GRASS CLOUDS

SHAUN BELCHER
poems 2002-2022
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Agency. © horseshoe press 2022

 SHAUN BELCHER

GRASS CLOUDS
horseshoe press 2022
Publications

Last Farmer: Salt Modern Poets Pamphlet 2010

The Ice Horses: Shore poets Anthology : Scottish Academic Press 1996

Poems in various magazines including

Staple, Southfields, Slowdancer, Gairfish, Oxford Poetry,

Odyssey, Fatchance, Envoi, Poetry London Newsletter, Bound Spiral,

Interactions etc.
 GRASS
CLOUDS
SHAUN BELCHER

“If God had wanted us to play football in the clouds, he’d have put grass up there”

Brian Clough

poems from the poetry bench

Nottingham 2002-2022
CONTENTS

DRIFTING VILLAGE: POEMS 2002-2007

11. My Father’s Crashes

12. The Return

13. Landlocked

14. Down-land Ballad

16. Drifting Village

18. Mapping Rain

19. The Green Light

20. The Writing Desk

21. Halos

22. Rivers I Have Visited

23. The Broken Hoe

24. Gun Chimes

26. Chalk Skulls

27. White Gloss

28. The Weaver’s Lament

29. The Rover Man

30. Painting the Step

31. Chalk Wings

32. Three Oxford Sermons

35. The Electric Brae

36. White Hyacinths

37. The Ghost Shell

38. Greyhound in Frost

40. The Shipstone Stars

42. Writing Poetry is Easy

EDWIN SMITH: COMMISSION FOR R.I.B.A. EXHIBITION 2014

44. CATCHING LIGHT

1. KODAK BOX BROWNIE No.2 Model F. 127 Roll Film 1927

2. ICA IDEAL 205 Glass Plate 9x12 1935

3. CONTAX II 5cm Sonnar Lens 35mm 1936

4. THORNTON-PICKARD RUBY Quarter Plate 1904

5. GRAFLEX SPEED GRAPHIC Roll Film 1960

6. ENSIGN AUTORANGE 820 120 roll film 1955

7
BURNING BOOKS: POEMS 2017-2020

54. Awfully Middle Class

55. Collateral

57. Become Invisible

57. Postcard to Okinawa

57. Acronyms

58. Rust

60. Matilda in the Snow

62. Working on a Building of Love (45)

63. London Calling (45)

64. Poundland Sonnet

65. Wreckless Scheme

66. Doodlebugs

67. Iggy Pop in a Sideboard

68. Creative Accountancy

68. Smoking Guns

70. Nude Descending

70. Proper Poetry

71. Bonnard’s Wives

72. Poem to end all poetry

73. Burning Books

74. Dance of Debt

76. The Invisible Audobon

77. Forged

78. South and West

79. Fishing in Fog

80. Room for Poetry

81. The Lost Decade

BURNING BOOKS: A GLOSS

84- 85

LOST NOTTINGHAM: NPF POEMS 2018

88. Paper Boats on Private Road

91. Picasso’s Peace Train

93. Charlie and the Lace Factory

MY FATHER’S THINGS: CASTLE RUINS III 2019

98. The Optical Level

100. My Father’s Watch

102. Butlin’s Pwhelli 1956

104. North Berks Premier Division Medal 1956-57

106. Polaroid Supercolour Camera

108. Rabone Chesterman Teak Level

9
Shaun Belcher

Born Oxford, England in 1959 and brought up on a down-land farm before mov-

ing to the small town of Didcot, near Oxford, England in 1966.

He studied fine art at Hornsey College of Art, London from 1979–81.

He began writing poetry in the 1980s and has subsequently been published in

a number of small magazines and a poem used as the title of the Shore Poets

Anthology ‘The Ice Horses’ (Scottish Cultural Press 1996).

He now lives in Nottingham, England after two years in Edinburgh studying folk

culture and several years in the city of expiring dreams otherwise known as

Oxford.

After several years as an academic art lecturer he has returned to writing along-

side his other artistic practices as this the fastest way to achieve total penury he

knows.

A selection of poems was published as 'Last Farmer' in the Salt Modern Voices

Series in 2010.

Edwin Smith: Catching Light was a R.I.B.A. commission to accompany a exhibi-

tion of his photographs at the R.I.B.A. building London in 2014.

Lost Nottingham was a project shown at Nottingham Poetry Festival in 2018.

My Father’s Things was an illustrated sequence shown at Castle Ruins III Not-

tingham 2019

He is currently working on a new volume of poems called ‘Substitute’ due in Fall

2022.
My thanks to the following publications paper and online where some of these

poems have appeared originally.

The Drifting Village, The Weaver’s Lament and Rivers I have Visited appeared in

Staple 64 The East Midlands Issue.

Greyhound in Frost appeared in the Guardian workshop selected by Ruth Fain-

light in October 2004

Three Oxford Sermons, The Drifting Village and

The Weaver’s Lament appeared in the Salt Publications Modern Voices Series as

‘Last Farmer’ in 2010 which is now O.O.P.

11
My Father’s Crashes

We could tell by the engine

When my father’s truck was home.

The diesel engine would vibrate

The windows as he reversed in.

My mother would boil the kettle at 5pm

Knowing he would arrive.

Three times in five years he did not

arrive on time.

One time back-ended by a Lotus

That shattered like an Xmas bauble.

He spent half an hour prising glass fibre shards

From the wheel arch.

Another time he and my Uncle John

Arrived ashen faced.

Drank tea before they talked.

Both cheated death as a car span toward them.

Finally he retired and bought a smaller van

But grew tired of working then grew tired

As the cancer ate away his stomach.

My mother made tea at five pm every day just the same.

Until one day he didn’t make it.

 GRASS CLOUDS

The Return

A rippling of stalks

raspberry bushes twirling

the flare of green bean flowers

along a row of canes

River, mirror, sky

as chalk whorls rise and twist

up the farm tracks

and dust the cornflowers

Celandines, chrysanthemums, marigolds

a garden breathing colour

as the sky deepens

toward thunder and showers

A torrent later, pools of milk

as the troop train steams in

a taxi drags a figure home

to an empty hearth, thorns

A bed of weeds, nettles and briars

the overgrown presence of neglect

that first night she watched him

fearful he would fade at daylight

13
 SHAUN BELCHER

Landlocked

Tied to a flat land

Of reclaimed pits and winding river

The railway has gone

Coal blackened tracks have grown over

Every wind caresses its absence

The silent factories know their part

But cannot speak, chains hold fast

Beyond pale gates and security huts

Poppies and cow parsley, ragwort and buddleia

A necklace of flowers around the empress lines

The slag of the steel rails is buried deep

Rusting wires rippling with plastic

Where prisoners of war once huddled

Now euro-workers assemble market stalls every Sunday

Chatter into cheap mobiles, pocket loose change

Against backdrops of power station, Tesco and trains

Midnight and bodies tumble from white van crates

In the empty parkway

Duck and dive and gulp clean air

Before swimming beyond the broken chain-link.

14
 GRASS CLOUDS

Down-land ballad

Fully five acres further east

and fifty years on from Harwell’s neutron beam photo-disintegration

a clump of Queen Anne’s Lace* wavers like a bridesmaid’s posy

above the quarried chalk and flint of this erased line.

The track that gravelled and iron girded once

carried trundling freight to Southampton docks and salt air.

Like a distant memory of past expectations

I wander through past journeys, delineations

chew on the fresh air like a discontented Wordsworth

now free, free to roam where I will

But nothing is moving here these days, no air pulses

through the gilded corn, American maize is rigid

All rhythm, rhyme and reason curtailed

but for the hover of Kite and wizz of combustion engines

I’m left standing in a shower of butterflies,

climate driven, wheeling

baffling the constant walkers and their dogs with

showers of atoms, as they spin into extinction.

The land is porous, half soaked with the elixir

and charms of the abandoned plastic barrels concoctions.

A squadron of rooks bank and wheel in tight formation

land and beaks probe at all the matter before them.

Beady eyed they cannot count the consequences

of all that steel now disappearing from the horizon.

15
 SHAUN BELCHER

In a damp corner of a thatched cottage

an artist* peels Queen Anne’s Lace from the paper

Dips it gently into a brimming tray of liquid

and the fusion of paper and molecules of silver re-arranging

maps a negative of stalk, leaf and stamen.

Up north the furnaces fizzle and peak for the century.

Sheffield steel, Welsh coal, Cornish tin, the land exhausted

pot-marked and reclaimed in a thousand regeneration schemes,

The process of covering the tracks of a century of production

is taken up by rose bay willow herb, buddleia and oxford ragwort,

each seeking to mask the brick and fence beneath it.

In the laboratory the encased hand holding the uranium phial quivers

as an owl is lit by a police cars headlights on the perimeter.

Its flash of white against a wilderness of dark down-land

like that brief explosion, that jolt of life in a vacuum.

The century starts to implode

draws itself as a negative image, trickles, spits and fuses

the image of a landscape removed becomes these islands.

The bromide stains her fingers, the plant collapses into stalk and seed

as she raises its negative to the kitchen window.

She stands looking at it again in the porch-light amidst the blackout

realising that all this movement above and below, these planes, these tanks

hurtling towards the coast and far fields of France are dying already

A moth singes against the candle flame, erupts into vapour, darkness.

* local Oxfordshire name for Cow Parsley which it resembles

** Eilleen Sherwood-Moore artist of Blewbury, Berkshire (1909-1998) experi-

mented with photograms

16
 GRASS CLOUDS

The drifting village

Deep in the sleet

Forward-slanted, rimed with ice

the cottage, wrecked and the tree

catching a fire on a winter’s eve.

Stars and a dance of the dead

across hills and exotic trees

brought in from ships at Tilbury

and carted to the master’s door.

The crackle of horsehair chairs

and splintered bed timbers collapsing.

All that remained of Bab

and what Bab held dear.

Like a frail cross the tree smouldered

then burnt to the ground

reminding the assembled multitude

of their right and true position.

Then, heads bowed on her behalf,

with a tear here and there

At her body still warm in the ground

they felt the village tug one last time,

then slip from their fingers

17
 SHAUN BELCHER

Like the mooring ropes a river away

being loosed from the India Docks

as particles of spice drifted loose

from briny planks fell into eyes

She had held that village like a hulk

in its original berth.

Stopped it sliding up from the floodplain

to the master’s new dock on the hill.

Now a three century gap gone

the same village a berth for commuters

watches as the water floods once more

as if it had found its true course.

All the spilt contents bobbing on a sea of silt

the mobiles, the dvds the trash of the eastern shore

All cascading just like that submerging barque

A hundred years before slid back to the river plain

And settles into its original image

marking out her last resting place like a chalky line

a scuzz of empire flashing like flags on the mud

her tree’s new roots a catchment of time.

Barbara Wyatt resident of Nuneham Courtney village refused to leave her tree when the Harcourt family

moved the village for landscape improvements. It is probable that Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’

was based on this village.

In 2007 the new village (now a commuter village near Oxford)was flooded as a result of a local farmer’s

mistaken attempt to alter a drainage pattern.

18
 GRASS CLOUDS

Mapping rain

I have swum my way through several maps

Each more frayed than the last

Curled, split or stained

A map of each place I have lost.

We canter through each day

Skidding across the surface of a place

But in my mind’s eye the old net remains.

A path from blood, to bone to grave.

On a summer’s jaunt down a chalky lane

Between river meadow and cow parsley banks

White froth against the sky’s inky stain

As thunder hovered across the lakes

I walk you home with dog and lead

Back through the circling sky’s rain

We will always be transfixed

In the lens of the fish we raised

Half-dead from the green nets

And choked back to life in your gaze

This map ends at the river’s mouth

Lines blurred, losing our place.

19
 SHAUN BELCHER

The Green Light

I think of you now

Head down against a biting northern wind

Scudding sleet across frozen tarmac

On a day of gunmetal sky

And office lights burning at noon.

The town’s Christmas bulbs

Shake along the Broadway

Tossing back and forth

Above your truck

Stalled for a second at a red light.

I’m not going anywhere

You told me, not here

You need to move on.

Hunch your shoulders, bite your lip

Press on

And prove me right.

20
 GRASS CLOUDS

The writing desk

Tre-foiled and punctured to dust by tiny worms across the decades

The last draw crumbled to the touch, slats collapsing into chalky ash

My father swinging the last draw and the worn leather desk-top

Into the metal barrel of smoke and with a crackle it was gone

The writing desk that had lain empty for four decades in a front room

Then spent another decade empty in my parent’s hallway

Present of a benevolent employer my grandparents never used it

I would peel back its lid secretly running small hands inside it

Sunlight shining on the brassy polish as my step-grampy sparked another pipe

Sat reading a child’s comic, learnt to read at fifty-four

Eyes travelling slowly across the back of words like cattle each day in the field

Sparks like igniting straw stubble flickering in lines away across the hill

So I travelled slowly, wary of the desk

Wary of its closed message, secret compartments

Wary of the world it opened out to

Preferred the comfort of the dark field

As my real grandfather’s DNA curled like runner beans

Along the canes of another life, another world

The truth in silence, the crackle of wood

Secrets crumbling to ash in a downland bowl.

21
 SHAUN BELCHER

Halos

They said the barn reeked of the smell

for weeks afterwards, their ghostly halos

were etched on the barn’s hard mud floor

like the chalk horse on the downs.

I looked up from my farmer’s memoirs

as a helicopter buzzed across the T.V. screen

and Thatcher’s grizzled yet ashen face

raged between panning shots of their bodies.

Two corpses circled with chalk

as a priest bent over them and touched pale skin.

No marks but the burn marks, the singed hair

and the surprised expressions that it should end here.

Not in a suburban bedroom, but here in the open

Working for a boss they never met, fingers welded to their tools

Until that moment when the lightning struck and magnetized

each hammer and nail were prised from trigger fingers.

22
 GRASS CLOUDS

Rivers I have visited.

Sluggish muddy dousers the Thames back waters.

Trickles between fissured Spanish clay banks in heat.

Spates of broad westward pouring Trent.

Skittish tributaries of Thame and Isis.

I loll half-awake in a Nottingham front room

Walking the banks of every one I can recall

Looking for a path back to the source.

A place to call home or at least a port of call.

Maybe the vast cold slab of the Clyde

Pressed down like butchers marble between banks.

The storm drains of summer in Spain full of trash.

A stink of Thames mud at Rotherhithe.

But none come into focus they all skim by.

My rivers have become one lost and vast

Body of water surrounding my island now.

There is only the cold glint of a pc screen

Distracting me like rising gulls on a spring tide.

Where is the peace of staring at a single line,

A bobbing float, and the chatter through the bushes

Of father and uncle untying a snagged spool.

The simple acts that are lost on the cyber air.

Flash animations dance across the screen,

Unreeling in fake pictures of Leonardo’s machines.

They bob and fly then bob again endlessly….endlessly

With no respite they slip by like a river of signs.

Endless signifiers of another dimension lost.

There is nothing beneath the surface.

We stand and stare helplessly into the glare

23
 SHAUN BELCHER

The Broken Hoe

the sheered hoe

in between nettle and wire

bleeding red rust

in front of the horse trough

the air sticky with midges

the afternoon black with thunder

the heart racing at the sound

of black clouds hitting the tin

roof of a shed

somewhere half way up

a chalk track

diesel drips onto leaves

we perspire, lick teeth

stumble and disappear

into cow parsley slumber beds

no guidance here

no map, no sound

I whistle at dog bones

that clatter down the gravel

like a thunder storm stream

blood ties mingling in with oil and tar

feathers floating in the grain bins

stones hot in the palm

and a thousand miles of chalk

from here to France

all that whiteness painting me blank

with my broken hoe

24
 GRASS CLOUDS

Gun chimes

On the far side of an evening

Of damp river grass and blinking streetlamps

Of dogs barking across the gardens

I sit and catch time in my hands

A fox slinks through the lamps

And out on the river’s edge

As cats flicker under porch-lights

A wind-chime tinkles incessantly

An empty boat nudges the mud bank

As a cycle light bobs past

And above the city traffic a siren

Somewhere out of sight, out of mind

I miss your heartbeat mapping the hours

Between 5 a.m. and dawn

Your smell and taste before the light bursts

Across the closed curtains and empty cars

I would fish you out of that far city now

Pull you here through the wet grass

On a silver line woven tight

Between my fingers I’d cling tight to you

25
 SHAUN BELCHER

Feeling the lurch of each short embrace

The spinning flash of your eyes

Caught in that dark and matted weed

We’d tumble through the pitch black night

There are no sharks here any more

Just the drowsy glow of tropical fishtanks

The steady drip of distant music

From the disco boat’s tannoy to engulf us

Dock leaves shiver with the blast

Of another crooner singing his heart out

Whilst somewhere further north blood is leaking

From another shattered chamber on to tarmac

I grip this line tighter and cling

To the safety of the known in everything

One false lunge, one hair trigger

And I too will empty myself on to the fox’s grin

26
 GRASS CLOUDS

Chalk skulls

Three rings round a shiny target and it’s yours

amidst the clatter and pop of fairground stalls

burning like a new constellation fallen to earth

I clutched the small plaster skull in my fist.

A booth trinket. A choice between that

and a fading, chipped plaster angel fish.

We moved on. My father and I.

Past a mud splattered generator pumping

grey clouds across the dark wet grass.

First thing I’d ever won. 12 years old.

I found it last winter. Turned it up in an old box.

Then noticed the carved inscription on it.

I’d made all those years before.

Shaun Belcher. 11th September 1971. Wallingford Fair.

I held it as my father, now in his seventies,

bent to the garden, his back to me

cuts away at the heavy clay soil.

The flint, chalk and clay, turning over again

as my own thoughts spiral back over years

to the dusty stubble fields of late summer.

My step granddad and his collie

arcing in loops across the Oxfordshire fields

tracking imaginary pheasants and hares.

The dog that ground to a panting halt

saliva dripping under the kitchen table.

So we too shall come to our end.

All our skulls, man and beast

flaking and turning to powder in the black soil

like this skull, a plaster moon, thrown at the stars.

27
 SHAUN BELCHER

White gloss

White gloss, shiny as a skating rink

dripping with spring invention

down the north London sun-stroked suburbs

and all around the falling blossom

drifting into piles in kerbside and drain

to wait for the summer rains.

All this quiet lapping from tin to sill

in the hands of refugees looking for a ladder up

from cockroaches and crumbling frames

of old towns and new box rooms.

Her hands are red and soft from washing

in the basement of this newly painted mansion.

When the fireworks exploded over Hampstead Heath

she was face down on the bed sobbing.

As her employees argued and shouted at the kids

she tore her last letter home to pieces.

She wiped her eyes and clung to the fresh

white glossed sill, felt her blackening eye

as it reflected in the perfect shine.

Thunder like distant raids rattling the pane.

28
 GRASS CLOUDS

The Weaver’s Lament

His* aging hands clumsy with the straws

that jerk into the shape of head and arms

of his latest creation.

If I were you I’d be using old wire not grass,

a handful of gravel, some chalk

moulding it against some concrete wall.

Instead of dancing away like this between sand

and arum, a twirling of lines

like the nets of a trawler gathering in

all the sweet silver off the plates.

No I am not you and never will be

but instead cling to a windless plain of grass

betwixt down-land and river. To knot, plat

these celandines and daisies into a country

of the mind is now beyond me I realise.

My harvest is fields of brick and mortar,

the dance of plastic in gutters.

Not the wilderness I read and dreamed.

An airliner passes overhead, a ship loose

with its million electrical veins coiled inside

and a hundred passenger hearts beating like yours

as you tried to haul your island in, nail it flat

to capture the salt tide, the dunes forever.

To catch it all in your cradling palms.

*Angus Macphee – outsider artist born on Scottish island of South Uist

Created artworks from knitted grass. Spent adult life in institutions.

29
 SHAUN BELCHER

The Rover man

He sat, firm and erect, on the park bench,

hands wrapped around his white stick

his milky eyes fixed on thirty years before

as we walked toward him.

He recognized my uncle immediately by voice

and smiled in our direction, gaze still fixed.

They’d worked together at the Oxford car plant

for almost twenty years.

My uncle blinking through the paint shop clouds

his gloves and goggles clogged with paint

whilst upstairs this man worked in admin

below the ticking clock-tower.

He’d been enveloped in his milky world

since that day in 1943 when a German bomb

he was trying to defuse exploded

the flash burning out his sockets.

He had worked every day through strike

and shutdown, militants and shirkers, managers

and scabs. Had seen the business collapse

into a heap of mangled parts. Bust and boom.

Now the site is owned by BMW

and that clock-tower has collapsed into a heap of rubble,

that my uncle sighs as he drives past the

new industrial park landscaping and fountains.

An industry and a community gone in a flash.

The newsreels of the factory gates burn on the lens

as consultants ditch the site and reinvest

Money or bombs…it’s the same effect.

30
 GRASS CLOUDS

Painting the step

With the regularity of a slow clock

the tin of paint was got out

and the step repainted

a dull crimson that declared

the house cared for, lived in

a place of solid repute.

Within days the scuff

of heel and tarred boots

took away the shine, the rouge

as if some careless kiss

had smudged a showgirl’s lips

and what you were left with was plain

muddied concrete, the hard facts

of struggle and keeping going

on a labourer’s wages mid-century

so I stood and watched my mother

and my mother’s mother wield

that loaded brush that dripped

like spatters of blood

across the chalk dusted steps

after my sister’s birth

the ebb and flow

of a century of female labour

rinsed at the kitchen sink

and brought back to life.

31
 SHAUN BELCHER

Chalk wings

Pinned to the chalk scarp like a moth

in a Victorian frame

watching tractors dust their way through a summer evening

I catch myself then brim full of ideas.

An eternal optimist careering on a bicycle

between dark hedges and chalk tracks.

Always believing the country at my back

would support me as sturdily as that grass

covered down where I lay back and watched

a glider glint in the sun then bank

and slip eastward toward a rising moon.

Now I don’t have that bicycle, those hopes

but something inside has welled up like

spring-water through acres of arid plough-land

and I see things, if not afresh, at least

from a different angle through freshened eyes

as the rain courses through these Oxford gutters

and swirls with the first leaves of autumn.

I’m caught like a glider in a thermal

my heart lifting off from the dry ground

the caked mud I clung to all my adult life

as if I’d die without it grounding me

I drift away from thorns, and bones… and flames.

32
 GRASS CLOUDS

Three Oxford Sermons.

written on 4.9.01…pre 11.09.01 and all that followed.

Our Hatred

Is an object, a ball of lead shot

I carry in my stooping frame.

It has grown, layer upon layer,

like a stone in the gut

each time I see a smug, ruddy faced

son or daughter of the shires

walk blindfold through these doors.

They do not stop, for they carry no guilt.

It is washed free of their hands each day

by the sure-footed minions who keep

the ticking clock ticking, the fountain fed

The trout swimming in the moat, the hedges well kept.

All so that power may be maintained

and their God-given purpose blessed.

Were they that blind in Victoria’s reign

that they did not see the bubbling corpses,

fly-blown dotted across their maps

or were they already such fanatics, lost in biblical phrases,

pure King James and Wesleyan hymnals

that each dead pagan was already a soul saved.

33
 SHAUN BELCHER

Now the maps are reversed, repainted and

the empire has slow-dissolved from pink to white and red.

As a new dogma falls from the T.V’s secular pulpit

the truth of democracy, the right of goodness falls

upon those who deserve it whatever their creed

but the result is the same

tents and bibles and corpses riddled with gentles.

Politics, more or less.

We do not write of politics.

We write of actions and death.

There is no margin for solace.

There is only the facts or less.

The corpses burning are counted.

Their collapse noted down.

So that posterity may judge

them martyrs or villains or less.

We wrap ourselves as a nation

in blankets of powder and guns.

And stand on the chalk hills

defying the invader to come.

But the myths have all grown tawdry

the broken-spined bible spills forth

welcome to the first 19th century war

you can read about winning before it’s launched.

34
 GRASS CLOUDS

Colony

A gentle space, a path of land beyond words

is all I ask now from this threadbare seat

as the drizzle of language washes through

the gutters and stains the skirts of Oxford

A place free of the shackles of past and blood

where free-born men can stand alone

in the muddied fields and not be called

back to the shearing, the grit and the chaff

clogging the lungs, or the spores of industry

that dribble down their chin at morning.

No more nightmares of the steel press slamming

arms into oblivion every time they wake.

Born to an open field, twenty years in a cot

twisted by the accident, his wife mops him down

each evening as the speedway hums on the city rim

and another van squeezed with immigrants pulls in

to a lay-by in a pitch black night of no moon

and currency blows across the nettles

In another week fresh hands are washing dishes

no questions asked beside the high table

under portraits of men who ransacked

their villages in the 1870’s they squirm

to avoid the buzz of the drunken chatter

these ghosts of an empire returned

Then one girl in each silver dish she passes

sees the reflections of Nuffield’s factory scarred men

twin ghosts of the machinery of privilege

dancing in the chandelier’s flame.

35
 SHAUN BELCHER

White Hyacinths

You in the fume of white hyacinths

blown across this London park.

Your ghost inhabiting others

like the girl sat opposite yesterday

writing in a book, then reading

as her charge played in the sandpit.

A break from her nanny’s duty.

She looked a little like you, French, not Spanish.

Then today another girl, another book.

I didn’t stop to look this time

but walked once more around the borders

not noticing the hyacinths fume, eyes almost watering.

Then your ghost walked away

hand outstretched to the child in me

a reminder of how good then how bad things had been

of how quickly hyacinths wilt in spring.

36
 GRASS CLOUDS

The Ghost Shell

For weeks after

the room still held you

like an empty shell grips

its absent occupant

the December sun

shafting through a plankton sea

of swirling dust

the only activity

but for the dull thud

of my heart inside my ribs

my eyes brimming

as I ran my hand

along the blue carpet

touching your absence

in the still indented marks

of chair and desk

as if touching

those ridges

could somehow convince

my heart you were really gone

I lift that room up in my mind

now like a shell

and listen for the sea

but have lost your voice

you are gone

like salt brushed from skin, sand tipped from shoe

yet I carry a fragment of shell forever deep

in my heart’s chamber.

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The Electric Brae

Where atlantic winds curl the barley stalks back inland

And sea salt tangs the lips, I once stood motionless

As our wedding party stopped the car and we watched

It gently roll uphill towards the moon.

A trick of perspective, bewitching the eye

We watched the illusion unfurl, eyes tricked into seeing a new world.

Holding you now I think of the Montgolfier Brothers, hands red raw

As they struggled to hold down a duck, a sheep, and a rooster

Seeing their hopes rising toward that new world in defiance

Of the black soil, the dirt sucking at boots and hooves.

With the right partner any landscape can fall away

Unfurl like a tattered cloak below the swinging basket.

Dizzy the old maps turn to land, the stars become creatures

As I wrap the whole world around your shoulders.

Hold me as we fly up like Chagall’s bride and groom

Through cold night air tasting the salt from off the ocean.

Believe me and the heavens will open, the barley fields spin

And as a world turns upside down

We’ll breathe fire in the face of every trick of the wind.

*The Electric Brae – name for a hill on the Ayrshire coast where a trick of

perspective gives impression that a downhill road is rising.

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Greyhound in frost

With every leaf and twig gilded with frost

And the park phosphorous in a pink dawn

The dog stands motionless, half dead

A sign for speed unread, unseen

And a dozen crows lift off behind it

Replaying a Breughel painting

And the air seems to vibrate with their wings

As silent you stand entranced, enmeshed

In a frame of the last century

Before the coronation or the foundry spat blood

Mincing your arm to a pulp

Between the stamping press’s glittering steel

And now one-armed you stand beside your dog

Calling it to run headlong into history

On a morning when nothing much moves

Even the container lorries are stacked up at Dover

You both stand and glint on the edge of this city

Your boots glazed with the frost

The dog’s blinking the only movement

Its heart racing, a suburban Stubbs

We are all glued to our place in the scheme

Like hares glued to the rails

You and I and that dog are measured by a painters eye

as shares flicker on screens beyond us.

Selected by Ruth Fainlight and for the Guardian Poetry Workshop October

2004.. Read her response here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/oct/19/poetry13

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The Shipstone Stars

Red lead rain lashed to pink

hangs like a soviet star

on the left side of Nottingham’s tunic.

Always east facing, a towering symbol.

The dawn of a century personified, rusts

above a city of casual workers, bicycles

and the hard slogging dutiful dead

who fleck fields from the Rhone to the Rhine.

Never facing the river, that westward

leaches mud from peak and meadow.

The dried, limed stench of rutted tracks

lining the willow barks of Derby and Leicester.

Gables glossed white upon lace-curtained

suburban fuchsias, trimmed lawns and empty trailers.

Safety in numbers as the suburbs huddle

into its coat from Bramcote to Beeston.

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Cattle slide into ditches, barges grind

at their moorings as floods flow on toward

dry fens gasping for this summer downpour.

The star remains firm, but tatty.

A remnant of a fading imperial industrial glory.

Cheap imports in containers trundle round the ring-road

headed for Poundland, Primark and Ikea.

We died for this, these rain-sodden shires

whisper the ghosts in the graveyards

as hooded boys on BMXs spin on street corners.

In a damp bedsit a shelf-stacker from Warsaw

lifts a Samurai Sword from the wall and mimes

the DVD still stuck on play on the monitor.

Star and blade flash for a second and are gone.

The storm lashes the window.

The Shipstone Star shines black on a white sky.

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 SHAUN BELCHER

Writing poetry is easy

It’s the easiest thing in the world

It’s the way you hit the tone right off

Twist the line and let the reader just dangle

In that particularly British and modern

Way - yes you can even let it run

On and you can affect the merest

Trace of the French symbolists without

Ever missing a beat, que sera sera

And how gorgeous you feel when

It all fits like a poodle in its waistcoat

And then it all falls apart

The joy, the effortless sheen

And you’re left staring at the

Miserable rain-sodden park

Where a rat scurries through the trees

And your head swells to contain it all,

The grafittied bandstand, the exposed flesh

The refugees on their black bicycles

Flashing their grins at a new world

That sparkles like silver from every leaf

And you cry, a gentle sobbing

That pours out like rain off the bowling green

A steady drip from the tennis court chain-link

As you replay yourself being happy

In another life that bled to death.

Here endeth Poems 2001-2011

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 SHAUN BELCHER

EDWIN SMITH – Catching Light

2014

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not

thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and

the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Someday, all this will

have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”

Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, Berlin Stories, (1945)

The whole sequence can be heard read on soundcloud here:

https://soundcloud.com/horseshoe-tapes/sets/edwin-smith-catching-light

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KODAK BOX BROWNIE No.2 Model F. 127 Roll Film 1927

Trembling in a gloomy Camden Town bedroom surrounded by brown paper

The teenage boy gently prises the camera from the leather case, undoes the

catch

Traces the word BROWNIE [i] along the fake leather strap, caresses the box

The textured cardboard leatherette warm to the touch, he raises it to his eyes

Spins around to catch a glimpse of lace curtains breathing in and out

Then a pause, stops breathing, squints through spectacle glass and a blurry lens

No film, just retina, lens and glass glinting, quiet suburban air between the wars

Shutter pressed, the first image, undeveloped, untaken, unrecorded.

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 SHAUN BELCHER

ICA IDEAL 205 Glass Plate 9x12 1935

A present from Marx and Nash [ii], same fake black leather case but much stronger

A hint of steel, hands now more relaxed, a world at his fingertips

The box finally clicks open, bellows a tiny lung, rangefinder, spirit level

Suddenly in Vogue, a London Atget spinning around fairs, cafes, Oxford Street

Zeiss Ikon Tessar 135mm f4.5 precision German lens and Compur shutter

The shop windows buzz with reflections, his spectacles stare back after

Nights spent in Lund Humphries [iii] experimenting with solutions, final prints

Days mixing it with emigrants and socialites, Focal Press tricks, ghost images. [iv]

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CONTAX II 5cm Sonnar Lens 35mm 1936

Modernism in Kentish Town, a lens named after the sun, Sonnar

The lure of speed, futurism, the 35mm film spooling out of the movies

Twisting on that light yellow filter, ½ a second at F4, the march of progress

Back to black-outs, air-raid fears, black shirts, Agfa Isochrom, Kodak Nikko

The thrill of a world intoxicated with power (v), dancing on a ledge, never falling

Café de Paris, Heppenstall, Orwell, men talking in gangs carrying knives

His finger presses the shutter on Laura Knight and Coco, the ballet, the fairs

Spin Pennies from Heaven, Zeppelins over the docks (vi), Germany calling.

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 SHAUN BELCHER

THORNTON-PICKARD RUBY Quarter Plate 1904

Post-War, Deep England after Evans (vii), ash in the mouth, misericord darkness,

Light trickle slowly through lens, cat-one, cat-two, cat-three, whispered

People have become ghosts, 27 and a half minutes (viii) divining, digging into

time

A mahogany box worn to a gleam in a suitcase, mahogany tripod, Leeds, England

So solid, a step back from the sirens, modernist black and white, the emblems

Slow drizzle and fade, tilts into spires and thickets, empty barns, rigs of the time

His glinting spectacles at the viewfinder, crouching like a sniper, waiting

Hiding his camera under vestry tables, a quiet man in a corner, hooded.

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GRAFLEX SPEED GRAPHIC Roll Film 1960

Movement, travel, portables, Made in New York, focal plane, press camera

The fruits of success, lease-lend to never had it so good, the wide angle

The New Europe, Ireland, Italy, Greece and France, the Ensign Autorange

Searching for the same mellow light, that photograph in the mind always

Then back weeks later to the darkroom in deepest England, the bleaching

Hours lightening shadows, clearing highlights with Potassium Ferricyanide,

poison (ix)

Chemical arts, sleights of hand, shade in the palm of the hand, fission and fusion

His collecting eye adding the coin to the wishing well, staring at the sun. (x)

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 SHAUN BELCHER

ENSIGN AUTORANGE 820 120 roll film 1955

‘Co-operating with the inevitable’, he called it, ‘bend with the stream’

Holding the Ensign Autorange up to the light it reflects in his spectacles

Bought in 1955 the last camera he held, English made, Walthamstow

The firm almost disappeared when in 1940 the offices in Holborn bombed

All surviving he stands with Olive to watch stubble burning in 1971

Squinting through a crisp and sharp Ross Xpres lens at the flaring

Feeling the silver body in the palm, the faux leather Ensign logo

Epsilon shutter pressed, a last image, taken, undeveloped,

catches light forever.(xi)

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References:

[i] Edwin Smith redeemed the Kodak Box Brownie by collecting Corn-Flake packet coupons probably in 1927

(EWELL, 2008)p.11.

[ii] Friend Enid Marx gave Edwin Smith a better camera in 1935 shortly after he got married Olive Smith

reports this as the Contax but as Ewell points out that not released until 1936. (EWELL, 2008)p.13.

[iii] Enid Marx was connected to The Royal College and Smith’s photographs came to the attention of Paul

Nash who encouraged Smith and gave him access to the darkrooms at the publisher Lund Humphries.

(EWELL, 2008)

[iv] Smith co-wrote and published a series of Focal Press guides from 1938-1940.(SMITH, 1940)

(v] Ewell reports the trip Smith made with his sponsor Sir Albert Talbot Wilson MP, a fervent pro-Nazi, to

Germany at this time. (EWELL, 2008)p.19.

(vi] The German airship Graf Zeppelin made spying raids probably equipped with aerial photography equip-

ment of a high resolution on the 30th June 1936 and this was reported in Hansard on the 8th July 1936.

The Parliamentary exchange highlights the naivety of some in Government which bordered on complicity.

(Hansard, 1936)

[vii] Frederick H. Evans, British Pictorialist photographer famous for the Sea of Steps photograph taken in

Wells Cathedral which Smith took a version of in 1956. A major influence on the Cathedral and Parish Church

series.

[viii] Smith would time exposures using the cat phrase and replace the lens cap on exposures that could last

up to 27 minutes thus removing all trace of human activity. (EWELL, 2008)p.52.

[ix] Smith mixed his own chemicals. After his death a large amount of Potassium Ferricyanide was found in

his possession. The chemical is a poison and the Ilford Manual of Photography recommends disposing in

drains with plenty of water to reduce the risk. Source: Roy Hammans note to article Ways of Working on The

Weeping Ash photography website. Accessed 31.10.2014. (HAMMANS, 2011)

[x] The Edwin Smith RIBA exhibition highlights the trick Smith used during the Fylindales printing of placing

a coin on the paper to create an image of the sun where none had been.

[xi] The circumstances of this last roll of film being left in Smith’s camera and only being developed years

later are detailed on the Weeping Ash website. Source: The Last Exposures.

Accessed 31.10.2014 (HAMMANS, 2011 )

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The ‘Mini Pamphlet’ ‘Burning Books’ (2017) was published to coincide

with Theresa May’s attempt to drive this country even further to the

right….little did we know how much worse things would get.

Eight poems about politics, books and poetry to be given away free at the

Jermy and Westerman reading with Rosie Garner on Wednesday 26th of

April as part of Nottingham Poetry Festival

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 SHAUN BELCHER

Awfully Middle Class

There is something about poetry in England

That is awfully nay terribly Middle Class

Something not quite right in the hands of a worker

Sibilants dribbling like snot from the poor man’s nose

Wiping its sleeve on the tasteful tablecloth of power

Always waiting to be found out or at least held up

As an exemplar of the erudite working class chap

Even that Larkin fellow wasn’t a chav was he darling

Then the skirmishes with the Leftist proletarians

Or the Rightists in their towers quaffing champers

No never quite right, never accepted as kosher

Little piggy faces pressed to the literary crown jewels

In 1992 I gate-crashed an Oxford University poetry bash

Crept along corridors I had no right to be in

After another day serving the arrogant little sods

And after much prevarication finally made it in

Les Murray, sitting like an antipodean Buddha

Laughing like a Boetian at the Athenian Temple

Then he slowly let rip with poems from Dog Fox Field

Words circling the pews like a fox in a henhouse

I walked up shook his hand said thank you

And skedaddled before they set the hounds loose

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COLLATERAL (for D.D.*)

Windows shake, tyres screech

Litter blows across the estate

Gunshots ricochet as sound

The Divis Flats, Brixton Market

Beirut, Jerusalem, Sarajevo

A baby cries, a baby cries

The broadcast stops, the helicopter hovers

There’s a smell of cordite, a cold wind

A face you have seen before on the news

Starting to dissolve in a pall of smoke

Gravestones, a line of mourners, a hearse

More tracking shots, more candles to light

The post-war peace has been noisy

All night the rain streaking the vans

As another round up begins

Difference is a slogan, tolerance fades

Hope drifts downstream like radium

Whitewashing concrete stained with blood

We can carry on, we can care even more

The trains will run, the tide will turn

The supremacists will make everything alright

The same arguments start again and again

Tube trains fill with dust and smoke

Collateral damage drips through the door

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 SHAUN BELCHER

You choose what to believe, what to see

As another herd of innocents die in a cellar

The missing migrant is pushed into the sea

Sixty years of peace in Europe a lie

From the Balkans to Ukraine this is total war

An iron curtain swinging in the breeze

In the morning a cold silent light

A white horse streaked with blood and lame

Dragging itself to a poisoned stream

The crusaders horse is then shot full of holes

Its body carried away on a torrent of pain.

Collateral: The ghost in the Western dream.

D.D. is David Dixon the only British person to die in the Brussels Tube Train

attack.

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Become Invisible

(for John Carson)

John was his name, I forgot the surname until now

But I remember his words in the Edinburgh Gallery

As I joked about being a ‘serious’ poet

He was already in late 40s must be retired now

He looked me dead in the eye and said

No I mean it ‘stay serious.. we need serious poets’

I had visited his home, an inspirational teacher

His daughter was confined to a wheelchair

I never forgot his words, what they really meant

Twenty years later his study of invisibility in hand

I ponder their weight, the cost of being serious

The cold rational cost of telling the truth

I thought I was a serious poet then, thinking it became me

Or so I thought, reading, reviewing, first published

But something was going wrong, gnawing away good intentions

The serious business of poverty, buying leftover food

Numbing data entry to survive, the lies of agencies

Serious was fine, serious cost me dear, tore holes

Giant moths ate my beautiful career, the garment fell apart

Not then and there, basking in the autumn sun on Arthur’s Seat

Then we were smiling the world lay before us and shone

Right then I thought I could do anything, fame a step away

But as the cars sparkled in Craigmiller the sleet came

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 SHAUN BELCHER

We shivered, held each other as it spattered our cheap coats

You hugged me said hold on, I couldn’t and dragged you home

Back to Oxford, a poet returning from exile to be lauded

Surely this time I would be carried on to higher things

But you knew the cards were marked told me to fight on

Nearing Oxford you noticed the trees were all behind walls

Holed up in a terrace in Nottingham now with pen and paper

I cling to the broken promises, those simple words

Stay serious, don’t give up the fight, keep on keeping on

No restraints, no agencies, no academics to be waited upon

Sorting through a cloud of dust as I sort my books

Putting things in place. The Oxford Professor of Poverty.

Become Invisible.*

Refers to John Carson’s essay ‘The Concept of Invisibility – the Redress of

Poetry’ 1996. An examination of working class writing in Scotland. It features

Duncan Maclean, James Kelman, Alasdair Gray and Hugh MacDiarmid.

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Postcard to Okinawa

Leaves the hand

The post office disintegrating

Still air rising

ACRONYMS

W.V.M.

For months after his death

I would still hear and see his lorry

The diesel engine

The two men drinking from a flask

Headed home

The ghost of a W.V.M

C.H.A.V.

I lived most of 40 years

On a council estate

I never saw one punch thrown

Except at me

By a schoolboy who missed

His father owned a yacht.

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 SHAUN BELCHER

Rust

Overnight every university building

In the city of dreaming spires

Had been covered in a patina of rust

In some cases it was flaking away in sheets

In others places spots grew like spores on chrome

It never went away

There was consternation

Everything looked the same

The spires burnt ochre red in the low sun

Turner’s famous view had a reddish tinge

The whole place was turning to rust

Looked like a scrapyard some said

There was a debate in Parliament

There were letters in the Oxford Mail

Something had to be done

‘Oxford turns red’ the Sun gloated

Some saw it as a political satire

Others as aesthetically pleasing

Slowly people got used to it

Some started selling fragments of Oxford Rust in jars

The postcard people had to start a whole new line

Where there’s muck there’s brass was the ticket

The all new ‘City of Rusting Spires’

Was easy to advertise on social media

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Then someone noticed that the Heads on the Camera

Were each oozing a blood-like substance from the eyes

The rust now started to clog the gutters

It fell in chunks on the Quads, flecked young ladies shoes

Tests were done and builders called in at once

To assess the chances of renovation or destruction

It was decided to sandblast the rust away at once

The scaffold and hoses were brought in for years

Finally the old dreaming spires reappeared

But something had been lost, it was a pale imitation

The rust had been an important part of the city

So they forgot about making cars and turned to phds

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 SHAUN BELCHER

Matilda in the Snow

I remember the cold spell of 1962

My father’s tractor dragging cars out of the ditches

The impenetrable whiteness of a world

Seeming to go on forever

From the gates of our down-land cottage

Nothing went further

From sky to cloud was one field

Nothing was all around us

There was just the flickering wood

Spitting in the grate

And the dog barking at shadows

Men bringing us damp wood to survive

Smoke choking the kitchen as it burned

My father wrapped in layers

Stamping ice onto the lino

Next morning the thaw started

The magic world slid away

Leaving the branches broken

The straight road outside

Breaking out again like a whale’s back

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The snow had been a blank page

A blanket at the end of my bed

A dizzying pattern etched across my window

A sore red hand, chilblains

From holding on to it too long

Years later I sang ‘The White Hare’

Whilst digging a trench with my Dad

And heard of Matilda escaping from Oxford

Dragging cold feet away from the spires

Like me almost erased by a blizzard of snow

Wrapped in her white cloak

She slipped from one cold page to another

As the dog cut loose and sprinted ahead

Sleet crusting cloak and hands and eyes

Trying to keep to the line, to sing, or nothing.

The intention.

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Working on a Building of Love

45s no centres, piled in a dusty box

For years I did not play them just played with them

Loved the colours and labels.. Pye, London, Atlantic

Spread out across my grandparent’s front room

There was an old battered upright piano now never played

And a radiogram that I could never get to work

I used to spin the record anyway making the arm engage

Dropping the disc on to the turntable and spin…heard unamplified music

Net curtains always breathing in and out in summer rainstorms

Years went by until I found a way of plugging the radiogram in

I must have touched a bare wire..

My arm was thrown back against the wall and felt numb

Never mentioned it as knew I would be in trouble

I would never get to play with those 45s again

Even as an adult I returned and absconded with some items

Working on a Building of Love I still have

I am still playing. Reminds me of home, belonging… summer rain.

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London Calling

Bright November evening 1981

Sweatbox of a venue Camden Ballroom W1

A sea of heads bobbing below a platform

The Clash and Mikey Dread. Rasta Cowboys.

I left the venue to drizzle and police sirens

And a ring of police wagons encircling us

Broadwater Farm waiting, Brixton happening

Camden dirty and ugly, fists and chains

London Calling to the far away towns

To Toxteth and Bristol and Handsworth

Misspent youths in dingy bus shelters

Rain damping down isolated fires all evening

I had no idea then that the decade to come

Would see riot police and cordons across the land

That those SPG troops in their vehicles grinning

Were just practicing for what was to come…

London Calling

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A Poundland Sonnet

In the vacuous naughties the affluent thrum

Their chubby fingers on the card-less tills

As the slippery accountants of PWC and RBS swill

Their caviar down with Vive Cliqout at the parliamentary bash

The air is full of Quangos and insider trading slang

As the parade of yesterday’s entertainers head for the tank

Never have so few been made rich by so many

Gated compounds reek of the stench of money

Whilst out in the gutter the poison rain flecks

The sequined shoes of the stars as the homeless wretch

Wherever a buck can be made from a paedophile story

With a false ID the hacks tear at the fraudulent lying

Satellites spin, every channel is a Clear Sign

We are all Poundland remainders now buried alive

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A Wreckless Scheme

Paradise is a gold throw on a white leather sofa

Under the buttocks of a call-girl blowing a footballer

Indiscretion is a national pastime after cup-cake baking

Facebook ramming lives with other people’s misfortune

Clear-eyed dreams of making it with the boys in the band

Dissolve in bleary orgies in the back of a camper van

Parrots and lizards scamper under screen saver skies

As the magpie landlords eye their prosperous finds

While celebrities promote books they never saw penned

As the cut crystal tinkles with the fizz of the vanity press

Screenwriters shuffle stories that have already been spent

Suggesting that our culture is bleeding to death

The tethered ox offers its throat to the knife

The Sun will always shine on the shittiest life

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Doodlebugs

Doodlebug 1

Random thoughts spilling

Black vinyl tooth paste tablet

Rain shower plastic banjo

Birds drizzle James Bond

Across a scribble aviation fuel

Barcelona high-wire fly tourniquet

Dribble satisfaction core values

Professor of rainsquall Americana

Plantation melodies and weddings

Lampreys Richard fluffy dogs

Alarms craft beers cyanide

Isis working-class distressed

Scribble random thoughts

Jazz swing coalition damp

Crisis inflation spoon-fed

Dream cheers goodbye

Angelina and brad sting

Book charts death druids

Blank chords end strange

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Doodlebug 2

Cutting to the quick

The rain shower pastes

The plane crashes

The banjo plays blue

Doodlebug 3

Crisis in management

Random thoughts

Blank cheques

Nowhere to land

Doodlebug 4

Dream plantation melodies

Barcelona turns to the east

Black vinyl turns green

The sofa screams

Doodlebug 5

American inflation

True spoon-fed death

Strange banjo thoughts

Plastic distressed

Shower death

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Iggy Pop in a sideboard

Too much thinking fucks you up

Too much time slips through the cracks

Worrying about the rain, the funerals

The way the poplar trees creak in the wind

And all along the drip of ice melting off

The corrugated asbestos roof a metronome

The beat of a disillusioned parade

Spun through a muddied field outside Berlin

A piano disintegrating under the 400 blows

Wielded by a clown and Judy Garland’s axes

Chopping down through the wires and chords

The splinters of a life fading away

I was 17, Lust for Life, in a rack at Woolworth

I bought it although it was so warped it didn’t play

Spinning on a tweed covered second-hand record player

Hidden inside a wooden sideboard it rattled the china

The Passenger woozy and stumbling into a Motown beat

The future on a plate, disintegrating in the shooting match.

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Creative Accountancy

That’s the kind of writing

You find these days in colourful EMW brochures

Not in University any more – too old school

Workshops on how to be a real poet

In ten weeks, just one easy online payment, how sweet

There’s even guaranteed tutor interaction maybe

How nice that we are all a part of this booming

creative economy

Smoking Guns

All went off in the sixties

Now it’s retro and rehash and the end of things

Speculative fiction

And fantasy football

Nothing like something happens everywhere endlessly

It’s called the internet of things.

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 SHAUN BELCHER

Nude descending a shopping mall escalator

Was last seen

Sucking a slush-puppie

One hand grasping her iphone

She missed her footing, tripped

And drowned in the cubist fountain

Proper Poetry

I used to write proper poetry

Not the really proper stuff

You know packed full of classical allusions

Or invented lives based on obscure photographs

No I gave up on proper poetry

Because it is so fucking boring

So I write an occasional diatribe

And raise two fingers to the academy

These are the times for less poets, less experts

Less academics and more UKIP candidates

When a military chaplain’s daughter from Wheatley

Is playing Joan of Arc in the Wars of Brexit

With only God and King Billy (*)to save us.

*Boris Johnson

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Bonnard’s Wives

I was in this bookshop

When I read the blurb

A book called Marriage by David Harsent

An ‘inspired portrait of conjugality’

Apparently

Well forgive me but

Who gives a fuck really

It’s all pure conjecture….

White middle class fantasy

Another poet riffing on fabricated lives

Bonnard wouldn’t give a toss

That fifty years later

Some poet was tossing off an ode to his wife

If you want to win the T.S.Eliot prize though

Just be published by Faber

And be judged by your academic colleague

Who happens to work down the corridor

Dream like Bonnard

And keep it all in the white middle class poetic family

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 SHAUN BELCHER

Poem to end all Poetry

Was primed

All the software routines

Executed perfectly

But sadly

When it came to the launch

It misfired badly

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Burning Books

It was a cold winter’s morning

That he struck on the idea,

Books at Poundland were now cheaper than coal

So he took a barrow down to town

Filled up a hundred weight

And trundled them back to his house

Then all through that January cold snap

He felt toasty and warm

As he sat and enjoyed the heat from the books

Whilst they flickered and spat and crumbled in the grate

First there was Paterson, Child and Archer

The big hardbacks of course lasted longer

Fifty shades of grey climaxed in less than fifty seconds

But at least a better end than being pulped to cream

And best of all was that special late night treat

J.K.Rowling’s shite novels disintegrating, toute suite.

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 SHAUN BELCHER

The Dance of Debt

9.20 post-watershed family viewing

Not Minder, not procedural, not even faintly interesting

A fake architects, a fake accent, fake words

Playwright mechanically scraping barrels for ideas

The actress presenting a fake library plan

A new fake library in a fake world

Where a thousand library doors have closed

And a thousand more await ‘repositioning’.

A terrible dance of debt with taxpayer’s lives

The plot of a penny dreadful writ large

Every empty shelf, every skip full of books

Another building closer to a retail led outcome.

For even the palatial Birmingham Central Library

Is but a fall-back plan away from a shopping centre

Every shelf full of play-stations, candles and soap

The retail mantra sell more to sell more to sell.

More items hastily constructed in dirty sweatshops

By this century’s lace makers and nail makers

More blood from stones, poison from lead

All those who died early with no heirs, half-fed

Leaving behind that benefactor’s Municipal Library and Gallery

That developers are now re-selling to foreign hotel investors

Both built by the same dance of debt

Each brick paid for with blood, each nail timber hand-made

Every name in the ledger but one erased.

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The Invisible Audobon

Somewhere deep in the bowels

Of my past life in Oxford

I am crouched with a naked flame

Above an original copy of Audobon

Subscription edition, worth millions

And hidden from mere mortal gaze

In a secret location

Its own room in the Bodleian Library

In this dream my life rolls backwards

Towards the Minotaur under the trees

Holding each precious page

Hurt and pain unwound too

Alongside Alfred’s jewel, lost treasures

Leonardos and Raphaels all mine

I load them on to Tradescent’s cart and

Wheel them back into the light

I start a new enlightenment

Shine a light into the dark with these beacons

Light a series of fires across the downs

Burn away the hurt and sorrow, the business plans

Start a new University in the air free of charge

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Forged

The ignition came unbidden

A firefly at dusk, drifting

Across the estates like a wayward lantern

That some bright spark in Mansfield

Decided was a UFO

And called 999 twice

Or three times

No I didn’t want to start again

I couldn’t help it

The materials were there

Lying around the forge

Dusty with neglect, unloved

Then the molten heart leaked

A salamander

Here it lays, stronger, steely

Coated in black armour

For black times

Come slings and arrows

Normal misfortunes are ten a penny

In every A&E you’ll find them

Forging ahead or burnt and gone

You cannot fake emotion

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South and West

I sit on a Nottingham bound train

At Derby Station

And note the platform signage

‘South and West’

My wife is south and west

Of here now following her own path

I am headed north without due reason

My life has always been south and west

Until nearly twenty years ago

On a whim I headed north

And met her due south

On a grey thundery London evening

She was headed west even then

It just took her a lot longer to reach her destination

Which for now is between stations

Hanging in the air like bird song

I hear her now and then, hear her true voice

Growing fainter on the wind

Standing in a siding blurred with weeds

Somewhere south and west of here

In twenty years

We may both be gone, long departed

Down the lines we can still see

Singing

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Fishing in Fog

A winter Sunday, fog and frost

Two figures climbing a stile

Boots crunching crisp grass underfoot

Head toward the Thames at Clifton

My father not yet seventy, still working

And I back home for a day’s fishing

Struggling with tackle and reels in the cold

Sit expecting nothing, no fish bite in this weather

Talk about things, my grandparents

The cost of renting, share a flask of tea

Steam rising across his face as he pours it

Lines taught in the brittle air, disappearing

Then slowly the sun starts to lift the fog

The opposite bank starts to appear

A moorhen skirts the bank, swans drift by

Beyond the fog a dog barks endlessly

For a few hours we hold on to hope

Stare back into the white eternal glare

Of mist along the river looking for a bite

Staring at futures unseen, but clearly there

Now and again on a misty morning

Crossing the Trent I see father and sons trudging

Through the mist and rain together, silent

Sharing thoughts, hopes, jokes, together

Their lives unravelling like lines in the air.

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A Tiny Spider

A speck

crawling from under Acrimony

seen under the spotlight

A metaphor

for the last ten years

crawling down the hard shoulder

A tiny spider

picks its way through books

and is gone

I stare at the rain

The stationary cars

The Middle of England

Wonder how she’s doing in rehab

What webs lay ahead

What sticky yarns

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Room for poetry

I have a room for poetry

Two bookcases of neatly filed books

Arranged by region of course

Then chronologically

They have been gathering dust for years

Unread, unopened, a wall of doubt

Twenty years I have been a closed book

Until today the penny dropped

The dam burst, the Bastille fell

Words started pouring down

Cascading down the shelves

From Shakespeare to Auden

A waterfall of words

For you

They poured around my bed

Lifted it up like a boat

Some took off battered the windows

Like a murmur of starlings

Blinded my eyes

Choked my throat

I have made a room for poetry

I rock on a bed at sea

Calling out to you

In the silence

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The Lost Decade

Travelling on the Manx electric railway

In Fog

One minute coasting

Could see to Ireland

The next all blank like a page

Then a screetch as foot on brake

Bad news from abroad

Then silence

Mist rolling seaward

Beginnings and endings

A horse on a cliff

Cold black sea

The line ended

We sat silent

At a Victorian station

Overhead cables fizzing in the rain

Then a tired horse pulling

Us along the esplanade

Ten years before dirt rained down

On your sister’s coffin

Even then I felt the cold wind blow

In from the Irish sea

Eating into our bones

Then into our souls

Until we could not find our way home

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BURNING BOOKS : A GLOSS

‘Burning Books’ was Horseshoe Press Pamphlet No. 2 published in April 2017.

At the time I thought I’d try and describe what influenced the poems and

what I think I doing which invariably different to what the reader imputes.

Burning Books and Buying Time ..education, morals, politics..everything can

be bought these days. I am literally buying time at present using up savings

before the next employment.....if there is a next one...

The Dance of Debt

The dance of debt been going on since time immemorial but never has it

been such a mantra from the ruling classes..

Burning Books

Things are not getting any better no matter how many J.K.Rowling novels we

burn....

Iggy Pop in a sideboard

True story on Foundation Art at Oxford Polytechnic I suddenly had enough

money to buy my third ever vinyl album. The first was an MFP Oliver the

musical soundtrack. The second was Alice Cooper’s Bilion Dollar babies then

this. The copy I purchased was so warped it kept skidding when played on

the Dansette tweed record player kept in my parent’s sideboard. I returned it

to Woolworths and traded it for a flat copy of XTC’s White Music. I heard just

enough of The Passenger to ‘get it’ and the details about Berlin are fantasy

thoughts prompted by a documentary and footage shown after Bowie’s

death.

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Matilda in the snow

The description of the down-land cottage all true. My dad was a farm labourer

in early 1960s. We were so poor he bred rabbits to sell. The memory of Matilda

comes from school history lessons. Matilda fled Oxford and was given refuge

at Wallingford (my school’s location) Castle. Her action changed history and

ensured that the Plantagenet line was in power later. No Matilda no QEII..which

despite all the 90th Birthday celebrations might have been a good thing..in fact

how about no Royals at all? Personal note I fled Oxford too but on a London

bound overcrowded National Express coach. Not quite as romantic...

Rust

The selling of England by the Pound was most brutal in the destruction of William

Morris’s original company. Rover was the biggest employer when I a child now it

the University. They let it rust....

Postcard to Okinawa

Hiroshima anniversary.

ACRONYMS

I hate acronyms especially nasty little ones that belittle the working class which

most of them seem to be funnily enough...

Made Invisible

Dedicated to Simon Armitage who has hoovered up everything I could ever aspire

too with some of the dullest poetry I ever read. Success in Britain is never offend-

ing anybody...and toeing the line forever.....New Labour through and through. His

first book is where it ended for me...

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Five doodlebugs

Just for fun completely random stuff which has overtones of suicide airline

pilots from the news owing something to Prynne and Oliver but not sure what.

I never been a strident modernist in that vain and frankly get bored with poetry

that needs decyphering or pretends to be something it isn’t. The factionalism of

contemporary poetry means that if you go down that road you will have a loyal

and small audience and not much else. It a good route for academics. A love of

Bob Cobbing helps..the poetic equivalent of trainspotting.

London Calling (45)

Start of a series of Vinyl 45 related poems. Short and lyrical ...that’s it with over-

tones of political comment just like the original songs.

Working on a Building of love (45)

See above any link to Corbyn is purely coincidental and anyway I ditched

Labour for the Greens.

A Poundland sonnet

Both these ‘sonnets’ written pre-election. Angry squibs. Didn’t help the shits

won anyway.

A Wreckless scheme

A retort to the great God Armitage’s dull work in the field. Armitage is like New

Labour very successfull and very dull.

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Collateral

Self-explanatory. Whilst writing I referred to Edwin Muir.

I was also was reading Cesar Vallejo in great translations published by Richard

Price ( a proper poet) at Southfields.

Awfully Middle Class

Again says it on the tin. A classist rant and I aint apologising. If you are going to

publish boring self-referential holiday snaps about reading Dante on the beach

then be prepared for a slagging..naming no names..oh sorry naming names...

there you go no manners the working class...

Buying Time

Self-explanatory but I lost count of the number of times privileged i.e. wealthy

middle class people have told me that life is what you make it, you make your

own luck, you only have yourself to blame etc etc. BULLSHIT..this country is

totally controlled and run by money and the class system has become MORE not

less embedded in my lifetime. I would not have had a decent education in post

Thatcher Britain because that is how the Middle Class voted and would like it to

stay...if you poor you don’t get in the door...

I hope this might help...

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LOST NOTTINGHAM

A Illustrated poetry project for Nottingham Poetry Festival 2018 which focussed

on ‘Lost Nottingham’ stories about famous people who had some connection to

the City however brief. It was shown as large illustrated panels at Jermy 7 Wester-

man on the Mansfield Road which itself is now part of Lost Nottingham.

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CHARLIE AND THE LACE FACTORY

Monday 4th May 1904, Grand Theatre Radford Road, Hyson Green

Evening performance of Sherlock Holmes over, Charles Chaplin aged 15

Collar askew from a swift costume change leaves Billie the page boy behind

And cheekily slaps the final drop curtain just below King Charles’s heard

The sun-light overhead sputters and dies leaving the stalls gloomy

As he exits through the corridor of mirrors, flickering like a film

He turns left on to Gregory Boulevard which is quiet now, audience departed

The half-moon illuminates the Forest park to his right, a few stars above the trees

Cold now he huddles in his thin jacket, stuffs hands in pockets and half-runs

Ahead the last tram descending the Mansfield road clatters in the darkness

A cab rattles past him headed toward Hyson Green its two jovial occupants singing.

Then silence, just his own steps and far off an occasional cry, or clack of hooves

Latecomers emerging from the Grovesnor Hotel or workers leaving late shift

At the Mansfield Road a sudden burst of steam and noise as a train exits the tunnel

Then silence again as just Charlie and his shadow dance their way up Sherwood rise

Carrington Market is busy with late drinkers fresh off their factory shifts

The rumble of machinery echoes across the granite sets, mixes with brewery smells

A quick tap at the door and Mrs Hodgkinson lets him into his digs at number 100

From the back high window he looks down on the Burton and Sewell factories below

Their dark brick walls dotted with illuminated floors of workers making lace

Women on one floor tending the bobbins and un-twirling long lines of thread

Below men tending to the machines as they endlessly repeat their movements

He thinks he catches a smile from one young girl but she is gone in an instant

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He is left hanging out of the top window watching clouds cross the moon

His only companion a rabbit hidden beneath the bed can be heard scratching

He feeds it leftover stale bread he had been given that morning

Watches the endless repetitive machines coming and going over and over

The steady hum of machines that brought him to this place, steam and iron

The flicker of images that will be with him throughout these modern times

He thinks of his mother in confinement, his brother tending a bar in London

He hardly speaks except when on stage and wanders a different town weekly

Too late to play loudly he picks up his fiddle and bow one more time

And stood in the window, in moonlight, imagines himself a famous musician

He glides the bow gently across the strings, hardly a sound can be heard

He serenades the men and women below, all the world his stage forever

CODA

The lace factory now a care home behind imported plastic net curtains

A woman in her 80s suffering dementia suddenly remembers her mother speaking

About a night she saw Charlie Chaplin playing to the stars but no-one believed her

How one day he’d return and play one last reel for her forever.

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Picasso’s Peace Train

The black clouds had been building up all week

Thunder rolling down from the Peaks on Nottingham,

Grey drizzle trickling from the glass roof at Marylebone Station

Dripped on to Pablo Picasso’s neck as he boarded the train to Sheffield

Monday 13th November 1950 early morning the train’s steam billowed

Through the suburbs of London as it swung left at Lords, headed north.

Adjusting his pale blue tie and the beret on his lap

Pablo gently rolled his cigarette in his hand over and over

He turned to Gilbert his ex-resistance bodyguard, drew fire

His dark eyes flashing with mirth as they discussed the papers

The lies and distortion and the statement by Clement Atlee

Who stood by Guernica in 1939*, clenched his fist for the I.B.**

The heavens were opening all across the Midlands

The boiler hissing, the firebox at 2500 degrees C, half a Hiroshima

They hurtled down a line 50 years on from the dawn of the century

Carrying a card-carrying Communist spy according to the Herald

To a Peace Conference in Sheffield that would ‘paint the town red’

As the first U.S. troops brought their atomic bombs to defend us.

From arts council genius to pariah, Pathe News mocked his arrival

The only artist let in as Robeson and Neruda were denied visas

The Korean War on the back burner, the cold war freezing

Like bad weather the post-war storms kept blowing in

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In Sheffield the chrysanthemums and the banners were wilting.

Rugby, Leicester, Loughborough flashed by between grey sodden fields.

Then the train swung right into a Nottingham damp with rain and coal dust.

Crossing at Wilford Picasso caught sight of the Power Station

Huge dark rain lashed walls by the Trent, chimneys belching sulphur

The thunderclouds swirling beyond the steam out the carriage windows

On Wilford Bridge he turned and said ‘Rain, Steam, Speed n’est-ce pas?

Down a modernist line that lasted barely a century they drew into Victoria Station

Sliding through the tunnel at Weekday Cross and into the platforms

He stared at the tunnel ahead, like the gates of hell or a Minotaur’s lair

His impression of Nottingham some posters, a W H Smith, huddled travellers

Then darkness and rails rumbling beneath Mansfield road, light then dark at Carrington

He drew breath, then continued northwards mouthing the words of his speech later

‘I stand for life against death, I stand for peace against war’

His hand constantly drawing the symbol of the dove against his trouser leg

Remembering the heat and light, the warmth of his father’s hand in his mind

The doves he grew up with jinking and turning against a blue sky.

At the exact spot where a year later the first Rolls Royce Avon prototype Canberra

bomber***crashed on Bulwell Common station.

References

*Clement Atlee spoke at the Whitechapel Gallery in front of Guernica on tour

January 1939.

** International Brigade Spanish Civil War.

*** Atlee’s Labour Government decisions 1944 and 1947.

Our first tactical nuclear strike aircraft.

Designed to deliver a British Nuclear deterrent.

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Paper Boats on Private Road

A lone slim figure in Sunday best gets off the tram on Woodborough Road,

Hesitates then proceeds down Private Road until it dog-legs east at his destination

As he turns along the high brick wall he hears children’s laughter, a maid calling

He stands at the gate hidden by trees and calls, the maid comes to the gate

Later she recalls his patent leather shoes and his smart appearance that day

Frieda stands at the French Windows, behind the red curtains, eyes sparkling like a hawk

He is ushered into the sitting room, red velvet curtains caught in the breeze billowing

Initial stiffness is washed away in a heated conversation about Oedipus and women

D.H. Lawrence is being bewitched by this most un-English and strong-willed of women,

Her exotic and erotic vibrancy entrances him, already struggling to escape this England

Her husband delayed by work she leads him past then in to her bedroom,

An English sparrow in the talons of a German hawk he is taken in hand, finds himself

Then they are both entwined in secrecy, taking tram and train to secret assignations

One day with her daughters they play on a local stream with paper boats

He flicks matches at them saying look it is the Spanish Armada come to sink England

Two paper boats catching fire in a Nottinghamshire backwater, then phoenix-like rising-

From the crazed machinery of Edwardian England, the conservatism of suburbia

Sometimes of an evening Frieda would dash up Mapperley Plains just seeking freedom

In a cottage near Moor Green they continued their first loving act on Private Road

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Under Pear-blossom, ‘a fountain of foam’, Frieda crawls naked over him, he writes a poem

To her and to freedom, to his sexual and intellectual fulfilment with a gushing woman

By May 3rd hey were sat together on a night-boat to Ostend, that old England fading

A peaceful Anglo-German union as the two empires ramped up production of munitions and

cruisers

The Suffragette movement beginning, the war to end all wars looming.

Paper boats burning

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MY FATHER’S THINGS

Ivo Charles Belcher 1932 -2004

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A series of illustrated poems titled ‘My Father’s Things’ created in Summer 2019

for a show called Castle Ruins III at the King Billy pub Sneinton, Nottingham.

The exhibited works included ephemera related to the objects. The whole

sequence are the first time I had attempted to deal in writing with the loss of my

father aged 72 to pancreatic cancer in 2004. My mother then passed away from

Carcinoid Cancer in 2012.

I was infuenced by my reading of Richard Ford and Blake Morrison’s memoirs of

parents.

I produced the original drawings and wrote poems during a period of crisis in

my relationship with my wife who was suffering from late stage alcoholism. She

passed away in 2020.

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The Optical Level

Gun metal grey-green, heavy in the palm

My father’s optical level

The metal worn through use, a record

of my father’s presence as is the smell

of leather case and faint aroma of tarmac

as if his hands sunburnt and grimy with tar

still waved at me on those frosty mornings

I helped him set levels somewhere below the downs.

A ritual since the age of 14 as I earned pocket money

holding the levelling rods, red and white striped

icy cold that stuck to my fingers as I held them straight

waiting for the hand raised, a signal that he had the reading.

Then another wave to move back up the slope and start again

tied together by the upside down image of cross hairs

rising and falling on my hand then the rod

like a bomb aimer looking for a target

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One morning we are out early.

Steam rising from the power station cooling towers.

Stood in early morning sun on a former airfield at Harwell.

The airfield the Dakotas lifted off from before dawn on D-Day.

Carrying the last memories of men destined to fall

caught in the cross hairs of German gunners.

The rattle of munitions cascading from a thousand guns

blurring the coastline and making the earth move.

Turning the world upside down.

Like the poor pilot spinning out of control

trying to bring things back to a level.

I stare through that old telescope and call to him.

Right, right..back a bit.

That’s it we’re level now.

Roll out the string and mark the foundations.

Knock in the pegs and start to build again.

A nation fit for heroes on a sunlit morning

when the smoke had cleared.

We heard birds singing.

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My Father’s Watch

A gold Limit Silhouette watch leather strap hardly worn

A dress watch for a man who never dressed always working

Most times he didn’t carry a watch as it would be get damaged

or snagged whilst working..too dangerous…

A man who cheated death twice..first a burst duodenal ulcer

I remember him being taken in the ambulance

It was touch and go. The Radcliffe saved him..the surgeon

told him later he found carrots before cutting him to save him.

Convalescence in Didcot Hospital..now housing..long gone

Later a wall collapsed on him he was two feet away from death

Was catapulted out of the way just in time..battered and bruised

He joked about it later..even the Lotus Elan that smashed into him

Or the spinning car in the rainstorm that missed him and Uncle John

Neither made a dent but then his luck ran out at 70

A soreness in his stomach was scanned..revealed pancreatic cancer

Too advanced for surgery..he grew greyer and weaker..could no longer

Get into the garden..chemo making him vomit black bile

He died in the extension we built in that last year defying the odds

to the end..he died on a bed in that building…almost perfect

like that watch stopped at 9.05 but hardly used

He died at 7.10 a.m.

The time he left for work every morning rain or shine

Kept perfect time until the end.

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Butlin’s Pwllheli I956

A small silver and pink enamel badge

showing a welsh woman in traditional dress

and the words Pwllheli I956

all that remains of my father’s holiday

as a 24-year-old farm labourer

travelling with mates by steam train

to North Wales .

Years later he spoke of it fondly

as a brief respite from rationing and post-war austerity

The camp was originally built by Butlin for the Admiralty

like so many other camps, Butlins was founded on war camps.

Some even housed prisoners-of-war; Pwllheli was training.

It was the second time he had strayed beyond the Thames Valley.

The world was opening up. My mother was three years away.

In the darkness below the stairs years later I found

a cracked copy of Rock Around the Clock, Bill Haley

Amongst his treasured 78s and his record player.

That and Doris Day and Frankie Laine were the soundtrack to I956.

Across the land belts were being loosened, petticoats swirled

as the first post-war generation started to dance

beneath bikini clouds.

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North Berks Premiere Division Medal I956-57

Football was something I grew up with.

From the tins of dubbin to the boots caked in mud on the step.

My father played for Long Wittenham into his thirties.

Before TV the radio commentaries would be heard throughout the house.

My earliest memory was my father jumping up and down as England won the

world cup in I966. He rented a TV for it.

Years later we would both sit in the kitchen listening around a small transistor

radio. Poland I975 I remember especially. Always the chat was around how the

Arsenal were doing (usually badly) .

Then the moments of pure joy. Charlie George scoring at Wembley.

Moments I shared with him.

Even when I living in Edinburgh the chat came back to footie.

Gazza’s goal in Euro 96 against the Scots. Laughter.

I have a small tin with his medals in.

A photograph of him at Reading’s ground for the North Berks Cup Final I956.

They lost but it doesn’t matter.

Images of him fit and happy.

Before the decline.

The last match.

Then the long walk down the tunnel. Game over.

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Polaroid Supercolour Camera

My father became a self-employed builder late in life

He was proud of his truck with Belcher Construction written on the side a

nd the business card he had printed.

He began documenting his jobs both as a record and in case

he had to revisit or change something.

He bought a Polaroid camera and started shooting off images.

After he died we found a box full of polaroids.

He had worked with my Uncle John in later years

and I passed the photos to him keeping a few back.

He also travelled abroad for the first time in later years

to Naples to see my sister and to Florida with her children.

The passport photo shows him greyer and maybe the first glimpse

of the cancer that was to kill him can be seen around the eyes.

He spent his last years mostly in pain being scanned and probed and recorded.

Images of him rather than by him as life snapped.

Held in the hand, waiting for the remission that never came

My mother was left staring at a blank bed,

A smaller van without a name on the side.

A shed full of tools turning to rust

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Rabone Chesterman Teak Level

A small hand held level for small jobs

I remember my father using it

It has the Rabone Chesterman logo on

which with three triangles signified Hockley Abbey

from the original Birmingham firm

that had existed since I87I

Later it amalgamated with Sheffield firm Chesterman

the inventor of the automatic rewind tape measure

Rabone was an enthusiastic industrial moderniser

introducing steam machinery in the face of opposition

Their tools are robust and long-lasting

But like all things now swallowed up by Stanley tools

This level is pre all that, pre offshore, downsize

and seven hundred levels of capitalist re-selling.

It is worn through use, the three spires dulled with age

But still capable in the right light of sparkling

a reminder of older ways,

the combination of church and provincial hard work

that laid the foundations

Before the bubble stopped shaking.

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Addenda: What I am not.

After Auden

A NEW YEAR GREETING

**** (poem here)

Shaun Belcher is the author of one out of print slim volume that disappeared into

the virtual ether before it was printed via lightning strikes/amazon so qualifies as

a work of fiction.

He did not edit any anthology of obscure, unacknowledged legislators nor did he

win any prizes, nor should we be specific did he enter any competitions.

He has held no official tenures as a creative writer at any top end nor third rate

provincial university and has never reviewed other poets he dislikes for the

simple reason of building a profile to get published.

He has never been recommended by friends in the poetry world as he has none

and has studiously avoided anything to do with poets or poetry for over two

decades.

He is member of no group who look after his publishing and reading interests

when his work over time slides into fabulous irrelevancy or simply becomes so

bad it an embarrassment.

He has no agenda nor minority axe to grind and has never played on his working

class beginnings for pity or favour.

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He regards his lifelong devotion to obscurity and keeping some semblance of

sanity in a world over-run with poets like a corpse covered in flies that he should

not add to other’s suffering by maintaining a steady output of academic poetry

which simply done to fulfil research departmental targets.

His earnings from poetry over 40 years accrues to £70 he once got paid for being

given a slot at Ledbury Festival by a friend and a commission again via a friend

for £500 which works out to roughly £14.25 per annum which a living wage in

the poetry world these days.

He is however still a poet if being a poet is none of the above.

He is still alive at time of writing and doesn’t expect things to change radically.

It all depends on a red wheelbarrow apparently and he does not have one.

Happy New Year.

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http://ww.shaunbelcher.com/writing

‘the poems individually and cumulatively preserve aspects of identity and

genealogy rooted in a particular soil and way of life..an underlying humaneness’

STEWART CONN (Scottish Poet Laureate, Playwright )

‘your poem is so beautiful..I love the tenderness of the carrying of the horse

which was rescued.’ (The Ice Horses) TESS GALLAGHER (Poet)

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