Kevin Gardner
Contemplating the literary significance of Huntingdonshire, that county that no longer exists outside memory and imagination, John Greening was reminded of all the poets who left their mark, perhaps none more poignantly than John Clare. “Clare’s poems,” he writes, “conjure the particularities of these clustered Midland shires, what is at our feet, the local clay that clings, the lost tesserae.”[1] Local clay certainly clings to Clare’s poetry – and it clings to all the new collections gathered here. One is hesitant to push the metaphor, but I am very much taken with the idea of ambling through the shires, accumulating local soils on one’s boots while unearthing a pleasing array of tesserae. Each of the following books is imbedded in local clay, and each speaks in its own way of John Clare’s famous confession, “I could not fancy England much larger than the part I knew.”[2]
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That local clay of Clare’s clings unapologetically to John Greening’s boots. From the East: Sixty Huntingdonshire Codices (Renard Press, 2024) opens with a quotation from David Constantine: “Why should a local habitation interest anyone but the locals?” Greening’s Codices comprises the fourth sequence of poems set in the poet’s adopted county. Each sequence (the previous were the Eclogues in 1995, the Nocturnes in 2003, and the Elegies in 2009) is composed in tercets, but beyond that each sequence has its own unique formal structure. The sixty numbered but untitled codices in From the East, are in fifteen lines rhyming aaa, bbb, and so on; the unifying principle is (perhaps understandable for a poet born in 1954) wintriness. Those who know Greening’s work well (this is his 24th collection) will appreciate that his linguistic playfulness remains fully operational, as does his trademark overlay of historical events and current affairs (witness, for instance, the jouissance of Madeleine Albright’s brooches in poem #22).
The opening poem establishes the book’s major motifs and themes: North Sea winds bluster across muddy East Anglian fields, technology coincides with spiritual tradition, and senescence squares off against remembered youth:
Following power lines, three of them, insulators
like gleaming mini angels, a trio of undecorated
Christmas trees, brown, on poles as upright asmemorial crosses. Boxing Day. The hunt is ready
to pass under the wires, but at this hour nobody
hails my shadow stretching itself across a muddysown field beside that single cottage, where once
an old woman offered a smile. Following lines,
their gifts of light and heat, to a chain-link fencearound the gas pumping station: the North Sea
cries Stop. Let the powerful march and be
hailed by a singing distant host in white. My energyreserves are not so great. I turn to face the future
where I’ve come from: and it’s wireless. Human nature
finds its way, king or shepherd, poet or teacher.
Here is a poet, it must be noted, who is unafraid of paradox and wordplay, as we see in his dual use of “energy reserves”, or the even cleverer “wireless”, which, Janus-like, stares simultaneously at past and present. Even the passing of a Boxing Day hunt seems to allude to the passing of that shire commonly abbreviated as Hunts. I might offer a pun of my own and suggest that this is, at least in part, a collection about crossed wires. Which line, though, will be followed? The syntax of the final line has a marvellous ambiguity: is “poet or teacher” an amplification of “king or shepherd”, or do these two pairs follow alternate, crossed lines?
A line of religious, or at least spiritual, thinking runs through many of the poems that, like the three kings alluded to in the opening poem, come From the East. In one, George Herbert, who had the living at Leighton Bromswold in Huntingdonshire, is unafraid to ask God difficult questions, but answers come no more easily to him than to us, who are like “the man who lives with a maze on the misty edge of vision” (#2). Even though this is the county of Nicholas Farrar and Little Gidding, “where the God of England is / among these kneeling men” (#12), Greening also observes that “No rite / is under way to mark the start of a new era / or restoration of the old” (#116). As this is also the county of Oliver Cromwell and Puritanism, he wonders whether “the spirit of the Commonwealth is still potent here” (#16).
Carlyle dismissed Cromwell as phlegmatic[3], which seems an apt description of Greening’s Commonwealth, “the soggiest, foggiest, least combustible of shires” (#38), where slow-moving winter floods on the River Kym regularly render the poet’s village an island: “the flood / that always comes when you least expect it, like poetry, / how everyone rushes to seal their vulnerability / and keep it out” (#6). This phlegmy, sluggish landscape masks its beauty, but Greening teases it out gradually and subtly:
Dry sorrel, teasel, grasses flattened by the flood.
The faint beginnings of a gibbous moon. A tiny bird
crosses the path (last year’s leaves and mud)to the river, lower now, but still flowing at a pace. (#31)
The languid landscape will certainly cake one’s boots with local mud. But there is something ominous at work here, and its associations are much deeper than Cromwell’s Commonwealth. “The waters, muddy, persistent, irresistible, hold / your life beneath the surface” (#34), which seems more than a little threatening. Greening rejects the phlegmatic sensation of death by water; his poetry advocates for living both now and in the hereafter. In one poem, he eschews “the accepted view” of nihilism in favour of “what instinct tells me, that we do / survive, as Donne believed, one short sleep past” (#33). This is not necessarily an immersion in The Word, merely in words: to avoid drowning we must, he says in a rare prescriptive passage, “reach out for a reed, / a straw, an overhanging rush, a feather, tread / water and pull yourself up word by word” (#34).
Apropos of this is one other significant feature of From the East: as one might expect from poems called “codices”, these are consciously literary pieces, frequently engaging in converse with the great writers associated with the shire and that occupy Greening’s imagination. Herbert and Donne we have already met, but here too are Ben Jonson and Samuel Johnson, Pepys, Bunyan, Cowper, Pound, Blunden, Hughes, Plath, and many more. These are the authors of the “lines” Greening follows, the “power lines” that open and close the collection. “Follow the final wire,” he says in closing: it will take you, soil-caked boots and all, to exactly where you need to be, where you can “warm both hands before the fire” (#60).
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From Huntingdonshire we trek to Nottinghamshire, the primary setting for the poems in Last of the Coalmine Choirboys (New Walk Editions, 2024). Having grown up in this county, Graeme Richardson has a deeply rooted understanding of its soil. His poems are affectingly frank and lyrical, by turns harrowing and humourous, and refreshingly varied in form and structure, with voices and perspectives that shift from miner to priest to parent to son. The collection’s roots in the local clay – or perhaps coal dust would be more appropriate – of Nottinghamshire is made clear throughout, and yet like Clare’s, Richardson’s local, Midlands vision looks outward and beyond, where “with cortisone injections, England’s / hope of glory, out in the middle, / battles on” (“One More Last Word from the Cross”).
The opening poem, “Pithead” – which Richardson notes is an invocation to the muse – adopts the voice of a miner to reimagine “a tired and barkled collier” and his life spent underground. This was a “Buried life” – a disquieting foreshadowing of deaths to come, not only in the subsequent poems but for each of us as well. “Buried life” also works with the sense of a miner’s life as a living death. There is Greening-like wordplay that establishes Richardson’s sense of humour, when he states that “the most important part of all that gear / was the coping mechanism”. While a “coping mechanism” is a technical term from the machinery of mining, Richardson overlays his poet’s art with the miner’s “horseplay” – both are mechanisms for coping with the grave complexities of life. Indeed this a high-spirited life, especially evident in the miners’ relationship with the pit-ponies. Richardson imbeds an especially joyful symbol of a “coping mechanism” – a miner’s orange stolen by a pit-pony just as hungry for light and pleasure as the miner: “that sunburst dazzle – / all sweetness, and breezy fields.”
The voice of the miner is a recurring vocal surrogate for Richardson, an ordained Anglican priest, for whom the pithead and lychgate serve equal purposes. In “Mansfield Notts”, church and mine alike are spaces of death and darkness, in contrast with the liveliness of the town’s streets:
The church was wholly different; the lychgate stopping cars,
and no commercial point to the narrow, impossible steeple,
or the carvings no-one could see, high in the walls and the roof,
and the green where no-one played, with its hillocks of sleeping people.It was a mine of pain, in its sorrowing, sighing words
painful for martyrs to understand, or empires to misconstrue;
and its hero, the bloodied man descended into hell
who came again good as new.
The poem’s final allusion (to the Harrowing of Hell) seems to bode a resurrection for the Nottinghamshire miners from their buried life. “Unlatched and Lit”, however, seems less eschatologically certain. Here the line between priest and miner is purposefully ambiguous: “This sanctuary of my soul / at midnight is a seam of coal, // I mine it as I lie awake.” The “seam of coal” alludes of course to the sanctuary in the church as much as to the speaker’s spiritual condition. Despite being lit, the church is as dark as a mine. Stained-glass windows show nothing but black, and the building reeks of Brasso and mouldy Oasis – hardly a setting for spiritual rebirth. In “Mansfield Notts”, wisely the “Children stayed at the surface”; but in “Unlatched and Lit”, choristers like doomed miners enter the seam of blackness, never to return:
All those stories – well-known, once,
lost sheep, lost coin, and then lost sons –
whisper to a heavenly host
of woodwork, rats, and plaintive ghosts.Here, before these well-worn pews,
children walked in polished shoes
unsteadily processing in
and never coming out again.
Richardson occasionally sows his poetic soil with lines from the Gospel, and in “Those Amiable Dwellings” the biblical allusions are both plentiful and effective: “grain that unless it falls to the ground and dies / remains alone”; “The golden oak-leaves got the light, and the darkness comprehended it not”. Sometimes the aim is for universal human truth, while in other instances he is speaking only for himself. In these carefully selected allusions, for instance, he plants a hope in resurrection: “I stand on the edge of another black pit”, he confesses, before recalling that “the dove came back at least once to the ark / with nothing, before that triumphant olive-leaf.” In these judicious sprinklings of biblical allusion, Richardson’s voice becomes more even humane and his perspective even more personal and affecting. And not just the Bible: his poems also echo with the Anglican language of hymns and prayer book offices. The soil is which his poems are rooted is at once earthly and spiritual, and despite the treks into darkness, to which he is continually drawn, the message is one of hope on both sides of the grave: “The years’ black silt / was to bury me always / but I live. Take me back” (“Bramley Seedling”).
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From the Midlands we return to East Anglia. Ghosts: A Portrait of the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads (Waterland Books, 2023) is a collaboration between poet Cameron Self and photographer Stephen Hyatt-Cross, published in a large-format edition. It is not just a natural landscape that these artists depict, though; this is very much a human landscape. The Broads are not natural lakes but rather, as the text reminds us, flooded medieval peat beds. Until quite recently, people worked the Broads as they had done for centuries. The “ghosts” of human labour may be found all over the landscape, and those revenants comprise the poems and photos in this fascinating and evocative book.
This book is a joint effort in that the photos do not merely illustrate or accompany the poems; instead, poem and photograph independently reveal the individual artist’s vision of a particular setting. Each tells a story of the Broads, this fragile and ever-changing landscape. Take “Herringfleet” (22-23), for instance. The photograph emphasizes the Broadland sky, a nearly textureless plane split only by an abandoned octagonal mill clad in clapboards, its motionless sails adding verticality to the otherwise unbroken horizontality of marsh and sky. In contrast, the poem tells the story of this ghost, whose job was to drain dykes; the aim of such labour was not a permanent transformation of the landscape but merely “resistance”:
An age-old process
Of non-surrender
Waged by aged
Weather-beaten men.
While the photo is absent of humanity, the poem is dominated by people. Self and Hyatt-Cross work together to tell this story. Both artists exhibit a pleasing variety in the voices and forms and textures they adopt for each scene or story. “There” presents a photograph on a large scale, a fence-lined cart-track winding through marshgrass into the distant horizon, as sky and land merge in monochrome. The text, a simple four-line poem, captures Self’s characteristic Zen sensation in the Broadlands landscape:
It was never about being lost
But about being foundIt was never about going away
But about coming home
A paradox forms in the confluence of poem and photograph: in the photo the road appears to lead away, while in the poem the road brings the reader home. A similar contrast is found in “Eels”. The photo depicts a fisherman seated on the banks of a broad, his rod in the water but no evidence of eels; in contrast, the poem positively writhes with the energy of the eel: “The little ones were the worst: / Those wriggling, boot-lace elvers // Frenzied little water-snakes”. The real energy of the poem happens when Self transforms a fisherman’s advice for making an eel go motionless into a dual metaphor for writing poetry and containing the Broadland landscape:
And forty years on, I try
To do the same with words
To still those wriggling eels
From long ago and to hold steadyThis old, flat landscape
With its tides and reeds and derelict mills.
Self has a fine ear for the rhythm of the landscape and a deft touch in “do[ing] the same with words”. In “Wherries”, Hyatt-Cross’s paired monochrome photograph bursts with the implied colours of summer cumulus sky, silver-rippled water, bankside trees, and boat, while Self’s poem flows with the tidal restlessness indicated in the photo. Though the poem lacks punctuation, it progresses through seven tercets in a perfectly syntactical unit. Here are the first three tercets; the energy is as powerful as the movement of the wherries it describes:
Originally they were trading vessels
That plied the Yare and the Bure and the Ant
Like the ghosts of the longshipsHeading upriver with their gaff rigs and black sails
Distinctive above marshland and reed-bed
Carrying their cargoes of coal or ice or beetSkippered by hardy, independent men
In breeches and caps who made the most
Of the East wind or quanted them on calm days
And so it continues, unpunctuated phrase after another, like waves on a windy day. Transport by wherry would eventually succumb to the railroads, and this is one more ghost of the Broads. There is naturally an elegiac quality to much of Ghosts, though it is never lugubrious, sentimental, or romanticised. “Relics” sums it up: “There is no future / Here – no present – only past: / A working landscape / That no longer works: / Rusting, broken relics from / Another age”. A sense of loss naturally prevails in the book, but in this regard it speaks to England as a whole, and not just to local folkways. The ruined walls of “St Benet’s Abbey”, for instance, testify not only to the former power of this individual religious house over the Broads but also to the vast cultural upheavals across England in the sixteenth century:
And how your hooded monks
Farmed fish and grew vegetables
Dodging the great Dissolution –But then, over time, dissolving still
Your stones plundered,
Your fish-ponds silted, your power gone.
The ruined abbey is a powerful symbol of a particular vision of England, an England of decline and fall. Its prevalence since Wordsworth is a monument to the unquenchable historical imagination in modern English poetry, and that is one of its most positive characteristics.
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Tom Branfoot’s boar (Broken Sleep Books, 2023) is a journey not only in space but also time. Here we are transported to 14th century Bradford, the demesne of John of Gaunt, just before the Peasants’ Revolt. In essence, it is a sequence comprising fragments of local history, the Bradford boar legend. A particularly ferocious boar was terrorising locals, and in his capacity as Lord of the Manor John of Gaunt put up a reward for anyone who could kill it.[4] Branfoot shows less interest in the West Yorkshire soil than our other poets have shown for their own local clay, but his focus is nonetheless strongly local. To resurrect John Greening’s metaphor, it is not so much “the local clay that clings” but rather “the lost tesserae” that are turned up in boar. The poems are uncovered tesserae, but with careful reading they form a coherent mosaic. In short, boar has unearthed from its remote soil an obscure historical event. The end of the opening poem ponders the question, “at what point does ritual become tradition”, and that seems to me another way of asking at what point the local takes on the character of the universal, or history the character of the timeless.
The first five poems of the sequence, which focus on the legend itself, are fragmentary in syntax and layout. Reading them is at first disorienting; but as with a mosaic or stained-glass window, the picture emerges by zooming out and by repeated readings. The initial sense of randomness created by Branfoot’s broken lines and images quickly resolve into a coherent picture, and indeed the apparent formlessness is appropriate as Branfoot attempts to create a narrative out of the fragments of Bradford history and collective memory. At the outset, the language is perfectly ordinary: “during the Middle Ages / many areas / of the country / were infested with wild boars” (“boar”). Removed from the page, the lines are prosaic; poetry as such is strictly visual, in the layout. The diction gradually becomes medievalised, which aids considerably in transporting the reader into 14th-century Bradford; at the same time the layout of his lines becomes more organised, particularly with respect to the margin. Here Branfoot allows us to imagine the mind of Northrop, the hunter who would eventually succeed in killing the boar: “bothrin over brass / northrop / waited by the well / wantynge to ken / all he could abaht / his quarry / needynge reward / somethynge to warm his breste / at nyght his bairns / croodled up in their cruck / house”. Some readers will appreciate the short glossary Branfoot appends to the collection.
As the reader progresses through the sequence, it gradually becomes apparent that Branfoot is not merely recovering forgotten history but finding the universal human truths buried in local legend. Contemplating the prospect of domesticated pigs released into the wild and quickly becoming feral, he observes that “it is impossible to eradicate / wildenes / helyxed into wyn darke blod / do you not feel this trewe to humans / too this primeval desire” (“more than more”). Branfoot also explores the conditions of workers that would eventually erupt not only in feudal conflict but in subsequent capitalistic conflict as well. The title of one poem, “I am cutten from the same silk”, hints at Branfoot’s double narrative. In the opening lines we discover that there is more here than an allusion to the adage “cut from the same cloth”; he is also recollecting a Victorian-era strike at a Bradford silk mill: “cloth as strykinge workers / from Manningham Mill / theyre paye cleaved / on Christemasse Eve 1890 / this poem / leves a stone for them / on the banks of Bradford Beck”.
Branfoot’s final subtle and measured touch is to overlay this recovered local legend onto contemporary concerns about class conflict and the environment. The crest of the City of Bradford features a tongueless boar with a banner that once read “Labor Omnia Vincit” but which has been replaced by the motto “Progress Industry Humanity”. Branfoot reads this not merely as a collective historical memory rooted in the Peasant’s Revolt but as the condition of modern humanity: “without getting all Marxist / our historical conjuncture / parallels this time / rising rents / inflationary prices / unpayable bills / death of the reigning monarch / tax cuts for the 1% // all my ifs are spitless / wasted on progress industry humanity” (“labor omnia vincit”).
boar refuses to allow the violent slaughter of the beast to remain a legend cushioned by its medieval remoteness. It bristles with contemporary outrage and anger. Violent impulses erupt periodically, never with more startling vehemence than in “lost commons”, which bears quoting in full. It is a perfect illustration of Branfoot’s overlay of medieval and contemporary anger, all rooted in Bradford soil:
i would love to stryke john of gaunt
seeing as i can’t ransack
the savoy palaceand tear to pieces cloth of gold
rich and silver tapestriesbreak up the furniture crush his plates
grind his jewels and precious
stones under footseeing as we can’t revolt
(under the police crimes and
sentencing courts act)i would place a sharpened tusk
to his plantagenet pharynxand demand the communing
of crown land
i would glue myself to his lineageeveryone i love lives in this ancient riding
we could start an agricultural communein that house
in the middle of M62
and refuse to move
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Finally, a brief mention must be made of the curious Norwich Sonnets and Other Poems (Waterland Books, 2025), by Ron Nevett, whose debut pamphlet, Market Lunch, appeared in 2020. Nevett’s poems began appearing in the pages of the Norwich Evening News in 2019, and those early efforts belie the singular talent that has since emerged. Very little is known of the reclusive Nevett, but as the saying goes, “If you know, you know.” His poems are, superficially at least, “local” in interest. They take us from the crenellated heights of Norwich Castle over to the ziggurats of UEA, from the spire of Norwich Cathedral down to Anglia Square, from the Maddermarket Stage to the Maid’s Head, to Dragon Hall, Jarrold’s, and the Wensum. Here too is the history of Norwich in miniature, as well as sketches of figures from Norwich’s rich artistic and literary tradition, such as Julian of Norwich, the Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Browne, John Crome, and W. G. Sebald.
One of the qualities of really excellent “local” poetry is its capacity to connect with universal themes and broader human experience. Nevett’s sonnet ‘On Caistor St Edmund’, ostensibly about a Roman ruin just outside Norwich, observes that nothing can withstand the jaws of time, not even the greatest human constructions. Here in the sonnet’s concluding couplet, Nevett skillfully intermingles the local and the cosmic: “And heard an empire passing with a shiver / And turned to grass and earth beside Tas river”. Nevett’s ability to transform the local into the universal is again on display in “On the Chalk”, set on Mousehold Heath. The poem descends from a geological lyricism into an ordinary sinkhole that (like the jaws of time) swallowed a city bus in 1988. Yet Nevett avoids bathos by transforming this footnote of local history into an emblem of universal humanity, staring into the vasty deep of an existential crisis, “as if the earth might swallow / Norwich itself, and leave the whole world hollow”.
Nevett has become the voice of his city; his poems are deeply rooted in the local Norwich clay, yet they speak eloquently to the human condition. This is precisely what W. G. Sebald achieved in his haunting, magnificent Rings of Saturn. If Nevett’s usual pattern is to lift the quotidian into the empyrean, so to say, in one spectacular instance (“Norwich Firsts”) he reverses metaphysical directions, shewing us the anchoress in her cell: “Remember that in Norwich / A woman saw the whole / Of love inside a hazelnut / And watched her words unroll.” Is there a finer illustration of the universality of the local to be found than in the visions of Julian of Norwich?
[1] Vapour Trails: Reviews and Essays on Poetry (Shoestring Press, 2020), p. 239.
[2] Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 68.
[3] Carlyle’s complete caustic comment about Cromwell was, shall we say, choleric rather than phlegmatic: ‘What a grunting, semi-articulate, phlegmatic, croaking, confused, inexplicable abortive rubbish-heap is that!’ (In ‘Gropings About Montrose’, an early draft of the book that would become Oliver’s Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, 1845.)
[4] The legend may be found retold on various websites. See for instance ‘The Legend of the Tongue-less Bradford Boar’ at https://www.realyorkshireblog.com/post/the-legend-of-the-tongue-less-bradford-boar.