Round up of recent and planned poetry happenings

One of the poems in Voices from Stone and Bronze inspired by the work of historian Peter Barton has been commended in the Sentinel Literary Quarterly Competition. Judge Roger Elkin comments 

"Peter Barton’s Lessons of History admirably celebrates the photographic and archaeological research into the mass graves of soldiers and tunnel excavations at the Somme by First World War historian and author, Peter Barton. Each of the four short verses begins with a negative “A trench is not just a trench”, “A tunnel is not just a tunnel”, “This passage is not just a passage”, “A map is not just a map”. This connective structural device, while echoing the cataloguing of historical findings, gives the poem a factually-unsentimental tone, but without any dilution of sentiment. This in turn endorses the celebratory nature of the soldiers’ work “dug out spade by spade”, and with “perfectly square shaft”, while recording the fact they “have no headstones” or just “a cluster of crosses”. This is a moving poem, made more moving by the fact that it does not tug at emotional strings."

A poem I wrote more recently “From Whitsbury Copse to Mametz Wood” about following in the footsteps of David Jones, author of In Parenthesis is being included in the anthology ‘A way through the woods’ being launched at the inaugural Binsted Arts Festival. I will post more details in June when the anthology has been published. 

I’m looking forward to Ouse Muse in Bedford this evening and a chance to hear Anne Berkeley read and then on Saturday I’m off to London to take part in the Poetry and Visual Art workshop led by Tammy Yoseloff. I really enjoyed the workshop in the autumn term, and having been unable to do the spring term,  I am pleased to be doing this again.

Voices from Stone and Bronze

I’m launching my second poetry collection, Voices from Stone and Bronze today, and I will be  reading in Milton Keynes, London and North Wales.  You can order your copy from Cinnamon Press.

 

With thanks to Jan Fortune, Vanessa Gebbie, and Jeremy Banning and also all the members of the Thursday advanced poetry group who read and commented on the poems as they were being written. 

Caroline Davies is writing poetry like no one else’s, embedded in shared, lived history. Her poems are quiet, direct, understated –and full of restrained power and emotional depth. Very moving, beautifully written, and unique in contemporary British poetry, this sequence deserves attention.

                                                Katy Evans-Bush

 

Pigeon Ravine on the Somme

As I have been writing this blog post I came across my hand-written notes from October 2013 when Jeremy Banning first took me and other writers to Pigeon Ravine and I found Louis Doffman amongst the graves. I can’t remember now whether it was Jeremy who pointed out his headstone (as is his habit of making sure you notice things) or if the part of the inscription ‘served as 242421 Private’ caught my attention because it was an unusual thing to find written. There was more information in the CWGC register.

(served as MOUNTFORD). Son of Charles and Ellen Doffman, of 82. Broad St., Hanley, Staffs.

I assume that it was his parents who provided the epitaph for their twenty-seven year old son. He had been single at the time of the 1911 census and I have found no record of him having married.

Ever in our thoughts

God’s will be done

 

As far as the official records are concerned Louis remains as Lewis Mountford I have no way of knowing if any of the rest of his company knew that he was really Louis Doffman but I assume he kept quiet about his German sounding name which would have made him a figure of suspicion. 

Photo by Jeremy Banning

The word ‘Ravine’ might make you think of hills and valleys but the landscape in this part of the Somme battlefields is level ground. It reminded me of how the farmland changes and flattens as you leave Bedford and head east towards Cambridge and the Fens. 

You can see for a long way (unless there is fog and mist).

Photograph by Jeremy Banning

 No cover but there is a sunken lane- Gloucester Road

a refuge from enfilade fire when they get there

From Voices from Stone and Bronze  

 As you will observe from my notes this attack by the 2^nd Battalion of the Worcestershire Regiment happened quite late in the war, at the end of September 1918. Of course the men who were fighting for the Germans and the British did not know the war would be over two months later.

The Pigeon Ravine cemetery is a typical battlefield cemetery where the men were buried very close to where they were killed and all buried together as a company.  I like to think that they will have been buried with a ceremony rather than hastily interred. The cemetery was created in October 1918 by the 33rd Division Burial Officer. It contains 121 known graves, the majority of whom were killed on 29^th September 1918. The youngest was 18 and the oldest was a Lance Corporal named Robert Vincent Beare was 41. 

After the war and as the French regained their farms the remains in some of the smaller cemeteries  were moved into larger cemeteries but Pigeon Ravine was left as it was. 

Photograph by Jeremy Banning

The Menin Gate Memorial and Robert Victor Davies

The Menin Gate Memorial is where my great uncle Victor’s name is inscribed as one of the 54,389 men who are commemorated here. When I use the words ‘great uncle’ about someone who died nearly a hundred years ago your mind will probably conjure up an image of an elderly gentleman with Edwardian sideburns. Victor had just turned twenty when he was killed in July 1917, his birthday was in June so he was just out of his teens and only a few years older than my older child.

The Menin Gate is in the town of Ieper, known to the French speakers as Ypres and I expect that Victor will have called it Wipers like the rest of the troops.

During the day it is a thoroughfare with cars and buses and pedestrians passing through, going about their daily lives. In the evening it is closed to motor traffic for an hour for the sounding of the Last Post. This began in July 1928 as a gesture of gratitude from the Belgian people and the buglers came from the local fire brigade. These days it attracts crowds and people arrive in coachloads which is as it should be given how many men are remembered on all the walls. 

It had not occurred to me until I found R.V. Davies amongst all the names (eleven of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers with the surname Davies) that I was probably the first member of the family to visit. His mother was already a widow when he was killed and would not have had the money to go all the way to Belgium to look for her only son. I don’t think his younger sisters would have thought to go there.

Siegfried Sassoon hated it describing it in his poem  On Passing the New Menin Gate as ‘a pile of peace-complacent stone’. I wonder what he would have made of the fact that people continue to visit today looking for the dead. I have described my visit earlier on this blog and here is the poem for Victor.

For Victor at the Menin Gate

Where did you fall?

Somewhere out in the fields

the summer rain had turned to mud.

Where did you fall?

I cannot find the field corner

enriched with your Welsh blood.

Where did you fall?

There is only your name

among the thousands on a stone wall.

Where ever you fell,

I bring you a white rose, for peace,

Robert Victor Davies.