Content
Walking Dartmoor with Dad on Alzheimer Morning
Prize Winner
The Plough Art Centre Poetry Prize 2025
3rd prize Mary Gilonne
Walking Dartmoor with Dad on an Alzheimer Morning
Remembering our crucible these fish-flank valleys parr-finned becks
that faint fret of clapper bridge stone scarred with hoof wood
iron along the lychway corpseway holloway
ringing with old times can you hear them,
all this piece-meal sky reflects in wet-land clag like slips of puzzle,
how I take your tight hands waiting noosed granite grey chill.
These Moors are beset with abandonments histories of shadow
deepen lode-dead mines. Bell-heather ling deer-grass sweet smell of traces,
look look how silence smelting light from tor to tor sets clouds
afire how Lydford Church far south becomes oh yes oh yes a sudden flame.
Remembering our coracle in dry dock now land-locked bracken
light palls threading through forgotten skin
as if bones could ache from lack of water your loss of place.
How once that fragile nest floating on river’s lap whorled spooled out
from bank to weir reed grass duck-weed your paddle curdling a supple wake
licked smooth as milk and me your egg-cupped fledgling
babbled bright through gentle trout-flecked race lace of elder willow
ash fading circles greening out and out. Invisible people peripheral echoes
print vibrations ripple air and now in the water of your eye blue
settles love love we hold on quietly watching somewhere yet to come.
‘Papermaker’ won the Wenlock Prize .
Papermaker
Water-logged with aspen, larch and fir, he takes cream pulp,
settles it down sweet as curds, paddles a long dark
oar across and rests. A quiet surface of page shores up
along the frame and ferries his thoughts to monasteries ,
a meditative marsh of birds, her wading thighs like gleaming carp.
He can almost hear a fishering of bells drifting lines across the Fens,
see Ely floating , hardly moored to any land-locked thing.
Rimed, his hands hang parchment white , salted,
drying this absence of her. She has nearly gone,
only a shoal of books and bags, bones of little things are left,
her waiting shoes bask delicate as minnows. He's watermarked,
hold him to light ,see how the press of her is printed through him.
‘Saving Icarus at Sunrise’ was first published by Visual Verse, and appears in my pamphlet ‘ Incidentals’ ( 4Word Press 2018).
Saving Icarus at Sunrise
I'm walking through a glitter of yellow dunes,
light like fused glass, sea-sheen beaching up
far far out , way past a labyrinth of morning pine.
One bright bird falling, falls, feathered flames.
Water honeycombs with heat, a sublimated sigh
of blackened wings as if a body can melt, drown
in sound. Such is the hubris of cloudless wind.
Easy to flounder him unharnessed on the sand,
to strip him down to this simple alchemy of skin,
a muscled maze of gold, lashes pollened,lustrous
lines of fingers, fleece. So easy to take his mouth,
breathe him my godless air, keep him hanging there.
‘The Hardness of Quinces ‘ won the Sentinel Poetry Prize in 2021.
The Hardness of Quinces.
This mother who used to hold me, sits,
pale pod of head in the shell of her chair,
hands pleached. Word-blight, leaves falling.
I have, as fruit keeper, watched over the bletting.
Autumn's winnowed crop fattens my lap now
with forgotten butteriness, summer's mislaid
light, all is silent save a sigh of patient cupboards.
Kitchen cloistered , windows steam-blossomed,
as if this weighted scent of fruit is incense, rite.
Her knife still knows its November role ,slits, cores,
glints a juiceless path hard as bone. Skin. See how her
quinced hands , are peppered, downy with ageless bloom.
A stutter of sugar, honey shirring warmth, old appled air,
she leans like a weathered tree, stirring quiet the sweet
and sour of it all, so our quince time must slowly pass .
How soft the cooking ends, how tender this reddened
flesh slips. Fingers flutter an emptying dish, and I know
she searches some lost face in the well of her gentle spoon.
‘That Day’ was published by The Phare.
That Day
found me lip-reading the sea from my kitchen window,
trying to make out its sprint of gleaming dashes
some sort of illegible morse drifting in from the north.
Usually here, there’s a soundscape of high birds and lapping
coast, never those strange bass organ-chords grinding, a deep
underscore lamenting through the firth.
But then it was the first day, only 24 hours after he’d left.
Light was passing as if through silver-coated plate, changing
my stone-washed walls to shifting shadows. A few people
were frozen negatives on the strand, heads turned darkly seaward.
Then like a castaway on an interrupted journey, an immensity
of lost ice islanded the channel, hung there in a weight of blue,
shut away my sun. Perhaps it was the berg’s aching lines ,retraction,
loosening, how it slowly decomposed, perhaps it was its cold void,
the way it held its noise within that made me fear. I swear I saw
his whiteness loom against the glass, a fist, my indoor sea sinking.
But then it was the first day, only 24 hours after he’d left.
This Poem was published in the Morning Star and appears in my anthology Sublimity
Thresholds
Whether to leave now while dry evening light threads field and fen
or wait till they come and fence us, knot us round with untold dark.
The door is the weight of my curved hand, a decision too heavy
to close. Frame and wood, drudging hinge. How even clots of sheep
whitening the green seem to be eyeing, cumbersome with waiting.
.
Men and glinting muskets, look how they gather on the rise, while lords
of land engirdle, hedge and trench our laborious lives. Tight-lipped
booding draws me to her face, mother knows the debtor's score, the muck
and mire. I swither between fight and here, a hounded hesitation. How our
harried common ground ebbs free and wide, far-off marsh unyoked water.
.
Flint and shot, all is red and black in that burning tumult up Ketts Heath,
boots and feet make thunder of their own, drumming through city's skies.
I sit upon the step, resolve in doomy grey and cloud. My fingers are arrows,
arm a flex of bow. Whether to stay ot leave depends on this desperate theft
of pasture, halted plough, on the hanging weight of our raging open doors.
For me no where more embodies the essence of poetic emotion than Norfolk, a land that draws you in and holds you tight. There’s something beautifully ancient and quietly apart about this county. Water, land, space and a strange continuum of people anchoring time and place to something deeper than we can immediately comprehend. When you walk these sublime expanses of coastal light, Holkham, Cley, Salthouse , the ‘everyday’ is reduced to insignificance. Here, our natural world is magnified to a quasi spiritual dimension, tides and shifting sands that put us mortals in perspective. Marshland, salt and sky, this is alandscape of water-lines and a subtlety of colours so particular to Norfolk,nothing brash , all is in a brush-stroke palette of blues, greens, gold andsudden liquid silver. Meditative, and always uplifting.The sea. What would webe without Norfolk’s North Sea vastness, the clamour of its old herring fisheries, the dawn crabbers toiling out of Cromer, the distant ghosts of windmills turning the horizon way way out. A continuous symbiosis of traditionand modernity that is so finely balanced here. Wherever we turn our gaze,history beckons. Neolithic settlements circle, the clangoured industry of flintpits , Boudicca rallying Iceni throngs. While, when standing on the greenheight of Mousehold Heath, the echos of Norwich’s past and present sound out in so many layered vibrations of change all around. The bloody desperate tumult of Kett’s Rebellion: the welcome of refugees ,their looms weaving Tudor prosperity: the ebb and flow of 2O th C household names, yet all this renewal is rooted in an unequalled richness of the past. So yes, Norfolk is Sublime.
