In the beginning…’

I’m very near the end of the process of putting together my first collection to be published by Cinnamon Press next year. When I say near the end this is not so much me sprinting for the finishing line as edging my way up a cliff but my fingertips but I’ll get there.

I’ve started to reflect on the last couple of years and looking back to what it was that started me off writing poems about merchant seamen. The first poem came completely out of the blue and if you’d told me it was the beginning of a two year journey through Malta in the second world war I’d have told you that wasn’t what I wanted to write about. It began on 22nd November 2010 with Pascale Petit’s Poetry from Art workshops at Tate Modern. During the workshops you are allowed to go into the galleries after dark, after closing time when everyone else has been sent home. Coupled with the delicious feeling of doing something out of bounds is Pascale’s gentle facilitation to go with the art before you start to write.

http://pascalepetit.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/poetry-from-art-at-tate-modern-ana.html

On this evening we were looking at the work of Ana Mendieta; a video of her covering herself with oil and then feathers. Pascale had suggested that we make use of all your senses. So we read poems Sharon Olds and Selima Hill and watched the short film before returning to our places to write.




I went into my usual ‘oh-help-what-am-I-going-to-write-about-I-can’t-do-it-this-won’t-be-any-good’ when suddenly I was on board ship. We’d just been bombed – helluva racket, worse noise you ever heard and there was a injured seaman in a heap in front of me screaming except you couldn’t hear because of the earlier barrage of noise and I wasn’t looking at him through my eyes but someone else’s. That someone else was starting to move forwards, to pick up this lad. And there was a poem in it which has become ‘Under Fire’.



While he was alive (and he made it to the grand age of ninety) I never talked to my grandfather, my Taid about his experiences during the war but on that evening at Tate Modern it felt as though he had stories he wanted me to know about. All I had to do was open up and listen.

Thanks Pascale.

Collected Poems – John Pudney

I have one of my academic colleagues, Jonathan Rix to thank for reminding me of John Pudney’s poems. He was enthusing about some of Pudney’s RAF poems – Smith and Missing  

Smith, living on air, 
Your astral body 
A mechanic wonder 
Your anger an affair 
Of fire and thunder.

So I’ve been reading his collected poems, published in 1957 which contain poems from his first ten collections published over twenty years from 1933 – 1953.

His most well-known poem ‘For Johnny’ was featured in the film ‘The Way to the stars’. According to the author’s notes at the back of the book it was written on the back of an envelope during a London alert in 1941 and there never was a particular Johnny: it was written for them all. However to my taste it does have the feel of something written in a hurry and is far from being his best poem – rather too much tell and not enough show. I much prefer ‘Combat Report’ with its alternating voices; one which is a pilot reporting on the enemy he’s just shot down and the other the poet commentating on the situation. When the poem was broadcast in 1941, read by Laurence Olivier the BBC wanted to alter the ending ‘that’s how the poor sod died’ to ‘poor soul’. Fortunately the authorities were persuaded to allow the naughty’ word to be used. I wonder if anyone recorded the broadcast – it would be quite something to hear it.

I, of course, came to Pudney via Malta. He was sent out in 1943 to write an official account of the Battle of Malta for the Air Ministry, but being a poet as well as in the RAF he came back with a long poem, The Siege of Malta.  
.... A petal 
Yellow, all veined with green in the sea’s hard 
Flooring of other element, of timeless running 
Malta, upon blood-invested water, cactus, nettle 
Leafed, old prickle, guard.