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Foreword by Jacob Polley 1
David Borrott
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Elizabeth Burns
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Contents
19 Mark Griffiths 24 Pauline Keith
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32 Cath Nichols
St Francis and the Birds This is a dawn of doves, of pigeons drawing their loosening spirals across the sky’s canvas. The farmyard crackles and ignites with noise, cock and hen, a grey pool of geese. Still the pigs are asleep in their pens, the cows punctuate the hill’s sweep, Purposeful sparrows divert to the wagon’s rut.
of enthusiasm that they want to fall into. They pursue him, spreading like a peacock’s tail. He is almost winged himself, they thicken about him in the lane. Starlings quaver on the barred gate, a heron comes cometary from the river, crows wait for him like parishioners, he advances with his bridal-gown of geese.
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David Borrott
Cassocked and besotted with joy Francesco opens himself to the morning, flinging himself like a twig into the inferno of new light, the birds scatter then gather again. Hens chase his footfalls, doves coo from the roof tiles, geese come dripping. He treasures and ignores them, a magnet, a swell
Brooding It’s the annunciation that puzzles me. I’m fairly sure Europa didn’t need telling, and Leda had the precise feathered touch, not an emissary elaborating to let her know. Potency needs no delegation, except, as the sun says it, loud and all day long, while we simplify glory to the chance for a suntan
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David Borrott
or a barbecue, where the chicken wings drip fat onto the coals, and some distant aunt, an uninvited guest, takes us aside to whisper why we’re bleeding or not bleeding.
h�eld One-year-old, and he’s discovering the river, dropping stones in at the edge, retrieving them. He loves containers, says his mother, then wonders, is a river a container? The riverbed is: it curves its way from Roeburndale down through these woods of wild garlic and bluebells, letting the winding stony vessel of itself be filled with springwater, meltwater, rainwater, water which also contains things – you can plop a stone into it, take it out again, and here are glints of fish and floating twigs, silt, insects, airbubbles, ducklings –
says the basketmaker, the earth contains us, we contain bones, blood, air, our hearts. We are baskets and makers of baskets, and fresh from the hold of the womb
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the boy-child’s discovering how things are held by other things: milk in a cup, food in a bowl, a ball in his hands, a stone in water, water in a nest of stones.
Elizabeth Burns
and if the river’s a container, so’s a song, holding words and tune; everything is like a basket
h�orse A horse takes shape on a hillside. It is three thousand years ago. They are drawing the lines of its body, digging and lifting the skin of turf, exposing the white flesh of earth which buries its secrets deep, has in its keeping bones, flints, vessels beads for spindle-whorls hearth-stones the grave-place of a child;
and piece together fragments of a story, making − as we on earth have always done – from what is broken, separate
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something whole: mud and fire that make the pot chalk and grass the horse, still galloping over the hill.
Elizabeth Burns
until time comes to carefully shift the soil, begin to sift
t�he Golden Life We sat in the car in the centre of town safe from the hatching November rain eating fish and chips steaming up the windows with our salty breath my son and I having a laugh the radio going on about something or other.
Later, we tramped through the woods skimmed stones across the Gelt made a den in a fallen tree played army with sticks for guns held hands, still greasy from the chips, watched a squirrel hopscotch the branches jumped the ditch, landing absolutely on our feet.
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Mark Griffiths
We talked about gravy and the hardest lads in the school and music he liked and which fish was hotter and his mum’s bloke and big sister’s bloke and dinosaurs and other stuff.
outgrowing my sex-object status You emptied your soul for me that I could live in your imagination without distraction The broad street led to the sea we found the purse In my memory I kissed you there In my lust I unwrapped you behind the bushes
We were naked then young even our faces lost as sleeping children happy to remain at the foot of the mountain waiting for the football scores
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Mark Griffiths
Our breath curdled with cinnamon and chocolate
the knacker s yard Council-licensed, it lies low in the valley bottom like a guilt. It’s hidden behind the high church and beneath the singing saw-mill; under drifting smoke from engines shunting back and forth across the viaduct; where the river takes on colour downstream from the dye-works.
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Pauline Keith
Those who risk the cinder track, short-cutting past the Yard, know to pinch their nostrils tight, don’t peer through knot-holed boards for sights kept sheltered there. Only the wind slips in by chance, moves among the beams and pulleys, sets up a moaning as it sees.
Childcare in the Slaughteryard Knacker Brown, her grandfather, fed her on sights and smells and little presents of boiled meat hauled clean from the seething broth.
She grew up close-acquainted with blood’s many lovely reds and the sequence of its thickening: an opalescent stripiness that seeped in rivulets and slowed to form flat pads of solid-seeming matter: rubbery, perhaps possible to peel and lift? She prodded with her toe; never touched with fingertips.
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Her hands stroked and stroked smooth quiet necks, so slack, deep knife-slits almost sealed. The bleeding done.
Pauline Keith
In winter, when the carcasses lay cold on the sloping flags, the boiler house breathed warmth; the fierce walls of the vats, thick with their years-old grease, rose into wreaths of steam. Drawn by their dangerous heat she edged carefully between them, hearing the comfortable bubbling she feared to see when lifted tall.
Fear of Falling (new york, 1913) A raw egg was placed gently in the carriage. Cables were cut and the lift fell fifty-five floors. Journalists and potential tenants gathered at ground level, waiting.
The egg was unbroken.
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Cath Nichols
The lift arrived. As Frank had stated: their safety mechanisms were second to none.
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Not a hard interview, no, I was chosen because I’m five foot four, shorter than him that owns this place. We’re all blonde too, and wear white gloves, a smart uniform. Mr Woolworth likes to see me close the doors, press the buttons. I like to sew at home; I have small hands and a neat way with my fingers (I come from a family of weavers). The lifts, they say, have triple safety features, and stop to within an eighteenth of an inch on every floor. I’m the spider plumbing depths between a girdered web. Here, there’s such precision. I think of a shuttle, zooming back and forth, crossing the weft of each floor, filling in the picture of an empire built on dimes and cents. It’s a fairy-tale palace for the 20th century, with electric lights on every floor! They say it’s like the parliament in England. They call it the new gothic. This is a sky scraper. My Dad says that’s what they used to call a ship’s tallest mast. So, in my lift I am a sailor in the rigging, criss-crossing... up and down.
Cath Nichols
The Tallest Building in the World