sheenaghpugh | Entries tagged with steve ely

When Steve Ely remarks that his name caused him to be “chosen” by the European eel as a chronicler, I doubt he is being entirely facetious. George Herbert, after all, was convinced that if “son” and “sun” were homonyms, this must be because the Lord, for some good reason, wished it to be so. Ely does nothing half-heartedly and having decided to write a book-length eco-poem centring on the endangered eel, his first act was to make an exhaustive study of its life, habitat and history. The result of this is that he is very much at home with the scientific vocabulary – geographic, oceanographic, biological – attaching to it. And being Ely, he sees no reason to avoid using this because it might be esoteric or unfamiliar to the reader. He does provide an informative glossary and notes at the end, which can profitably be read after the poem, but personally I would first read straight through, immerse yourself in this Sargasso of fascinating new words and rely on the meaning becoming clear enough from the context.

For one thing, the lingering on the tongue of lines like “leptocephalus, the larval form of anguilla” and “the thermonuclear/microplankton of the drifting epipelagic” pave the way for the sudden brutality of his description of the Gulf Stream, in which the same verbal euphony belies the words’ meaning:

     a roaring salt river
     hurtling north on the edge of the American
     continental shelf, its estuaries of blight;
     oestrogen-saturated sewage, methamphetamine
     neurotoxins, chromosome-warping
     neocotinoid run-off. The leptocephali soak it up
     and tumble to Hatteras with the flotsam
     of the current – single-use Canaveral
     space junk, the strip mall’s car-tossed,
    fast-food trash and radioactive manatees.

He focuses on one individual eel’s journey from her birth in the Sargasso Sea to a Yorkshire pool and back again – eels breed in the Sargasso and find their way there from all the various European rivers and streams where they have spent most of their lives. Having made this epic journey and bred, they die. This eel’s odyssey encompasses, beside natural predators, the blades of hydro-electric plant turbines, potentially fatal pollutants like benzoylecgonine, found in the tissues of eels in cities where cocaine use is high, and indeed Mr Ely himself, who temporarily removes her from her habitat to make a study before re-releasing her.

Obviously the journey, though based on extensive research, is largely imagined, and some of the imagining creates startlingly effective imagery:

      rippling spearheads
     of foliate gelatine, glittering in the half-lit heave
     like a shoal of shredded cling-film.

Its single-minded purpose also generates terrific momentum. One danger of eco-poetry is that it can sound like a sermon or lecture. This poem never stands still long enough for that: the ways in which humans are casually fouling up the eel’s world are noted, deadpan and laconically, as she travels, never dwelt on – after all, new hazards are arising at every turn and demanding attention. Power pulses through these lines like the eels through the water, never more so than at the literal climax, when the eel finally mates:

      the hypertonic waters are smoking
    with milt, and her shuddering body
    can hold it back no longer. She cracks like a whip
     and her body convulses, spurting gusher
     after gusher of glittering golden ova.

Another way to get eco-poetry wrong is to make it so gloomy and doom-laden that it is no fun to read – as Brecht so aptly remarked, if you want to educate or persuade an audience, you must first give them an incentive to sit still. Here the incentive, apart from the intrinsic interest of the eel’s journey, is the joyfulness and delight of Ely’s language. He has always enjoyed diving into an ocean of words, and rarely has this trait been more appropriate than in this poem. In an earlier collection, Incendium Amoris, I occasionally found the allusiveness and linguistic exuberance detracting from the momentum. In The European Eel there is such a narrative drive that the passing allusions to other endangered or extinct former inhabitants of the earth, like right whales, passenger pigeons and evicted Gaelic crofters, speed by and become part of the poem’s landscape as if we were glimpsing them through the window of an express train.

Fortunately this particular train can be boarded again and again, and the details of the journey noted more carefully. This is, I think, his most consistently powerful and entertaining book for a while, and certainly one of the most impressive books of eco-poetry I have read.

Here's a challenge. You have a short pamphlet of poems (there are 12 or 15, depending on whether you count a sequence as one poem or four) whose subject matter is football. Can you interest and engage a reader who admittedly likes poetry, but whose knowledge of football stops at a one-time adolescent crush on George Best and a liking for the film The Damned United?

The answer, much of the time, is yes. Of course, one reason is that subject matter is not the only thing, nor even the main thing, that poems are about. Here, football becomes emblematic of male solidarity, class conflict, a semi-condoned vent for energy and violence. In the first poem, "Tohuwabohu", it is more, the ball becomes the mythological egg laid by Night, from which the world hatches. This might sound OTT, and indeed there is a humour in the exalted language that would be hard to miss. But for all that, the comparison between egg and ball, and other round objects (suns, worlds, testicles) is not entirely frivolous. The mediaeval and post-mediaeval games involving whole towns, few rules and a lot of casual violence are represented here by the game at Bartholomew Fair, which was in August, but most of these games were held in winter, often around Christmas and New Year, when it is tempting to see the ball as a stand-in for the absent sun.

As one might expect from Ely, the matter of class conflict becomes central, and several poems concern the chasm between amateur and professional. The concept of amateurism in sport is often romanticised; here it is forcefully pointed out that "ludere causa ludendi" is a motto relevant only to people with money. The Carthusians and Corinthians, playing the game "for game's delight" are in a different world from the Northern slaters and riveters for whom football could be a rare escape route from poverty, provided they could get paid for doing so, and even non-football fans will at this point find themselves siding against the Carthusians with their "hands of white kid" and with Fergus Suter:

riveting plate till the shipyard hooter
blares and the working day relents
and limps to his cockroach tenement
where even a dram can't ease the pain;
play up Corinth, play the game.

It is interesting to note that the "Scottish game", the subject of the pamphlet's central sequence, differed from the English public-school game not only in being keener on paid professionals but in being more collaborative, as befitted its working-class roots. The English game had favoured individuals holding on to the ball and dribbling it as long as possible; the "Scottish game" introduced the passing play which characterises present-day football. There's something quite satisfying about that.

The final poem, "Jubilate Messi", is a praise-poem addressed to Lionel Messi and in a conscious echo of the style of Smart's "Jubilate Agno". This is a style that quite suits it, since it is Ely in his most allusive mode, jumping from association to association without stopping for explanations in much the same way Smart's unpredictable mind tended to. I wouldn't know Messi if I met him in the street and have certainly never seen him play. But I can recall the joy that radiated from Best's talent as he left the opposition behind, and it is much the same delight that comes through here:

I will rejoice in Lionel Andrés Messi, for he leaps before the Lord like David and his joy is uncovered: Let the rain streak bright on the flaring floodlights, Empire’s phosphorescent rainbow arching like a cat.

So… I can’t altogether share what seems to be Ely’s tolerance, if no more, of violence on the field (apologies if I’m misreading the tone, but in his “Ballad of Jack Ross”, the line “he tripped and hacked and chopped” sounds more celebratory than anything else). And yes, some background knowledge of football would probably make it more immediately accessible. But guess what: when first reading, I clean forgot Mr Ely’s helpful habit of putting notes at the back – I was too caught up in the momentum and exuberance of the poems. The notes are worth reading, they will give you a lot of interesting facts, but when I did read them I saw that the essentials had already come through to me. That says a lot for the craft.

Those who have read Ely's two previous full-length collections, Oswald's Book of Hours and Englaland , will be familiar with his themes and preoccupations: place, and people dispossessed of it, history permanently alive in landscape, religion, politics. They will also be aware of his techniques, particularly the delight in the multifariousness of words, the use of forms, and the dense texture created by constant allusiveness. There are generally a lot of things going on beneath the surface of an Ely poem, so much so that end-notes are needed, but up to now, this has never, to my mind, been a problem. The technique arises from his consciousness of past-in-present; he cannot look at a landscape and see only what it is now. Rather, everything that has ever happened there comes together to shape it.

The ground of this book is the story of Richard Rolle, 14^th-century mystic, prolific religious writer, unofficial preacher and spiritual adviser to nuns, with one of whom, Margaret, he seems to have developed a relationship close enough to raise eyebrows. At one point she became an anchoress, only emerging from solitude when informed of his death, after which she was active in promoting his cult. Whatever the historical truth of the matter, it is strongly hinted, especially in the poem "Richard lay a-weeping", that the Richard and Margaret of this collection are indeed lovers, and torn between their vocations and temptation.

This is potentially an absorbing and moving situation, and it does become so in some of the early poems in Richard's voice, where he emerges as a character, notably "To Mega Therion" and "Banquet of Virgins":

I am your Father and you my monkish girl.
We sit knee to knee, handfast in yearning.
You confess you are often tempted,
as am I.

Much of the time, though, Richard and Margaret seem to me to disappear behind the crowd of disparate characters who elbow their way into these poems: Pound, Blake, Catweazle, Agricola, Robert Aske and various friends and relatives of the poet. Some of these, sometimes, do have the effect of the allusiveness in Oswald's Book of Hours, making the poems deeper and more layered by adding an historical consciousness. But sometimes I felt they were not so much adding layers to the narrative as getting in its way.

It is the first time I have felt the level of allusiveness might be a problem, that some of the allusions were lying about on the surface of the poem rather than being absorbed into its fabric, and that Ely was perhaps trying to cram too much into one poem. Notably, this happened in a five-part non-Rolle poem, "The Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram". The note to it begins with the sentence "In (1), the unravelling of creation is explored with help from the Genesis creation story, the legend of the Golem, Gnosticism, the allegory of Adam Kadmon and Gawain and the Green Knight". After that, it gets a bit complicated. I found this particular poem all but unreadable. Another allusive poem in several parts, "Little Saint Hugh", exploring the long history of anti-Semitism in Europe, is far more powerful, communicative and focused.

If there is a problem, it is one of over-ambitiousness, which, goodness knows, is better than having poems aim too low and attempt too little. But to me at least, it robs the poems of some of the drive and momentum that were so evident in his two previous collections. Some associations, maybe, should be like the seven-eighths of the iceberg beneath the surface: the writer knows they are there, and his writing is influenced accordingly, but the reader need not.

In the final poem, "Æcerbot" ( a charm designed to restore fertility to a field) Rolle reappears to conduct the rite, as does Ely's ability to dazzle with the richness of words:

Slit-light splayed in shafts cross
chancel, limed walls lucent, linen bright.
Bated breath of bell and Bible,
batflit dust mote, transepts still.

And in two adjoining poems, "Je te plumerai" and "The White Hart", Ely again shows the skill at playing one poem off another, to the benefit of both, that surfaced so often in Englaland. Both are set in the 14^th century, both involve hunting, the first by nobles, the second by poachers in rebellion against government and its tax-collectors, and while each is complete in itself, together they are more than the sum of their parts. There is much to enjoy and think about here, as always, and most when he gives music and narrative their head.

This is a 25-poem pamphlet (nicely produced by Calder Valley Poetry) with a definite scheme running beneath it. Though it becomes fairly evident as you read (and there are notes to help where it doesn't), I think an explanation is needed before I review it, because poems that are part of a narrative can't entirely be considered as stand-alones.

The first poem, "Zwillinge", sets up a myth; an Ur-woman bears twins, which are brought up apart in a sort of experiment, one with love and care and the other in neglect and abuse, with the results that might be expected: one grows up idealistic and well-intentioned, the other violent and depraved. Through the rest of the cycle, some poems concentrate on the "good" twin, some on the evil one, while others are more general commentaries on the history and nature of violence in the human condition. In the last poem the twins come together in an enterprise, at least so the notes say, for I don't think anyone could deduce it from the poem; we'll come back to that presently.

The idea of experiments on twins of course has Nazi echoes, but the cycle is careful throughout not to tie its mythology down to any one historical event, and the whole idea of twinhood is more archetypal than that. It is clear that in some sense the twins are always one, representations of the different sides of man's nature, at once reaching for the light and haunted by darkness, animal in nature yet striving with some success for rationality. It's also of course true in a literal sense that children brought up with bad role models and few opportunities are very liable to replicate the faults of those who acted as their parents. In Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, Ernest Pontifex gives up his children for adoption precisely because he fears he will be as bad a parent as his father and grandfather and wants to break the cycle. In more recent times, during the furore over the murdered child Peter Connelly ("Baby P"), who figures in this book, some pundit or other was criticised for saying that had the angelic-looking toddler lived and grown up in that environment, he would have become as violent as the adults who were his role models. This was self-evidently true; indeed these adults themselves were the product of just such homes, but nobody wanted to believe that smiling blond toddlers can turn into monsters (or, rather, that monsters were once blond toddlers capable of being saved).

It will be seen, then, that this poem cycle has some very interesting, thought-provoking ideas at the back of it. And its technique of never tying itself down to events, of assimilating specific events from different times and places in history, serves it well. In "The Death Dealer of Kovno", the Lithuanians who carried out an anti-semitic atrocity in 1941 are likened to a group of schoolchildren who carry out a bullying attack on a classmate in 1978, while in "Inyenzi" the genocide of Tutsis in 1994 is invoked in a poem about how what's sometimes termed the underclass in Britain is regarded by the media and society. It might seem at first that the larger atrocities are being devalued by comparison with the smaller, but this would be to miss the point, which is that the one can lead on to the other. "Inyenzi" means cockroaches, and is one of the terms used to dehumanise the Tutsi and make it easier for their killers to act as they did: they were deliberately turned into the "other". In this context, the language used of our own citizens in the poem is intentionally disturbing, because we see it doing essentially the same thing:

They were repulsive
some grotesquely corpulent
others skeletal on crack;
Special Brew faces shrunk reptilian,
They were toothless and hairless,
pimpled in blackheads and shiny with pus.

Nevertheless
they seemed to find each other attractive
and they mated continually and without compunction.

"Inyenzi" is a very powerful poem, one that could stand alone provided the reference in the title is not missed, and uncomfortably reminiscent of some of the language used in certain sections of print and online media. It is also one of the poems that might go to justify the contention in the notes that "the central argument of Werewolf is that state power can relatively easily induce and coerce humans into participating in violence, murder and genocide".

It is certainly the central argument of the "non-twin" poems, ie those that don't deal with the myth of the good and evil twins. I'm not sure, myself, that it is the central theme of the "twin" poems. These seem to me to deal far more with man's intrinsic nature than with his reaction to any political or any other circumstance. The "evil twin" poems, as one would expect, harp on the vein of violence that is inborn in man as in any naturally predatory animal. Both these and the peripheral poems mostly work, like "Inyenzi", by blending instances and peoples from different times and places – in "Spurn", the possibility of a death camp on the Humber estuary is envisaged, with sardonically observed and all too credible results:

In towns and cities, where once was blight,
now were parks and orchards.

Income tax was slashed.

The accounts were audited
and nothing was found amiss.

The ones, like "Fayasil", that do confine themselves to one historical time and place, without this constant cross-referencing, seem to me the less effective for it (though the unspoken reference to Adlestrop in the first line of "Fayasil" was pointed). And this, I think is why some of the "good twin" poems dissatisfy me a bit. The best of them is "Righteous Among the Nations", which does use the technique of cross-cutting between various folk who risk their lives for others. The last sentence, in a poem that celebrates great heroism, is a deliberate volte-face, reminding us that love for those we know can also make us fight the "other":

Greater love hath no man than this,
that he lay down his life for his friends. Strangers,
perhaps, enemies even. Maybe he'll kill for them.

But in at least three of the "good twin" poems, the idealist is confined to one context: he is a teacher. Now, if the main thing causing a child to go wrong is the home in which he's being brought up, there is a limit to what any teacher, however well-intentioned, can do to help, and these poems are indeed bleakly pessimistic, as also is "Every Child Matters", in which our idealist fosters a pair of children, but apparently too late to save them from the effects of the environment they were in before. At best, in these poems, there are tiny, temporary advances which are soon negated – a child learns to say thank you, but a few years later is joining in race riots in borstal: a girl makes some progress in class but then falls pregnant. Possibly we are meant to read the idealist's persistence as hopeful, but it would be just as easy to read this continual tale of disappointment and think, "why bother?"

I doubt if that was the intention, but the possibility is there, and made more likely by the final poem, the only one that doesn't work at all for me. In "Columblane", the note tells us, "the blessed twin's altruism and idealism leads him to join his monstrous brother in a school shooting". I'm glad the note was there, because I would never have guessed from the poem that the idealist twin was even present; there are clearly two people involved, but then there were at Columbine and neither of them was any sort of idealist. The conundrum of idealists who kill is a fascinating one; I have always wondered how doctors, in particular, can end up killing for Hitler or chucking bombs for ISIL, as they sometimes have. But I think he chose the wrong context in which to examine it. All the school shooters I have heard of have been archetypal losers, people who had a grudge against society because they weren't very good at dealing with it; certainly the Columbine shooters and Hamilton would seem to fall into that category. Of course motives are usually mixed, and there are losers who think themselves idealists; Anders Breivik probably thinks of himself as a right-wing hero, whereas to most of us he looks like a Billy No-Mates who never got over his mother's divorce. At all events, this poem doesn't convince me; the vision of suited middle-class men embracing their inner werewolf is bizarrely interesting but I could never see in it the figure of the ineffectual but well-meaning idealist he had built up from the earlier poems.

It's a pity, in a schematic collection like this, that the final poem in the narrative doesn't, for me, succeed in merging the twins as it was presumably meant to do. And I think it's also a pity that it causes the narrative to end on such an unredeemed, bleak note, which could easily be taken to be saying, "men are violent by nature and there's nothing to be done about it". Because there are, of course, idealists who make odds; for every Breivik there is, fortunately, a Nicholas Winton, but the thrust of this narrative seems to show idealists as essentially ineffectual, often hypocritical wafflers. Which no doubt some of them are, but it would be the greatest pity of all if readers reacted to the "good twin" poems with "why bother, then?"

Nevertheless, the poems in this collection which discuss individuals' propensity to violence, how they control it and how it can be exploited by the state are extremely thought-provoking and memorable, and mostly not because of their often harrowing subject matter but because of the skill with which it is handled. The jackdaw approach to history, assimilating different peoples, events and eras, brings home, as nothing else could, our essential likeness to each other, and viewing our own thoughts, words and actions through the glass of the "other" is as instructive now as it was when Euripides used the prism of the Trojan War to condemn the Athenian invasion of Melos. I don't think anyone could read "Inyenzi" and not be, at least temporarily, more careful in their language, or "Spurn" and not wonder "could it happen here?"

Steve Ely's first collection, Oswald's Book of Hours (Smokestack Books 2013) was shortlisted for the Forward first collection prize and I reviewed it on this blog. His second, Englaland, came out from Smokestack in 2015 – also reviewed here.

Matins: Annunciation

Force eight from Lundy and the Irish Sea
in the dark moon of the solstice.
Alarmed awake at midnight, sleet slashing
across the window glass, blurring the street-lit world.
Packing the van in drenched Jack Pyke:
Lazerlight lamp-kit, slip-leads, dogs.
The long drive east to the ditch-cut flatlands.
Sleet strafing down. Wind howling in the hawthorns.
Shivering long-dogs, ears erect. The thousand foot
halogen beam. Green eyes in hedge-bottoms.
Transfixed conies. Dogs running down the beam.
Conies dangling in the Deben double V.
Back to the van. Bag the necked and bladdered conies.
Towel and box the dogs. Peel off the drenched Jack Pyke.
The cold drive home in the dark moon of the solstice,
sleet slurring the view through the wiping-windscreen,
blurring the headlamped world.

(From Oswald's Book of Hours)

SHEENAGH: Your work is clearly very rooted in a particular landscape, and every point in that landscape's history seems equally present to you – there aren't many ways in which you remind me of Cavafy, but one resemblance I do see is how people like Oswald of Northumbria and Nevison the highwayman are still alive in your mental and emotional territory, just as Cavafy evidently wouldn't have been surprised to turn a corner in Alexandria and bump into Mark Antony or a priest from the Serapeion. How long has this sense of past-in-present been with you, and informing your work?

STEVE: The sense of past-in-present, as you put it, has been with me for as long as I can remember. As a kid I’d attempt to imagine the layerings of the past that had shaped the various aspects of the landscapes I roamed in — how the fields and woods became, the backstories of footpaths, copses, ponds and valleys. This tendency became more intense and urgent in my teens as reading began to inform and transform my experiences of place — and as my experiences of place began to similarly inform and transform my reading. That dialectic enabled the development of an imagined historical perspective that contextualised and sacralised that which had hitherto been quotidian — particular trees, meadows, views — or whole topographies. As this tendency developed, I came to see landscape as something akin to a living organism embodying a transgenerational integrity in which the past was inexorably alive in the present.
Two books were particularly important in this development. The first was Aaron Wilkinson’s A History of South Kirkby. (South Kirkby is the place I was brought up in. I’ve spend most of my life in the area.) I first read the book aged around fifteen and it sent me rambling around my local area (and into my local libraries as I followed up Wilkinson’s bibliography) with fresh eyes, triangulating landscape with past people and events and enabling me to connect my parish with a larger history (the Danelaw, the Norman Conquest, the Peasant’s Revolt, the Wars of the Roses, enclosure and the English & Industrial Revolutions).
Arthur Ruston & Denis Witney’s Hooton Pagnell: The Evolution of a Yorkshire Village (1934), also became important to my sense of the present in the past. The Hooton Pagnell estate was the main poaching/bird-nesting territories territory of my youth. I knew every hawthorn bush and rat-hole of that estate. I didn’t encounter Ruston and Witney until I was well into my twenties, but the millennial scope of the book provided an account of the landscape that allowed me to see my personal experiences in and around the village (and the neighbouring Frickley Estate) as part of a continuous parade of human activity from the Yorkshire Danes Swein and Arketil, to the planting of Frickley pit. I discovered, for example, that ‘Badger Balk’, (the widest of the three footpaths that joined Hooton’s Back Lane with the Iron Age route of Lound Lane) was so-called not simply because it was the haunt of meles meles, but because it was the only place within the parish where itinerant pedlars (‘Badgers’) had rights to graze their horses. But Badger Balk was much more than that. It was also part of a luminous and numinous personal landscape. Where it terminated at Four-Lane-Ends, the ivied elders were clotted with the ragged nests of spuggies, and foxes earthed under field stone dumped in the broad hedge-bottoms. Immediately beyond was Deep Dale, until recently an isolated valley too steep too plough, an oasis of orchids and harebells in an agrochemical waste. Richard Rolle, the hermit of nearby Hampole and confessor to the nuns at its Cistercian Priory, had his ‘shack in the fields’ very near here — the place where lazerlight lamps strafe the midnight stubbles in search of loping Puss and where Robert Aske’s forty thousand marched past bannered under Wounds, en-route to their great camp at Scawsby.
All my landscapes are transformed into quasi-sacred landscapes by a mythopoeic coalescence of experience, reading and imagination. The sacred landscape of Brierley Common, between South Kirkby, Brierley, Hemsworth, Grimethorpe and Great Houghton informs much of Englaland. Richard Rolle’s Hampole underpins my current work-in-progress, Incendium Amoris. Almost every day I walk my dogs down ‘the lines’ (the disused railway lines) near where I live in Upton. But I’m not just walking ‘the lines’. Almost every stride is resonant with historical, personal or other significance. The place where I cross the road to join the path is where, in 1973, nine-year-old Colin Bryant was killed by a car whilst playing ‘chicken’ on the highway. Across the road, behind the old station master’s house, a tawny owl nests in a magpie’s abandoned drey. A looted brick platform is all that remains of the station, formerly a halt on the Hull to Barnsley line which fell to Beeching’s axe in the railway-killing sixties.
Walking on, I pass the scrubby, sparrowhawk-patrolled woodland from which jays and little owls call and where, for one unbelievable weekend last May, a nightingale hymned in the dusk. It was in that wood, in 1981, that I stumbled across a turtle dove’s nest — the last nest I ever found of that species, now extinct in the North. A hundred yards further and the path spurs off to North Elmsall, where in the seventies a seal of Pope Honorius III was turned from the tilth and where the highwayman John Nevison would hold court in the White Hart, a now-vanished coaching inn on the Wakefield-London road. Past a patch of wild raspberry is the site of the short-lived Upton Colliery, opened in the thirties and closed by the sixties, now re-shaped into Upton Country Park, where cuckoos chase and call each spring. The fishing pond, margined in loosestrife, phragmites and flag, is fed by the spring known as Thunder Hole, which roars from the scrub below Luke Farmer’s memorial garden. Luke was killed in Afghanistan in 2010, aged 19. I used to go out with his Dad’s cousin. Along the cutting, where lads in Jack Pyke send ferrets into setts that travel deep into the fissured limestone, is the hamlet of Wrangbrook, until the sixties the site of an important railway junction where three now defunct rail-lines met. There kids converge to shake down conkers, last year I gathered a stone of blackberries, and sometime in the late fourteenth century, a paralytic got up and walked after praying to Saint Richard. Beyond is Skelbrooke, where John Little is graved interred in the Archangel’s graveyard, a few hundred yards below Robin Hood’s Well. This land lives and its dead cannot die. It’s as wrong to build a bypass or a Tesco on this land as it is to kill a tiger to grind into Chinese Viagra.

SHEENAGH: I can see why you say that, but could it not be said that while tigers are finite, land goes on for ever, and what you're proposing there is to freeze its ongoing history, of which you're so conscious in the poems, at one arbitrary point? Saxons recycled Roman walls, mediaeval farmers re-used once-sacred stones as barn floors. The sacredness and history of this particular land is obvious to you because you know it, but in all probability there's hardly a square yard of the country of which the same couldn't be said by someone who knew it well, and we can hardly ban building everywhere.... Since I spend much of my life regretting that I didn't become an archaeologist, my own inclination is to preserve everything, but doesn't that, in itself, go against the concept of landscape as a living organism, which is never done changing and developing?

STEVE: What I’m against is total or careless destruction for no good reason. As far as I can see there is never a good reason to build a Tesco or a bypass. My local authority put a new bypass (‘link- road’) near Upton a few years ago, using European money. The same local authority had rejected spending its own money on the same road twenty years previously because the cost of the road ‘was not justified by the usual standards of highway economics’. That is, it wasn’t necessary. The avowed reason for the road was to complete the A1-M1 link road (to open up land for development) and more specifically open up the former pit site of South Kirkby Colliery for development (even though it already had excellent road access). I protested against the plans and proposals both times. The road has bisected the largest swathe of open, undeveloped farmland in the local area, soaked the countryside in traffic roar, taken out some woodland, cut across the route of several footpaths and has brought anti-social behaviour into the countryside (joy-riding, destruction of paths, fields and hedges by off-roaders). On the plus side, HGVs can get from the A1 to the M1 three minutes faster than hitherto and the Colliery site now has a back door as well as a front door. As long as our political leaders are committed to growth (economic and population; the two come together, by definition), development never stops and the land is continually subject to creeping industrialisation and suburbanisation. (I recently saw a photograph of the land between South Elmsall and Upton (where I live) dating from about 1955. There was about a mile and a half of clear space — woodland, pasture, arable. Sixty years later, the gap is about three hundred yards). It’s not about opposing change and development, but learning to value what we have, becoming conscious of landscape, nature, and ‘heritage’, and subjecting development to local, democratic control. Ultimately, we need to reduce the population, end sprawl and restore the land.

SHEENAGH: You're very unafraid of words. That sounds an odd thing to say of a poet, but I've read so many reviewers, in particular, who seem downright terrified of any vocabulary vaguely out of the ordinary. Use an esoteric or archaic word and they'll complain of elitism; use modern slang and it's condemned as unsuitable or a "duff note", as if modern argot and poetry were somehow incompatible. One of the things I like best about your work is how you cheerfully expect your readers to cope with liturgical language, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, umpteen bird and plant names, lovely obscure words like xanthic for yellow, and you mix that in with army slang, business jargon, politician's soundbites….

STEVE: Words are my business, and as such, every word, in every language — past, present and future — belongs to me. I’ll use them as I see fit. Relatively early in my poetic second-coming I was expressly warned-off from using the word ‘cerulean’ by a well-meaning would-be mentor. My response was to write a poem (‘fancy THAT’, from my unpublished book, the compleat eater) that deliberately and provocatively deployed the word. Since I began to write again in 2003, I’ve used a range of registers, vocabularies and languages — Yorkshire dialect, the cant of U.S. prison gangs, Calo (the Hispanic ‘creole’ of East Los Angeles) , and many more, including the examples you cite. In ‘The Song of the Yellowhammer’ (Englaland) I also use two Romani words, ‘sunakai’ and ‘salno’, which both connote ‘yellow’. In the stanza of the same poem in which I use the word ‘xanthic’ there are five other evocations of ‘yellow’. I’m trying to make it golden.

SHEENAGH: Indeed yes. It felt to me as if what you were doing in Song of the Yellowhammer was trying to wrap the landscape in a sort of golden haze. In metaphorical terms that isn't a million miles from a sepia wash, and I did wonder if you ever worried about attracting the criticism George Mackay Brown sometimes encountered, namely that he over-idealised the past of his chosen landscape? Especially since, near the end, in the verse beginning "Cut the vines", you seem to hint, albeit less apocalyptically, at something akin to what he says in his essay on Rackwick: "I do not think Rackwick will remain empty for ever. It could happen that the atom-and-planet horror at the heart of our civilisation will scatter people again to the quiet beautiful fertile places of the world". Which alarmed me at the time, because he sounded as if he thought a nuclear holocaust would be a small price to pay for such an outcome... In your poem, the lines

To each man his allotment.
With plough-turned fieldstone
gentled hands will build
once more, and lift the lintels of long-tumbled halls

sounded more elegiac, like a dream of what had once been but you knew could never actually happen again (certainly not if the average digging and building skills of the population are anything like mine). Leastways, that was how I read that poem; was I right to, or were you seeing not just a desired but a possible future?

STEVE: The gold is the gold of the yellowhammer, a symbol for ‘the people in the land’, the real treasure, not the lucre zealously guarded by Fafnir or sought by Sigurdr. Also in my use of ‘goldenness imagery’ I intended to give luminosity to the landscape itself, which is the other treasure — and perhaps to knowingly evoke an imagined, past-and-perhaps-once-again, ‘golden age’. I think the juxtapositions with violent and quotidian elements and the poem’s engagement, argument and tension guards against any simpering to sepia. My own, more cowardly version of Mackay Brown’s sentiment is summarised later in the poem. ‘Too much blood, I can’t commit.’ I’m intuiting and assuming that the wrenching away from capitalism necessary for sustainable living, conservation, the full development of human potential and social justice will lead to upheaval and slaughter as the rich and powerful choose to scorch the Earth and immolate its peoples rather than concede their dominance. That fact that I ‘can’t commit’ makes my anarcho-yeoman utopianism a prophetic, not political vision. However, I do think yeoman-anarchism is a possible future (perhaps the only sustainable one). Those with the means to downsize, go off-grid and opt-out are approximating to a fragile, individualised and ultimately unsustainable version of it right now. On a wider, societal level, some form of revolution would be necessary. What kind and where it might come from I have no idea. But the alternative is the totalitarianism of plutocracy and the commoditisation of everything: death for the sake of profit.

SHEENAGH: How did your language become so rich and multi-layered, and have you ever had trouble getting it past editors?

STEVE: At one level, the reason why I deploy such a wide range of registers and lexicons is because I have a wide range of interests and obsessions — football, birding, hunting, nature, history, England, the Bible, religion, Catholicism, the occult, crime, the Fen, radical and revolutionary politics and so on — and the content, vocabulary and mode of expression characteristic to each area all find their way into my work. However, behind both Oswald’s Book of Hours and Englaland is a vision of England in which fifteen hundred years of history, culture and language exist simultaneously as an irreducible synoptic unity; my ‘interests and obsessions’ are filtered through this vision, producing the diversity of language, forms and range of reference that characterises both books. Ultimately, the heteroglossic mode of Oswald & Englaland is as much a product of ideology as accident or aesthetics.
I’ve often suspected that the relative unorthodoxy of my work has alienated the more provincial (Kavanagh’s usage) editors but I don’t really know this for sure. My editor at Smokestack Books, Andy Croft, has said that ‘only Smokestack’ would have published Oswald’s Book of Hours, and he might be right.

SHEENAGH: "Since I began to write again in 2003" – yes, I gathered from your website that you'd taken a break from writing and then come back to it. What made that happen, and if you actually stopped writing altogether, how else did you express the thoughts and concerns that feel so urgent in your recent work?

STEVE: I stopped writing when I went to University in 1988. I’d been writing poetry for five or six years and had reached a decent standard and had begun to think of myself as a ‘good’ poet. I think the energy I’d hitherto been putting into writing simply went into my studies. I also became very active in the Green Party about that time, so that might also have played a role in sucking up my time. In 1992 I left the Greens, joined the Socialist Workers Party — and became a secondary school teacher. My creativity was channelled into pedagogy and selling papers on the street. In the mid-1990s I began to read a lot of true crime and crime fiction. I made two abortive attempts to write thrillers. But in the period 1988-2003 I didn’t write any poetry at all — and barely read any. I left the SWP in 1996 and became politically quiescent. I’ve remained so to this day. (I don’t count simply ‘having opinions’, even on social media (or in poems), as being politically engaged — you’ve got to join, campaign, organise, commit, sacrifice.) I don’t think I expressed myself at all creatively during that period. Maybe that’s why I’ve been so prolific since starting up again. I’ve got years of stored-up unconscious to download.

SHEENAGH: Glad to hear it! Your poems don't shy away from politics or indeed polemic. I know you feel the past is always in the present anyway, but do you use historical parallels to get some distance from the subject, to approach it from an angle rather than head-on?

STEVE: Not consciously, although I do affirm the past to critique the present. I’ve just written a Corpus Christi play, The Coronation of the Virgin. The play addresses modern themes: it’s an affirmation and exploration of the irrational in the context of the ‘New Atheism’s’ scorched earth kulturkampf against ‘religion’. However, it’s set in first century A.D. Palestine and written in an approximation to an early sixteenth century style — alliterative blank verse — which I suppose is a political choice in itself.
Having said that, I rarely set out to write a ‘political poem’; however, because my poetry is engaged (that is it proceeds from vision and position) there is often a political (or at least public) dimension to it. My poem ‘Spearhafoc’, for example, began as an attempt to evoke the spirit of the sparrowhawk (in response to a particularly striking photograph of the bird), but as it stands is largely a defiant affirmation of a specific kind of working-class outlawry; I didn’t intend that. It’s just that the network of associations sparked off by ‘sparrowhawk’ include the Book of St. Albans, A Kestrel for a Knave, Kes, trespass, poaching, egg collecting, eyass ‘scrumping’ and the violence and confrontations which are inevitably associated with and follow from those things. In some sections of Englaland’s ‘Mongrel Blood Imperium’, I consciously adopted a less ‘poetic’, more direct and contemporary voice in order to present arguments, expose the faltering in my process and to convey uncertainty and bewilderment (and also to give some relief from the intensity and pace that otherwise characterised that 200 page poem. Overall, I think the decision was the right one. However, the shift to a more direct register, motivated by political as much as aesthetic considerations, came at the cost of music and a dilution of the linguistic resource. A more oblique approach gives greater space in which the imagination can roam and provides a greater range of resources to appropriate.

SHEENAGH: You use a lot of different forms – offhand I can think of ballads, unrhymed sonnets, alliterative verse, prose-poems in various formats. How does a poem, or a sequence of poems, find its ideal form, the one that feels right to you?

STEVE: I generally plan what I’m going to do, taking into account theme, content, language, intention, etc. Oswald’s Book of Hours was modelled on the structure of a mediaeval Book of Hours, which generally open with a Calendar (of Holy Days, etc), proceed via a formalised sequence of prayers and Psalms and conclude with ‘Memorials to the Saints’. Having settled on this general structure, I then proceeded on a utilitarian, practical basis (one of my major aims was simply to prevent the book becoming too long), hence the large number of short, sonnet-like poems — deciding to write a sonnet is my way of telling myself to keep it brief. My unpublished collection, the compleat eater was conceived of partially as a provocative comment on form — it’s written in unpunctuated and justified columns of lower case text and defines itself as poetry via rhythm, compression and lexis. ‘The Song of the Yellowhammer’ is an improvised form, its nine line stanzas, with the last line being much longer than the rest, is being a stylisation of the traditional rendering of the nine-syllable song of the yellowhammer — ‘a little bit of bread and no cheeeeeese’.
However, although I am and will always be a planner, I’m increasingly giving myself flexibility within the broad outline of any given plan. My work-in-progress Incendium Amoris is planned and structured and has movement and direction. However, within the broad intention, I’m giving myself considerable heuristic freedom in executing the various poems. I haven’t always done this; I haven’t always thought it necessary to. Oswald’s Book of Hours for example, was planned poem-by-poem, in great detail. I stuck to the plan throughout, with very few departures. ‘Werewolf’, my just-completed pamphlet-length sequence, was similarly very tightly planned and has a quite intricate organisational structure. However, the general trend in my work is for looser planning and greater spontaneity. Having said that, I’m increasingly interested in identifying forms that might complement my ‘English idiom’ and to that end I’ve begun to explore and experiment. I’m becoming particularly interested in ballad forms, odes, sprung rhythm, the Arabic qasida (I’ve just written an alliterative poem based on an Old English charm in a qasida-derived form) and in techniques (parallelism, repetition, lexical economy) used in the various English Bibles.

SHEENAGH: Yes, while Oswald's Book of Hours actually was laid out like a mediaeval book of devotions, Englaland was far looser and longer, and I know its published form wasn't, for space reasons, quite what you had planned, but what sort of a shape did you see it as being?

STEVE: Englaland was conceived of (in 2009, when I started writing it) as the thing it became, a wide-ranging epic that affirms, uncovers, critiques and transforms ideas of England and Englishness. The intention was to create a number of pamphlet-length sequences or long poems that could stand alone, but that would also be in thematic and other relation to each other, mutually commenting on, reinforcing and illuminating and thus creating a unity in which the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts. Englaland was planned and structured quite carefully from the beginning, although it did develop. Oswald’s Book of Hours, for example was originally planned to be a section of Englaland, but it grew too long for the piece. ‘Big Billy’ was originally the centre-piece of a five poem alliterative sequence (‘Feast’) about the Good Friday fair at Brierley Common, but it grew to dominate the other poems (in terms of length) so much that I discarded the others. ‘The Song of the Yellowhammer’ was a relatively late addition to the plan and ‘The Ballad of Scouse McLaughlin’ had to be sacrificed at the proof stage due to reasons of space — which grieved me no end, because all the component parts of the book are integral. If there is ever a reprint, I’d like to reincorporate ‘Scouse’, although that will probably add another fifteen or twenty pages to the book.

SHEENAGH: Both your collections have been very male worlds. In Oswald's Book of Hours, the only females I recall being spoken of with affection or respect were the Virgin Mary and various lurchers, and in fact there were several references to women that could be seen as casually misogynist, which was fair enough since they were in the voice of Nevison, who could hardly speak like a New Man. There was one in Englaland that bothered me a bit more, because though it was in a ballad about Nevison, it was in a narrator's voice: "he robbed the rich, man and bitch". If that had been, say, "cur and bitch", it'd be just the natural resentment of the poor against the rich. But it uses a neutral word for the male victim and a loaded, pejorative one for the female. What's the rationale there? And do you see your poetry continuing to be so male-dominated?

STEVE: Quite a few people have commented on the male world of these two books and gently implied that there may be misogyny at work. I’ve just had a quick trawl through Oswald’s Book of Hours and noted (in addition to Our Lady and the various female lurchers and long dogs) ‘affectionate or respectful’ references to Mary Tudor & Elizabeth Barton (‘Obsecro te’ & ‘O intemerata’), the un-named Flemish girl in ‘Beati, quorum remissae’, my daughter in the first poem of ‘Hours of the Dead’, Mary Magdalen in the poem of that name in ‘Memorials of the Saints’ and Margaret of Kirkeby in ‘Richard Rolle’. A similar trawl through Englaland reveals ‘affectionate or respectful’ references to ‘a girl’ in poem ‘X’ of ‘The Battle of Brunanburh’; ‘domestics and milkmaids’ in poem ‘XXI’; there are ‘affectionate’ if not ‘respectful’ references to women (and men) in ‘Eight Miles Out’; Lady Julia Warde-Aldam turns up in ‘Reverend John Harnett Jennings'; there are incidental but ‘respectful’ references to women in ‘The Field Church, Frickley’; ‘the booze-loosened lasses’ of ‘Big Billy’ are portrayed ‘affectionately’ and, I think ‘respectfully’; ‘Krakumal’ is Ragnar’s death-bed paean to his wife, Aslaug (Kraka); several women are mentioned in ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ and ‘Mrs Duffy’ gets a poem to herself. So maybe there are more ‘positive’ or at least ‘neutral’ references to women than you think.
The specific reference you make to possible casual misogyny (in ‘A Lytle Gest of John Nevison’), in which the narrator uses the term ‘bitch’ in lieu of ‘woman’, may actually be compounded by his subsequent reference to the innkeeper’s adulterous wife as a ‘whore’. However, the narrator of ‘A Lytle Gest of John Nevison’ is a working-class raconteur of a certain type, an outlaw and provocateur himself , hymning his hero’s deviance in a deliberately scandalous way, variously praising his hero’s fecklessness, his penchant for armed robbery and running protection rackets, his contempt for the rich, his treachery, womanising and reckless cunning. The poem ends with the narrator himself threatening the audience. The narrator’s possible misogyny is part of a range of disreputable attitudes he owns.
Of course, at a more basic level, I needed a rhyme for ‘rich’ and ‘bitch’ fitted the bill. I’m not sure my narrator would’ve used ‘cur’, though; ‘cur’ is not really in the vernacular as a synonym for ‘man’ the same way that ‘bitch’ (however much you might deplore it) is for ‘woman’. A few years ago I got into a similar minor controversy with some fellow writers over the use of racist terms by one of my narrators and some of my characters in my unpublished (the various poems were published in magazines and journals) book, JerUSAlem. One of the major themes of JerUSAlem is race and racism in the context of the ‘American Dream’ and concepts of the USA as ‘promised land’. Some of my characters and narrators were racists of various stripes and this was reflected in their language. I don’t see that giving scandalous utterances to scandalous voices is a problem.
However, to return to your fundamental point, both collections are undoubtedly very male worlds. Why is my world a male world? I suppose the content and themes of Oswald and Englaland — warfare, fighting, hunting, poaching, outlawry, revolution and so on — are bound to import a male bias. Plus, I am a man. I suppose I write about manly things. Looking at my most recent work: Bloody, proud and murderous men, adulterers and enemies of God is ‘very male’; given that its subject is violence, war, terrorism and genocide, it was always likely to be. Incendium Amoris is essentially ‘about love’, and as such is more balanced, genderwise. Enganche is about football. Ten poems in, it’s a very male world indeed. It’s just the way it is. I would never consciously attempt to compensate. I don’t write to be representative. I write because I’m obsessive-compulsive.

SHEENAGH: "I don’t see that giving scandalous utterances to scandalous voices is a problem." No indeed, and I wish to heaven that more readers would see the difference between narrative and character voice. As Chaucer says,

whoso will tell a tale after a man,
he moot reherce, as ny as ever he can,
everich word, if it be in his charge,
al speak he never so rudeliche and at large

Having said that, of course the sly old soul knew very well that it was he, the author, who chose his narrators and their tones and attitudes. I suppose it's the tone of some of your narrators' comments on women, rather than what they actually say, that sticks in the mind. Admittedly there's room for different interpretations: for instance "big-bosomed" could be glossed as "maternal" or "nurturing" rather than "belongs on Page 3", while "booze-loosened lasses" maybe sounds affectionate in a male ear but contemptuous in a female one? But what I'm really getting at is the clear, unconditional love that shows in the voices of your male narrators when they talk of their dogs, and which I don't hear elsewhere. It reminds me of when R S Thomas, in his autobiography, speaks of goldcrests: "I dote on them, the pretty little things". This comes as a terrific surprise, because he never says anything half so affectionate about his own wife and son (whose conception is explained in the sentence "The vicar's wife had expressed a desire for a child"). I don't suppose that means he didn't have feelings for them but he seems to have saved all his own expressiveness for the goldcrests. Hey, maybe I've been coming at this from the wrong angle; is it that your male narrators, too, feel less embarrassed expressing sentiments for animals?

STEVE: ‘Big-bosomed’ alludes to the comment Richard Rolle made to Margaret of Kirkeby during one of their conversations — that she had ‘gret papys’. She was a nun, he her spiritual advisor and confessor, which set certain boundaries. However, within that context, their relationship was loving and passionate and reading-between-the-lines, charged with sexual tension. ‘Booze-loosened lasses’ needs to be understood in the context of the drunken, tongue-in-cheek, sexual banter envisaged. Think hen party-meets-stag do at the races. ‘Lads laughing and lathered, lurching and leering’ at the ‘flirty, fresh faced fillies’ who ‘bar-barge’ Big Billy, ‘pouting promises for paid on porter’ — which may or may not be honoured. Maybe it’s a class thing; or maybe I’m a sly old soul myself. I think is easier for many people (not just men) to profess unconditional love to those utterly dependent and inarticulate (animals, babies) because those objects can’t muddy the emotional waters by articulating a reciprocal love (or rejection, even) — which is by definition a demand, a contract, a constraint. I suppose loving animals is in some respects an expression of solipsism or narcissism. Loving animals could also be an expression of alienation — maybe my working class narrators love their dogs because they come alive when working them in a way they simply can’t in their constrained quotidian — work, responsibility, debt, domesticity. The running dog is an emblem of freedom and escape — and a means of catharsis. Alternatively, perhaps I’m just sick of poems about ‘feelings’.

SHEENAGH: And while we're on the subject, do you have any theories as to why so many male poets are also birders? I can think of half a dozen male poets I know or know of, who are keen birdwatchers, and not a single female poet. If it weren't for that gender difference, one could formulate some high-flown (ha!) theory about flying being the ultimate escapism and poetry being another form of it, but it won't work for one sex only.

STEVE: It’s true — David Morley, Gregory Leadbetter, and Gerry Cambridge come to mind straight away. Pat explanation of why many men are birdwatchers and many male birdwatchers are poets: the alleged male hunting instinct sublimated to ‘capturing’ and ‘possession’ via the technical skills of identification, knowledge of habitat, etc fieldcraft, identification and classification. Birding poets effect a secondary sublimation: as opposed to being twitched, listed or sketched in the Alwych, the birds are written about, or otherwise incorporated in poems. I don’t list (except on my annual spring trip to Uist), but I frequently boast that 46 species of bird are named in Oswald’s Book of Hours. It’s the Hughes thing from Poetry in the Making — writing a poem is like ‘capturing animals’. Having said all that, I cheerfully concede that it might well be trite rubbish. Bird-watching and writing poetry is what you do when you escape for the world, even to engage with it. They’re both expressions of alienation and exile, a prophetic separation; Elijah in the wilderness being fed by ravens, in refuge from persecution, earthquake and fire, finding his still, small voice.

SHEENAGH: What do you plan to do next? There was a playlet in Englaland, plus a sort of mini-epic in alliterative verse; are you drawn to do more in those genres?

STEVE: I’ve just about finished two books of poetry. Bloody, proud and murderous men, adulterers and enemies of God explores the human capacity for extremism and violence. The aforementioned ‘Werewolf’ and The Ballad of Scouse McLaughlin’ have found homes in this book, along with my narrative sonnet-sequence ‘True Crime’ and my Poetry Society commission ‘How Dear is Life’. I've mentioned Incendium Amoris is a collection of poems arising from the life, writings and landscapes of the fourteenth century mystic Richard Rolle, my Corpus Christi play, The Coronation of the Virgin explores issues of rationality/irrationality and is a subtle and insightful contribution to the otherwise crass sloganeering of the ‘Religion vs Science’ debate. I’ve started work on a collection (see above) ‘about football’, provisionally entitled Enganche. I’ve got ideas for tracts, pamphlets and plays set in the revolutionary tumults of the seventeenth and fourteenth centuries and I have two abandoned novels I’d like to revive.

SHEENAGH: I utterly love the idea of tracts and pamphlets! If I could have lived in a former age (not that I would want to, and nor would George Mackay Brown if he'd had to cook on an open fire instead of grumbling about the decadence of stoves) I would choose the Commonwealth times when there was such an explosion of printed material, when the Welsh tailor Arise Evans could become a noted author of religious books and women could preach. What era do you think would have suited you best, and what would have been your fate in it?

STEVE: I love the ferment of the English revolution and its literary expression — Winstanley, Coppe, Tyranipocrit Uncovered, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, the Levellers, Ranters and Diggers, although my favourite poem of that period is the fierce music of the fifty-nine signatures listed on Charles Stewart’s death warrant. Me and Alice Oswald. It’s a pity literacy in our language wasn’t sufficiently developed in 1381 to leave more evidence about the Peasant’s Revolt, although, ‘whan Adam delved and Eve spanne, who then was the gentilman?’, is fine poetry and as clear a piece of class analysis as you could wish for. Some of John Ball’s communications have survived, including the following, which I incorporated in my poem ‘John Ball’, (from Oswald’s Book of Hours):

Johan the Mullere hath ygrounde smal, smal, smal.
The Kynges sone of hevene schal pay for al.
Be war or ye be wo; Knoweth your freend
fro your foo. Haveth ynow, and seith ‘Hoo!’

There were no Lords in Eden’s commune. But if I had to choose a period to transport myself to it would have been the period immediately post 1066. I’d have joined what the historian Peter Rex has called ‘The English Resistance’ against Guillaume the Bastard’s genocidal asset-stripping of England and the North in particular. I would have chopped a few Frenchmen before being disembowelled and hung from a gibbet by my thumbs. Stoves aren’t decadent. They’re necessary. Stove PLC is the problem. It denies stoves at all to those who can’t pay and puts the Amazon through a wood chipper to build super-deluxe diamond-encrusted platinum stoves for Bill Gates and Roman Abramovich.

More poems and links

Objective One

Through the mists of an April dawn
a crowd flowed along Manvers Way, so many,
I had not thought the dole had undone so many,
sending them herded from the fuming valleys
of Dearne and Dove and Don and Rother,
into the bus bays and car parks of Ventura,
ASOS and Next PC, where they pour
from Nissans, Vauxhalls and private hire minicabs,
lighting cigarettes, adjusting iPhones,
pressing mobiles to their ears, striding out
in polished patent, pinstripes breaking
on the buckled instep, tailored skirts
and long coats flaring on the breeze.

Sixty thousand work here, in logistics,
call-centres, light industry and retail,
along the roundabouted blacktop
from Birdwell to Barnsdale, the EU funded
M1 to A1 link road. Objective One,
bringing light to parochial darkness,
access, investment, enterprise, jobs;
until sterling collapses, Kolkata undercuts
and the market-zeitgeist lurches,
retrenching capital in gold and gilts
and the provincia flips once more
to wrecking-ball brownfield-bombsite,
the full monty of dole and dereliction,
where brassed-off, hand-to-mouth yokels
are abandoned to dearth and absurdity,
their eh-ba-gum tutu dreams.

Once there were woods and open fields,
fens in the flatland, villages on the hill.
Bullheads in the millstream, polecats
in the warren; red kite, raven, white-tailed eagle,
over the wolf-prowled heath. Danelaw sokeland,
assarted from wildwood, torp in the langthwaite clays;
the Anglecynn muster at Ringstone Hill,
where three wapentakes meet; Oswald's grange
by the holy well – belltower, gatehouse,
carucates for geld. Here, beyond Whitwell
and the five boroughs, beyond Mercia's
clement mid-lands, we will beat the bounds
at rogationtide from Bamburgh, Danum,
Durham and York; the dragon-prowed river,
the waycross on the roman road, hoar apple tree,
whit's gospel thorn, the tumulus at Askern Hill;
these are the roots that clutch, these the sprouting corpses,
these are the fragments I shore against my ruins.

(From Englaland)

John Ball

Wycliffe's words and Langland's gave the Englisc
back their tongue. Manor french and church latin
cut-off in the throat, battening behind
the buttresses of keeps and cathedrals,
parsing and declining. Johon Schepe
proclaims his hedgerow gospel, singing
from the furze like a yellowhammer:
Johan the Mullere hath ygrounde smal, smal, smal.
The Kynges sone of hevene schal pay for al.
Be war or ye be wo; Knoweth your freend
fro your foo. Haveth ynow, and seith ‘Hoo!’
There were no lords in Eden's commune
Scythes sharpened on whetstones, gente non sancta.
War will follow the Word.

(From Oswald's Book of Hours)

The Song of the Yellowhammer from Englaland can be found here.

Smokestack Books, Steve Ely's publisher

Steve Ely's website

Steve Ely's previous collection, Oswald's Book of Hours, which I reviewed here, was by some way the most memorable and unusual collection I read in 2013. It felt like quite a short, tight collection, not in the sense of inhibited but economical, every word working like mad. Englaland is much longer, looser and baggier, more sprawling, but there is a good reason for that; it is trying to portray a whole culture, and over a period of a millennium and more. The back cover suggests this culture is that of "the English" but that doesn't seem to me to be quite so: it is pretty specifically Northern. And as in Oswald's Book of Hours, the past continually collides with the present, is in the present – the epigraph to the collection's first section is William Faulkner's "The past is never dead. It is not even past."

There are seven sections, and in the first, he cuts cinematically between stragglers from the 10th-century battle of Brunanburh, fleeing and pursuing each other, and twentieth-century lads in the same landscape, trespassing, bird-nesting, looking for a fight. Those seeking refuge in the stream, aware of "waterline, rat tunnels, hand-holds for drowners" could be from either time, and the victors of Brunanburh who "ride garlanded in ears" are reminiscent, purposely no doubt, of the Falklands War soldier from Oswald's Book of Hours who did the same.

Indeed, though I said the book was looser and more expansive than its predecessor, it is full of linking chains of images, words, places – the landscapes of the Ryknild ridge and Frickley Park, which first appear here, will crop up in other sections, and the question in the first section "Whose is this land?" is the theme of the third section, "Common", which is all about ownership, particularly of land (trespass and poaching figure throughout the book, but most here). In the fifth section, "The Harrowing of the North", past and present are again linked indissolubly by one of these chains. Here, the effect on the north (and elsewhere, but the "elsewhere" isn't exactly stressed) of the miners' strikes and pit closures of the 1980s is compared with the punitive action waged in the north of England in 1069 by William of Normandy (generally known in this book as William the Bastard, which is pleasantly familiar to one used to his Welsh name of Gwilym Bastert). The narrator of "Ballad of the Scabs" mocks the UDM for their optimistic belief that co-operating with the government would save their pits:

And Foulstone, Butcher, Taylor,
how's your job for life?

The next poem, "1069", shows William conquering by dividing his enemies: "he bought off Osbjorn and bribed Malcolm of Scots". This poem ends with the words of the Domesday Book recording the names of villages laid waste in this conflict: "Warter, wasta, Wetwang, wasta, Wichum, wasta…" And the next poem, which returns to the present to show a dying, demoralised ex-pit village, is titled "Wasta"... There could scarcely be a simpler or more effective way to link past and present, to assert, as the earl of Newcastle once said without result to his unsatisfactory pupil the young Charles I, "what you read, I would have it history that so you might compare the dead with the living; for the same humours is now as was then, there is no alteration but in names." Nor does it end here: poem titles like "Search and Destroy", a litany of the names of dead pits, and the image, (when a disused pit is demolished in "A sin and a shame") of a crew dynamiting "the twin towers/of the winding gear" leave no way to see the proceedings except in terms of war.

There is considerable variety of form in this collection. Quite apart from the fact that one section is a short play and another an extended narrative in alliterative verse, there are ballads, prose-poems and the same creative use of white space and shaping familiar from his earlier collection. The alliterative piece, "Big Billy", in fact puzzles me slightly, because I'm not sure what role it plays in the pattern. Everywhere else in the book, the battles are about something: access to land, identity, holding on to what one has. Billy, a prizefighter, seems to fight for no better cause than to prove who's the best at punching and gouging (there is money involved but that clearly is not why it is happening). My best guess is that Billy represents fighting spirit in its purest form, but if he is being seen as a hero, which I think he is, then his name is a conundrum, because Norman William is no hero in the rest of this book. I suppose it could be mere coincidence, but it is a measure of the craft of this collection that I find it hard to credit that anything here is done for no reason. Though I'm unsure what this section is trying to do, what works brilliantly in it is the exuberance of the language, particularly for flyting purposes. I hadn't realised what a great medium alliterative verse can be for insulting people: "valourless-vagrant, vile vardo-vagabond".

The least poetically successful section seemed to me to be the sixth, "Mongrel Blood Imperium" which considers the various cultures and ethnicities that inhabit the landscape. I don't know if it's an overwhelming desire to convince, but at times in this section (eg "Acts of Union") the verbal music seemed to go missing, to be replaced by flatter, prosier statements than he normally deals in. I think something similar happens when he assumes Peter Mandelson's voice in "Scum of the Earth", the playlet. Not to be ungrateful, because any play in which Mandelson and Wellington fight each other and both get killed is an enchanting thought, but Mandelson's voice would be funnier and more biting satire if he were saying things he might actually say, as Burns makes "Holy Willie" do, rather than things an opponent might put unconvincingly into his mouth.

The last section, "The Song of the Yellowhammer", harks back to Brunanburh and its victor Athelstan, described by his contemporary the poet Egil as a "golden-haired Aetheling". This long, mesmerising poem is literally flooded with the colour yellow – corn, cheese, gold, ragwort, dandelions, gorse, sand, pears, a yellow moon:

The white-tailed eagle's
sunlit eye
tracks Humber's gullet
along Ouse, Don and Ea
to the slow blonde stones
and saffron clays of Hampole.
An orchard
of yellow pears.
Aureate moon, soft light of xanthic tallow.

It's a landscape with a golden haze on it. There seems to be a tentative hope such as George Mackay Brown sometimes expressed, that landscape will survive what people do to it and that they may eventually return to the land with a keener appreciation of it.

For most of this collection, and there's a lot of it, 200 pages no less, one is in the presence of the same linguistic exuberance, intellectual vigour and keen sense of living history as in Oswald's Book of Hours, and that's reason enough to buy any book. It's also very ambitious, far more so than most of the neat, controlled 64 or 72-pagers you'll read this year. Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the title: what's that about, then? On one level, "Englaland" obviously carries an echo of "la la land". But modern words, place-names especially, tend to be worn-down versions of older ones, and just as Bolton, in this book, is occasionally Bodelton, depending on who is speaking and when, so this was, and still is, Angle-land, and there's your third syllable. The past is not past: it is in the present and intrinsic to it; it is how the present came to be.

I've read nearly 200 poetry collections this year, and most have disappeared into the mists of forgettery. This one was memorable for many reasons, but mainly because it does not come from what might be called the usual place.

It is easy to please readers by telling them what they want to hear, expressing opinions they share. And much poetry does just that. There is a liberal consensus among poets and their regular readers; many are in the same part of the political spectrum and share views on gender, race, sexuality etc. Religion is more divisive; there are atheist and religious poets, but even then, few extremes, because the default world-view, among European poets at least, is a polite, apologetic, near-universal tolerance. If other views are expressed by a persona the poet has chosen to adopt, s/he will generally make it clear that this is a persona, whose views are not being presented for the reader's approval; in fact the reader may be encouraged to disapprove or mock.

So if you create voices that speak, amongst other things, of their pleasure in killing (voices of highwaymen, men who hunt with dogs, Afghanistan veterans) and you do not present them as people necessarily to be abhorred, you must work quite hard to overcome an intrinsic recoil among many readers. As a pacifist who loathes the mere idea of hunting, I'm not on the face of it his ideal reader, so since I found the book mesmerising, I'd say he is bloody good with words.

For one thing, he has a very clear delight in them and is not intimidated out of showing it by any possible accusations of "elitism"; he's quite ready to send you off to look up his Church-Latin titles or the Anglo-Saxon and Old English in his epigraphs and texts. Though you probably wouldn't, on a first reading, because the energy in the language and narrative would be carrying you with it. There is tremendous energy and momentum in most of these poems, especially the "voice" ones:

Lazerlight lamp-kit, slipleads, dogs.
The long drive east to the ditch-cut flatlands.
Sleet strafing down. Wind howling in the hawthorns,
Shivering long-dogs, ears erect. The thousand foot
halogen beam. Green-eyes in hedge-bottoms.
Transfixed conies. Dogs running down the beam.

("Matins: Annunciation")

Even the dead do not stay still for long:

Under the golf course, the dead of England lie;
beneath the steel mill, their vernacular graves.
Rolling and turning in tectonic earth,
drifting turfward in turbulent methane,
the sphenoids of huscarls reveal in the borders
of the Whitehill Estate.

(from "Hours of the Dead")

The telescoping of time in this poem is typical of the collection and it has to do with a sort of folk-spirit he sees emerging over and over through English history, in figures like Robin Hood, John Nevison (highwayman, better known as Swift Nick), John Schepe (archetypal hedge-preacher), John Ball and a great many others up to the present day. In the sequence "Godspel" there are several such figures. Wat Tyler, fighting for the rights of ordinary people, is easy to sympathise with:

1. Three things: firstly, and no offence; never trust a King. That was our downfall, the idiotic peasant conceit that a divine right tyrant propped up by a cabal of mammonite murderers could ever rule with the interests of his people at heart. ‘King Richard and the true commons’ my arse

The next, Robert Aske, another campaigner for human rights betrayed by a king, is not unsympathetic either. But the last in the sequence is a soldier who died in the Falklands carrying wounded men off a mountain and might have won a medal but for his habit of taking enemy ears as trophies. He's not a nice man, but his bloody-mindedness is here connected with the fearless integrity of Tyler and Aske, and the message – the dead man is speaking from heaven - is clear:

13: It's like they say up here; Daemon est Deus inversus. Two sides of the same coin: you can't have one without the other. […] the rabble is the blood-pulse of England.

I think visions of folk-spirits can be dodgy, and many will not necessarily go along with a lot of this vision (in particular, his assessment of Scargill seems out to me, crediting the man with achievements that were mostly due to his predecessors). But in the end the memorability of poetry resides less in what it says than how it says it, and I found more power, energy, conviction and sheer verbal exuberance in this than in any other first collection I've read this year.