Estuary - Walking on Wyre

Several years ago Lancashire Dead Good Poets' Society were fortunate to receive funding from Arts Council England for a project to create a poetry map of the area along the River Wyre.  We took groups of writers on walks along shortish sections of The Wyre Way, a public footpath that meanders along the river bank from Scorton to Fleetwood, detouring in land and passing through Cleveleys at the coast.

We recruited the expertise of several established poets to conduct writing workshops at six strategic stages along the route. Several weeks later, the map was published and  participants invited to perform their work at both the launch event and another event during Blackpool's Wordpool festival.

We are very proud of the project, named Walking on Wyre, and the map which is still available on request. It was a memorable experience, many of those published had never before seen their work in print. 

The first writing workshop, at Stanah on the Wyre Estuary, was hosted by the wonderful Sarah Hymas who lives close to the Lune estuary and has written extensively about this ever-changing geographic feature.  She was commissioned to write her own poem for the publication.  The poem that follows was my own contribution to this interesting and constructive part of the journey. 

Sampher

Full-bodied women 

               pickled, ankle-deep in brine,

enticed by salty succulents,

                along the tide line.

 

Red-legged terns

punctuate pale terracotta

searching for crustaceans,

            sand dancing,

reflected in mirror pools.

 

Keepers of the drowning flats,

they rise to sky

with soulful cries 

as sea kissed river returns .

Thanks for reading. Adele

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To Magnify A Candle's Brightness...

It's another lovely sunny Saturday evening on the Fylde coast and daylight will probably prevail until after ten tonight. Once darkness arrives, the electric lights will start to go on.... but it was not always thus.

At one time, candlelight would have been the standard method of keeping the darkness at bay and candles would have been as important a staple of everyday living as meat and bread, hence the prominence of the maker of candles in the popular rhyme about "the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker" (wherein the candlestick was the candle itself, not the holder).

Nowadays candles are used primarily for 'atmosphere' (romantic, scented, relaxing) and are only pressed into force en masse when there is a power-cut. Pam and Adele have waxed eloquent about the modern-day use of candles in earlier blogs this week, so I'm going to focus on their use in one specific device - the lighthouse - because it links quite neatly with a poem I wrote a couple of years ago as part of the Walking On Wyre project. The poem, which you'll find below, is primarily about Fleetwood's lighthouses.

Fleetwood, for those who are not familiar with the geography of north-west England, is a port on the Lancashire coast north of Blackpool. It is situated on the estuary of the river Wyre where it flows into the Irish Sea. For generations it was one of the principal fishing ports in the country and it was unusual in having not one but three lighthouses of differing heights which, when aligned, guided boats safely into Fleetwood port.


Upper 'Pharos' Lighthouse, Fleetwood (and tramwires)

Lighthouses obviously require light! In the earliest versions (and the Pharos lighthouse of Alexandria, circa 200 BC is the earliest documented), the light would be a wood fire burning in an open space (probably within a brazier). With the invention of glass came the means to enclose the space and protect the flame from wind. In medieval times candles were used in lighthouses instead of open fires, but it required a quantity of them - usually arrayed in a candelabrum - to generate sufficient light. The original Eddystone lighthouse (1698) was powered by sixty one-pound candles...and they had to be changed every three hours!

There are accounts of lighthouse keepers resorting to eating their candles when they were cut off by bad weather and food supplies had run out. Fortunately for them the candles were often rich in beeswax and whale tallow!

Of course, candlepower alone couldn't guarantee to be seen from any great distance (a mile or so at most even with a telescope) and so the development of prismatic lenses (originally devised by French physicist AJ Fresnel in the early 19th century) allowed candlepowered lighthouses to be visible from great distances by concentrating the light-source into a powerful beam. (Incidentally, car headlamps also use Fresnel lenses in much the same way.)

Candlepower (abbreviated as cp) was used for hundreds of years as a means of expressing units of luminous intensity and was replaced and renamed after World War II by the international (SI) unit known as the candela. Therefore, although candles have long been superseded by electric lights, their power/brightness is still measured in units that relate back to candlelight.

The Wyre Light, designed by a blind engineer

And so to this week's poem. I hope you like it, even if you live in Fleetwood - maybe especially so...

Fleetwood Fires
Wyre light:
designed by a blind man
to give sailors sea-sight
and safe passage by night
along the rolling salt-road
to their Fleetwood home,
you stood two miles offshore
in Morecambe Bay
and shone diopic bright
a century or more
until yourself consumed by fire
in nineteen forty-eight...

Lower light:
securely land based,
whitestone faced
and only half the height of anterior Pharos,
you sat classically squat and square
on elevated Wyrebank
but were far from inferior;
pivotal, rather,
in this trinity of incandescence
back in the day
when trawler captains used your nine-mile beams
to fix their fishy way...

Finally (upper) Pharos light:
flaring deep sandstone red
on sunny days,
you rose majestic
as totem of this once aspiring town;
a solid, steadfast, shapely tapered tower
topped by that magical prismatic mirror
which had the power
to magnify a candle's brightness
and throw it far into the bight,
pinning the blackness of the night...

As epilogue,
Fleetwood's Victoria Pier burned down
in two thousand and eight.
Britain's penultimate was both the shortest
and the shortest lived!
Now only a masonry stump remains,
plans to rebuild so far proved in vain.
And so,
lights sputter, gutter and are gone,
leaving a history
of ghostlike wraiths of smoke
in their wake...


Thanks for reading. Have a safe week, S ;-)

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Great Masters? Painting in motion.

I was a little reluctant to write on this week's theme.  I have not studied art to a great extent.  Oh I have been to Tate Liverpool to see a Jackson Pollock exhibition and spent a couple of hours in The National Portrait Gallery on a weekend in London but static art is not really my thing.  I do not often seek it out.

I know a little of art history and particularly enjoyed two runs of a TV series, Italy Unpacked and Sicily Unpacked, in which Andrew Graham-Dixon and Giorgio Locatelli explore the culture and cuisine of those cultural paradises. Watching the series, I felt that art came to life in the telling of great stories and in fact one episode, set in Livorno was the inspiration for our Walking on Wyre project in 2014.  You see, they read a poem by Shelly, looking out at the view from the same piece of coastline about which the poem was written. Poetry is better read this way - in place.

I was uninspired by the movie Mr Turner, grumpy bugger but then standing painting stormy landscapes must have been a cold, lonely profession.  The Girl with the Pearl earing was more my cup of tea. I must confess to loving the portrait and being in complete awe of Vermeer. I was also thrilled to discover recently that Gustav Klimt completely changed his creative style after visiting Venice and Ravenna, where he fell in love with the golden mosaics.

In 1983, I travelled with a friend who was working in Glasgow and went off for a day to Pollock Park to see the Burrell Collection. I saw three Degas paintings and knew instantly that he was my kind of artist. He painted dancers in real life situations.  They were fastening their ballet shoes, sitting in the dressing room or practising at the barre.  I saw the reality and movement in his brushstrokes and pastels. I was sold.  On a later visit to Tate Liverpool, I encountered his statuette, Little Ballerina. She is delightful. The Old Masters are not for me.  I am a performance artist.  Although for almost 20 years, I didn't have chance to really dance, movement to music is my raison d'etre. Degas is the only artist who really understood how that feels.

Recently a friend told me that whenever she went to the ballet, she would experience physical pain just watching the performance and that since she started to sing with our opera chorus and take clarinet lessons that the pain has gone away.  I understood what she meant.  When my competitive dance career ended, I tried to watch the British Open Championships at The Winter Gardens, Blackpool.  It was the most painful experience of my life.  Watching others dance and not being able to share their joy was excruciating. I walked away in tears. I didn't go to watch for another twenty years... then one night...I had a dream.

In dreams

In the chasm of deep sorrow
In the bleakest, endless night
When the shadows crept beside me
And blackout curtains stole the light
When days were filled with tears
When laughter drained through time
And anguish filled each waking hour
Then only sleep was mine.

In dreams a shard came seeping

In dreams my soul walked free

The spirits of my brightness
Shone themselves on me.
I stood upon the balcony above The Empress floor
And music from the bandstand came to my ears once more.
Then a power from inside my very core
Filled me up and I began to lift, to fly,
to soar above the heads that waltzed below.

 

Beneath the high domed ceiling

I swirled between the chandeliers
What an amazing feeling
Freud said that flying dreams
are symptoms of depression.
Subconscious wish fulfilment:
They release us from suppression
Yet I believe that in my sleep I really travelled there
My soul was really flying,
really dancing through the air.

The setting of my night time flight

awoke me from my trance
for zombie like my life had been since I forgot to dance
It taught me that if you suppress  the will to be yourself

then it will rise in dreams

Your soul has wings to stretch,

it screams.

For dance was once my own true love,

and then my heart was free,
In dreams the shackles of my emptiness released
In dreams the love of life forgotten, rediscovered me.

Thank you for reading.  Adele

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Meat is murder? Look at it another way.

My Mum celebrated her 68th Mother's Day this Sunday.  She is 95 years old.  Her eyesight is failing, her hearing has almost gone but her 'little grey cells' are better now than when she was 60.  I can say that without fear of contradiction by anyone.  Her GP, her friends, her family would all tell you that her physical condition, her mental health and her memory are both considerably better now than then.

In the late 1970's Mum weighed 6 stone, her hair was dropping out, she walked with two sticks and was extremely ill both physically and psychologically.  Some years earlier, she had been diagnosed with a medical condition for which her GP had prescribed steroids: So many steroids that she couldn't sleep.  She was then prescribed barbiturates.  The combination of the two made her volatile, unpredictable and more than slightly strange. One day she fell backwards, hurt her back and was rushed to hospital. They ran some tests, discovered that she was calcium deficient but they also found that she had been misdiagnosed. Mum was dying from Pernicious Anaemia. There is no cure. She was 59.

Now when I say that there is no cure, that is a fact. It is a terminal condition. However, in recent decades a method was discovered to sustain life for those with the condition. Pernicious Anaemia is a condition whereby the body cannot absorb Vitamin B12.  Sounds stupid, doesn't it?  A human being can die just because they can't hold onto one of the thousands of vitamins and minerals that we have in our everyday diet.  The symptoms of lack of B12 are devastating. The condition has detrimental impacts on; short term memory; concentration; energy levels; muscle control and skin condition.

Every three months, my Mum has an injection of pigs blood.  It contains high enough levels of Vitamin B12 to sustain her life. And what a life she has had in the 30 plus years since she was diagnosed. She has seen all four of her own children get married. We have given her six grandsons and two granddaughters and they in turn, have introduced her to her six great grandchildren. She lived to see my father celebrate his 80th Birthday and to share with him their Golden Wedding Anniversary.

Mum came to my graduation (an incredible feat because I was 52 at the time) and she was around to see my eldest brother receive his MBE and went with him to Trooping of the Colour.  She has seen my sister's daughter compete at the Commonwealth Games and my younger brother's son win the Lytham Trophy.  I hope that she remains mentally and physically well enough to enjoy her telegram from the Queen.  Had Mum had been a vegetarian or vegan and refused the treatment, she would have died and missed out on almost half of her wonderful life.

Is meat murder? That is for the individual to decide.  All I would say is, if you make a conscious choice not to eat meat, have your B vitamin levels clinically checked on a regular basis. Also, and I appreciate that this is a big ask, but please try to live and let live on this one. You may consider that meat is murder but to some it is the giver of life.

On a different note, a song that we sang in a House music competition at school was called Donna and was a mournful story about a small calf on its way to market. As an eleven year old, it moved me to tears, just thinking about the fate of this helpless creature. I should add that there was no inference in the song that Donna would be slaughtered and eaten: Any such detail emerges only in the imagination of the audience. I wrote this week's poem during our community creative writing project Walking on Wyre inspired by the remembered song and bullocks paddling in the river at Scorton as Sand Martins put on an acrobatic aerial display.

Birdsong  

Black Angus heifers paddling in the Wyre,

St Peter’s spire and Nicky Nook

Brush-stroke a pastoral scene.

A landscape from the past,

lacking only country folk,

horse-drawn wain.

Ripples circle outwards from hooves in the

shallow ford between two luscious,

green-mile fields.

They lap contented at the tea-stained water

as it slugs along Sand Martin-pitted slopes. 

Nesting birds dash in and out,

bank left, then right,

fly-catching on the wing,

they sweep the fragrant air,

sky ballerinas in sweet Summer rain. 

 

Today they will not sing their freedom in the sky;

will not mock the beef-boys,

happy with their lot.

They see the pock-marked soil,

over-flowing with rose-tinted rain

and offer only birdsong in their wake.

Thank you for reading. Adele

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Blue

Last year at the launch of the Walking On Wyre map in Garstang Norman Hadley read a wonderful poem, ‘Learning The Truth About Kingfishers’ that explained how the blue flash we associate with kingfishers is a conjuring between light and feather.

We call the sky blue, when more often than not it appears white or grey. Same with the sea – although Homer saw it as ‘wine-dark’. Today the colour of Morecambe Bay is that spectacular silvery grey that cannot be replicated. There could be no Twitter storm about that (or possibly not…).

 

So is blue a trick of the light, a colour of interpretation, of cultural context? Perhaps that’s why it is the colour most readily associated with mood and music… Perhaps that’s why it has become the default colour of those two great elements in nature: sky and sea. They are not fixed in the way trees and grass are fixed. They are temperamental – in the sense they are so much the natural environment they both change it and change with it.

 

I think this is why I love the sea so much. It is the nearest thing I know that allows me to become absorbed by the natural world. It is not the same from one moment to the next. Now I look at the bay and think I can see dimples of blue as the wind picks up and grazes the shallower water.

 

I can get closer to the sea than I can sky. I can sail or swim. In doing so, I lose myself. Or rather I lose a part of myself in the course of trying to survive it. Which part? Probably the part that is impervious to interpretation or tricks of the light, the part that just responds, the instinctual understanding of body in body. I wonder if this is the part that has grown over my creatureliness as the skin I require to have to be human and live amongst humans. This all sounds very romantic until you remember we came from this great body of water, before we became who we are now.

 

Now I look at Morecambe Bay and see the colour of wet skin. 

 

I thought I’d leave you with two poems. Norman’s in case you missed it before, and one I wrote on finding myself 70 miles from the sea after six weeks sailing around Scotland.

Learning The Truth About Kingfishers
The planet lost a little of its patina
the day he told me that a kingfisher’s
not really blue. “Oh no,” he intoned,
“there’s not a hint of pigment
in their plumage. Deep in shade,
they fade to just another LBJ.”
It seems that something in their feather-hairs
can scatter sun to conjure colour from a blur of air,
as if there is a world of brilliance somewhere
the bird reveals as it unzips the river.

Norman Hadley

 

Sealegs

After

she cannot venture inland

without feeling

even on the stillest day of the year

reduced by the moor

like a Rothko on its postcard ―

heather mopping the light,

despite her staring

at the sky’s unblinking blue. 

Sarah Hymas

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