Liverpool

Welcome to this edition of Between Rivers, in which we feature the poems and photographs of Linden Sweeney.

Between Rivers has looked in previous editions at work emanating from writing groups on the Welsh side of our area, and so I decided to even things up and see what could be found on the English side. I started searching for writing groups on the Wirral. They seemed strangely fugitive, despite an obviously active writing scene with the Wirral Festival of Firsts and Wirral Poetry Festival. Then I located an anthology called Weaving Words, produced by Neston Writers in 2025 and which included, along with other interesting work, poems by Linden Sweeney.

Linden Sweeney was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, and has written poetry throughout her life. She came to Liverpool to study English as an undergraduate, moved to the Wirral, was a school teacher for some years, and then became an academic librarian, working at Liverpool John Moores University and the University of Chester. She lives in Little Neston.

She is a keen photographer of birds, and I have interspersed some of her photography among the poems below. Watching birds is an emblematic activity around the Dee estuary where she lives, though some of the birds, like the poems, range further afield.

 

 

The first two poems struck me because they are especially pure observational poems. They press no argument: one is about birds and the other about noises. They defy being paraphrased. They are what they are. Let us start with the birds. In Still sits the snipe, Sweeney brings what she has observed in the estuary into a panoptic lyric with the bird of the title as the all-seeing eye.

 

Still sits the snipe

Late afternoon on the marsh,

the snipe sits watchful, bulrush hidden,

as a dozen bar-tailed godwits drill the grass;

their grey heads rocking like derricks.

A pair of swans, as white clouds, settle on the scrape

where a wigeon dabbles, in his war-paint,

and the tufted duck dives and bobs

with golden eyes that stare.

Two egrets sail up, white kites against the hill,

with their long legs trailing like strings.

 

A thousand silver quills of grass flutter in the breeze,

their feathered heads all pointing north.

A wired line of fence posts cuts across the land

and a harsh wind corrugates the water.

The Wrexham train clatters across the horizon:

above, a factory belches steam into the clouds,

below, are the watching and the watched.

 

A marsh harrier circles, and a flight of lapwings

rises; swirling W’s against the sky.

A silent heron is a statue in the marsh,

waiting and watching. His arrow head poised.

His orange dagger of a beak, drawn to kill.

Stone still, as his feathers ruffle in the wind

and still sits the snipe; silent and watchful.

 

 

The railway line which is such a feature of the English side of the Dee also runs through House sounds, one of the poems from Weaving Words. Sweeney remarks that writing poetry was rather displaced by academic writing at some points in her career, but that on retirement she took a course in writing poetry with the University of Oxford and then set up Neston Writers about six years ago: Weaving Words is one result. Here again, Sweeney gathers up many details into a meditative account, but this time organised through the slow movement of the day, with the poet herself putting in an appearance at some points but not others, declining to adopt the all-seeing eye of the previous poem.

 

House sounds

At night, the wind soughs in the pines

as the hard rain falls on the window

and the long Wrexham train rattles by.

 

At first light, a blackbird sings

though the rain still falls apace

and the gulls have flown in from the sea.

 

By day, the motors whirr

of washers and dryers and mowers

and, still, there is wind in the trees.

 

Above me, the magpies dance,

heavy-footed, on the roof

and skeins of geese honk past.

 

Inside, there is the click of a kettle

and the tink of my ring on a cup

and the sounding of words in my head.

 

At evening tide, when quiet falls,

there is the soft settling of a log

and silence, sometimes.

 

 

Next, also from Sweeney’s poems in Weaving Words, is The decorated city. This moves away from the estuary to give us a completely urban poem. The street names identify the city as Liverpool. We can say that this is a poem about homelessness, but that does not do justice to the power of its grotesque imagery.

 

The decorated city

Blood red lanterns

swing like bodies

from the gibbets

of skeletal trees;

the hanging remains

of Chinese New Year

abandoned,

redundant,

unwanted.

 

The gypsy trumpeter plays

‘On the street where you live’

while the boy on the windy corner,

bearded, dirty and drugged

sleeps on a cardboard pillow,

at the level of passing dogs.

 

Bare legged girls with dirty knees

smoke cigarette butts

on Colquitt Street and Wood Street,

on Slater Street

and Seel.

 

The city is awash;

its doorways brimful,

the basement areas inundated,

overflowing into the gutters.

This is not a sudden high tide,

nor an unforeseen deluge.

It is a seepage of the unsettled,

a discharge of the disinherited,

an excretion of the exiled,

the drip, drip, drip of the houseless,

the abandoned,

the redundant,

the unwanted

decoration of the city.

 

 

Our final poem, also from Weaving Words, is Remainder of the day. Sweeney tells us that this is based on Shakespeares’s Sonnet 73 (‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold/When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang…’) with a nod to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, his novel in which the aging butler is unable to realise a long-denied love and instead, with a kind of strangled heroism, re-dedicates himself to his role as a gentleman’s gentleman. I noticed that Ishiguro was 35 when he wrote this classic novel about aging, and that put me in mind of an elderly Lancastrian who was an important mentor for me early in my own career in the National Health Service, one of those people – there are still quite a few of them in the NHS – who had retired but not gone away. He mentioned that as a young man he had written a poem about his own old age: “But it’s nothing like that…” he said. Sweeney gives us her own view.

 

Remainder of the day

That time of year you may just see in me

when work is done, the harvest gathered in.

When wrinkled leaves are hanging from the trees

and winter’s preparations now begin.

You think you see in me the evening shadows

of night’s dark clouds that will obscure the sun,

the summer warmth now with cold opposed

and only night’s dark promise yet to come.

But you are wrong to see me in this light.

The remainder of my day is still to come

with still time to accomplish all I might.

My time’s my own, a new life’s just begun.

You may see me now as old and grey.

You are wrong: this is the best part of the day.

 

 

I hope you have enjoyed this edition of Between Rivers. You can find more of Linden Sweeney’s poems in Weaving Words: An anthology of short stories and poetry by Neston Writers, edited by Maureen Allsop et al and published by Pumpkin Press. And you can see more of her photography on her Instagram feed.

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