Jody Porter

Bradford Spring

On Bradford likewise look Thou down/Where Satan keeps his seat,
the methodist hymn goes. On this street,
a man lay dead unnoticed for a year.
Right here,
The ghost of an unrisen mall’s grave remains unfilled after many more.
It could have held all the poor
who died here since Bradford millionaires swaggered through the Waste Land
in silk hats.
That’s
the Central Library, closing down floor by floor, page
by yellowing page,
behind the new water feature in Centenary Square,
opened during drought. There,
the legend under the ILP mural reads There is no weal
save commonweal
Far beyond the Town Hall, ‘The House of Islamic Treasures’
lists among its purchasable pleasures
“Books Audios Hijabs Perfumes”
near where the Consulate of Pakistan has rented rooms
which brings the street a little life
before the afterlife
of a Baptist chapel, Sikh and Hindu temples, the Sally Ann, a mosque, then another
with “Paradise Lies Under the Feet of the Mother”,
a hadith quoted on a banner hung outside
for Mothers’ Day. A bus ride
and you’re where they make Jeremiad TV,
like when the BBC
flew in that American director to help them look down
on Bradford. He won’t be back. I will. I love this town.

Ian Duhig

Ian Duhig has published six books of poetry, most recently Pandorama (Picador 2010) named after Bert White’s contraption in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. He is currently preparing his seventh, which has the working title Ashtrayland. This poem is in “rebalanced” couplets, being the new euphemism for budget cuts that are unfair and unbalanced.

Poem at the Morning Star

Pig Iron by Benjamin Myers – reviewed by Steve Ely
Bluemoose, £7.99

Paroled as a teenager from a northern jail after serving five years for a shocking crime commited as a boy, John John is still a prisoner.
A Gypsy trapped in a sink-estate flat, he’s an honest man hemmed-in by crime and dragged down by criminals.
A loner who seeks friendship, love and fulfilment, he’s betrayed and exploited at every turn. Above all else he’s a prisoner of the legacy of his brutal father Mac Wisdom, bareknuckle King of the Gypsies.
John John longs to escape this physical and emotional wasteland. His desire is to escape to his “green cathedral” of nature and the woods and heaths that are the natural home of the travelling man.
Only there can he be truly free and his terrible psychic wounds be healed. But for now he’s an ice-cream man, pressured to sell drugs on his rounds, lured into cobblestone prize fights by former cronies of his father, betrayed by his girlfriend, and hounded by estate thugs with a sinister racist agenda. Read more…

Zone 4

Standing at the point
Where the buses don’t just stop
But finish.
Where their destinations of
Nowhere, somewheres
Roll round on displays
Like commandments on
Scrolls of silk,

I try to interpret
Meaning in the sounds of
Swallowed towns,
Like Debden, Sidcup and Ponders End,
Mouth melodies to 
Places never mentioned in song,
Where empty, arching
Concrete shelters have been
Waiting since World War II
For their moment, their onslaught,
The time when the planet arrives.

David Bryant

David Bryant is a Walthamstow-based poet and writer who over the last ten years has had work published in South Bank Poetry, the Hearing Eye anthology “In The Company of Poets”, The Delinquent, The Gloom Cupboard and The UK Poetry Podcast. He has also performed his work all over London, for the likes of Apples and Snakes, The Cellar, Y Tuesday, and Whitechapel Art Gallery.

Poem at the Morning Star

i’ve been single too long – a straight 8 film by shane davey
made for straight 8 2003 on one cartridge of super 8 film with no post production editing.
premiered at cannes film festival.

Not for the masses, but from the masses – Well Versed interviews poet Ian Parks

Split Screen – Poetry inspired by film and TV
Edited by Andy Jackson (Red Squirrel Press, £6.99)

Featuring a lively mix of well-established names jostling elbows with some newer voices, Split Screen brings together a host of British poets inspired to write about pop culture icons from film and TV.

Published by the independent and quirky Red Squirrel Press, we’re treated to an unsettling impression of HAL 9000 by Simon Barraclough, a clever recreation of Yoda’s mixed-up syntax by Colin Will and a sonnet on the Godfather himself from Luke Wright. Read more…

Waiting at Frinton-on-Sea Golf Club

A brown paper pay packet for waiting
on tables at the golf club was not worth
the endless knives, forks, spoons and plate setting
for middle-aged men who, despite their girth,
thought a paw upon my arse had such charm
and a naughty wink, cheeky line in chat
irresistible to a green girl, not smarm
which congealed as quickly as the goose fat
in the Sunday roasting pan, but what stuck
in the throat more than the chef’s claggy cheesecake
was the member complaining, “That man’s black.
“Why’s he let on the course for goodness sake?”
No, not worth waiting in Frinton-on-Sea
twinned with Jessup County, Mississippi.

Lisa Kelly

Lisa Kelly is a freelance writer and has had poems published in South Bank Poetry, South, and The Delinquent. She was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in 2008, regularly hosts poetry evenings at The Torriano Meeting House and is due to have her first poetry pamphlet published this year by Hearing Eye.

Poem at the Morning Star

scab

in the name of christ davey!
were you not half tempted yourself?
when only chips & soup for months
had made you shrink, think nothing else
but fear & hate until you slept, when the
face in your shaving glass couldn’t
look you in the eye & the kid’s lists
for santy were crushed in your pocket
like a secretive betting slip!
did you not think that davey? never once?
did you never wonder how many more rows
that you and sue could stand? how many more
days you’d have to wear the empty slouch
of charity? how long it would be ‘til the sharks
came round & you had to take their money?
& how long it would be before the bastards
came back & took the fucking video!
tell me that davey! just tell me fucking that!
at least tell me that! i’m your brother, man!
will you please look up from your pint?

Paul Summers

Summers is an English poet who was born in Blyth, Northumberland and currently residing in Emu Park. Summers was a founding co-editor of both the Billy Liar and the Liar Republic magazines. This poem is from his new and selected poems “union,” published by Smokestack Books.

Poem at the Morning Star

Breakfast at Jeremy Hunt’s Residence

“Toast darling”? She asked
“Yes”, he resignedly said,
“I probably am.”

Mark Niel

Niel is a full-time poet as well as Poet Laureate of Milton Keynes, where he hosts the Tongue in Chic Poetry and Spoken Word events which take place six times a year.

Poem at the Morning Star

Pete the Temp is a well-known figure on London’s busy spoken word scene, and his poetry cuts right to the nub of the disenchanted masses.

He has been heavily involved in the Occupy movement and draws inspiration from the artwork and slogans which festoon the walls of squats, social centres and activist encampments.

“Some of those pictures I translate into word form and they make it into my poetry,” he says. “I have collected quotes, slogans and chants from Italy, Spain, Colombia and Copenhagen, as well as Occupy sites, banners, walls and tents.

“Occupy is dripping with poetry – ‘Compost capitalism,’ ‘democracy is a participatory sport,’ ‘if you stand for nothing you’ll fall for anything,’ and the witty ‘now is the winter of our discount tents.’

“I like these words because they are not part of the mass-produced, bleached and sanitised commerce that has poisoned the urban landscapes of our cities. They convey radical ideas in spaces that often only exist at flash points in history,” he continues.

While an assuredly contemporary poet, Pete has plenty of time for the historic giants of literature, citing William Blake as a recent inspiration.

Blake is interred in Bunhill Fields, otherwise known as Dissenters’ Graveyard.

“It was surrounded by riot cops on the night of the St Pauls eviction. While the cameras of the world looked elsewhere, Ken Clarke signed off an illegal eviction of Occupy London’s School of Ideas building which is adjacent to the cemetery. Occupiers ran past Blake’s grave to retrieve belongings,” he recalls. Read more…

The Pound Note

There was a brief period in the sixties
when my dad was out of work and had no money.
He sold my old push-bike to a neighbour for
a pound. It seemed like such a lot then and
I remember he was very reluctant to break into it —
it was like the last pound note in the world;
but when he finally did for a round of ice creams,
it seemed to last forever.

Paul Birtill

Paul Birtill was born in Walton, Liverpool in 1960. He moved to London in his early twenties when he began writing, and apart from a brief period in Glasgow, has lived there ever since. His poems appear regularly in national newspapers, magazines and literary journals and he has read them on national radio and at poetry venues nationwide. He has published a number of collections on the Hearing Eye imprint including the best-selling Terrifying Ordeal and Collected Poems 1987-2010. His new collection Smoking in the Cinema is now available. Paul is also an accomplished playwright, and several of his plays have been staged at London theatres including Happy Christmas, The Lodger and Squalor, which was shortlisted for the prestigious Verity Bargate award.

Poem at the Morning Star

Geoffrey Hill commenting on Steve Ely’s poem The Ballad of Scouse McLaughlin? 

The Ballad of Scouse McLaughlin by Steve Ely

In memory of Stewart Peter Frank ‘Scouse’ McLaughlin, 3rd Battalion, Parachute Regiment, who, after demonstrating conspicuous bravery and sustained devotion to duty in the presence of the enemy, including several daring and pre-eminent acts of valour and self-sacrifice, was killed in action on Mount Longdon, East Falkland, on 12th June, 1982.
“Come on lads! I’m fucking bulletproof! Follow me!” (Stewart McLaughlin, Mt. Longdon, 12th June, 1982)

 

At New Brighton on the Wirral
where George’s Mersey meets Patrick’s Sea
was born a boozing, brawling lad
the pride of Wallasey.

Raised on the red-brick terraced streets,
coal-hole, two-up, two-down,
with his bike and dog and casey ball
and ten bob paper round.

His Mam made his tea and loved him
Dad showed him how to box
and took him lamping on the Wirral
after rabbit, hare and fox.

Z-Cars, Victor, Whizzer and Chips
styling like Alf Tupper
every daredevil, sporting day
ending with a slap-up fish supper.

Read more…

Kindoki
For Kristy

Was it because they could, mere whim, this pair 
became inquisitors, or was belief 
the seed that thrived, instilled the need to drive 
out sin with hammer, chisel, metal bar 
and pliers? Damned by the truth, damned if they lied,
no squeals of glee, just children terrified.
One sibling swears in evidence, ‘I don’t 
know what was going on inside their minds 
for there was nothing we could say to stop 
the beatings.’ Afterwards they’re forced to wash 
away their brother’s blood. But surely this, 
witches and stuff, is ancient history;
outside, England we know, suburb and town,
park, supermarket, restaurant, traffic light?

Peter Branson

Peter Branson’s poetry has been widely published in the UK and elsewhere. His first collection, The Accidental Tourist, was published in 2008 and a second collection was published by Caparison Press for The Recusant. More recently, a pamphlet has been issued by Silkworms Ink and a third collection is forthcoming from Salmon Press.

Poem at the Morning Star

Odi Barbare by Geoffrey Hill – review by Steve Ely

Unrepentantly “obscure”, Geoffrey Hill’s work is seen by many as an elitist form of academic poetry that is nothing more than a clever-clever word game for high-Tory dons.  Nevertheless, a growing number of critics agree with Guardian poetry editor Nicholas Lezard that Hill is, the “greatest living poet in the English language”.

The latest fruit of Hill’s astonishing recent flowering, the book-length poem, Odi Barbare, will do nothing to mollify Hill’s detractors.  In dialogue with the Italian poet Giosue Carducci, Virgil’s Aeneid, the Mathematician Frank Ramsey (amongst others), and drawing on a vast range of literary, philosophical, religious and musical references, Hill’s formidable erudition is, as ever, on display. Read more…