Friday: Imtiaz Dharker
I wake in the same bed, expelled to another country overnight. The television is still on, shark faces swimming up to the screen to eye the shipwreck. Even those of us who never eat breakfast come down to huddle together and feed on each other’s fury and sorrow. Our children send us disbelieving text messages. Clouds slump on the horizon and as we leave Wales, the rain begins. On the bus today there are no games, no playing with language. No-one is singing.
Past Wenlock Edge (‘the wood’s in trouble’) to Much Wenlock, the Much added to distinguish it from Little Wenlock. We have all looked forward to being back in this small town with its great independent bookshop run by Anna Dreda, who also started the Wenlock poetry festival here six years ago. We will read at The Theatre on the Steps, a beautiful old place kept alive, like many of the country’s best treasures, by dedicated volunteers.
With us this evening is Liz Lefroy; the audience give their local poet a warm welcome and enthusiastic applause when she says she comes from a family of Huguenot asylum-seekers and chooses to be European. She reads her poem Michelangelo’s David: “Love can be translated into time in any language”.
All of us shift our readings slightly. Gillian reads Lament, Jackie In my country, Carol Ann Weasel Words: all poems written years ago, but relevant today. There are no overt political statements but the choices are fierce. The people who come to speak to us at the signing tell us that the poetry has helped.
Saturday: Gillian Clarke
After a grey morning, we are leaving the Severn and the blue remembered hills for Oswestry (Croesoswallt, Oswald’s Cross) and the borders of another language, landscape, culture, a cliff-edge in the heart. To the far north-west, we glimpse or dream the foothills of Snowdonia.
Suddenly, all exclaim at a sight that Liz Lefroy warned us of last night, a monstrous construction in a field: fly-tipped junk, a garish “sculpture”, a tipped boat with a sly insinuation of refugees. Immigrants on a sinking ship, the loveless word LEAVE in weeping paint. A word to wound, not heal; to sink us, not save us.
In ancient Oswestry we check into the hotel, a sombre group. No luggage has ever felt so heavy as the knowledge we bear from town to town, venue to venue. Strengthened for a few hours by memories of Saturday night’s grateful Bridgenorth audience, and talk of the healing power of poetry.
In my room, silence. Window open on a sunlit hotel garden. A redwood stirs its heavy foliage. I try to believe with Dostoevsky that “beauty will save the world”.
At Holy Trinity church an hour before the performance, we meet our guest poet, Jonathan Davidson – not only a fine poet, but organiser of many festivals and cultural events. Here too are Carrie and Tim Morris, our Booka bookshop partners, whose lovely shop and cafe was shortlisted for independent bookshop of 2015. In their company, and with the audience arriving in the venue’s lofty space, we gather strength. As always, our guest poet adds his own quality to the wordscape and changes our readings too, making all fresh, again. I open with Lament, wondering what our listeners see. In my head is a sinking ship, wreckage, the work of a fly-tipper in a green field.
Yet the people rise to the evening, poetry and music do their work, and we are human together. As we sign our books, the fine young Nathan Campbell shows us his poem about being disabled. “Read it to us,” says Jackie. He does, loud and clear. “See me, not my disability” is the refrain. Poets and book-buyers applaud, he smiles with joy, and for that moment the world is good again.
Morning. My daughter considers applying for Irish citizenship, as her grandmother was Irish. Sackings and resignations in the Labour party. Yeats speaks in my heart. “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,” and the premonition: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”
The church bells of Oswestry are ringing. I find myself, after long spiritual silence, saying a silent prayer.
