serpents of Ireland, clung to an outcrop

slippery with seaweed, loud with skuas.

Legend built a church on the cliffs above.

 

The Royal Charter, steam clipper, laden

with gold and souls, Australia bound

from Liverpool, foundered in haling distance

of the shore, one long October night of gales.

A parish churchyard is full of strangers.

 

Low water exposes the remains

of a lifeboat station’s high wooden pillars

held in rough concrete blocks. A sloop in full sail

could slide down the steep ramp in seconds.

In less than sixty years boats launched from here

saved more than sixty lives. Generations

of local men – farmers and fishermen,

blacksmiths and shepherds – along this coast,

merely for virtue’s reward, risking their own

saved the lives of strangers.