reclamations is an urban pastoral sequence of poems set in the lower lea valley – an open green space within the bounds of the city, a geographic and social edgeland between town and country. the wreckage and remnants of war and urban infrastructure such as sewage works, filter beds, impounded and culverted rivers act as settings. the recycling of waste, absorption of floodwaters and presence of pits and burial grounds – vital features of the marshes for which they are devalued or shunned – figure in the poems, not as dead spaces or discarded processes, but as integral to ongoing renewal, of history alive and remade in the present. the people who populate the poems are also marginalised – ex-soldiers, redundant workers, displaced travellers, migrants, asylum seekers – but it is traces of their presence left in the landscape and in the language which resonate in lyric and verbatim poems. underlying the collection is the metaphor of reclamations – not only the process of reclaiming land from the marshes which the olympics set in train, but the contested claims of whose land it is, the overlooked, suppressed or forgotten histories and voices embedded in the marshes. the sequence echoes their regenerative capacity to take in waste, rubble and flood waters and transform them into productive crafts, industries, recreations and a wild ecology, absorbing at the same time the marginalised, giving us a space to breathe and a place where we can feel at home.
Keywords:
which wick?
wandering on wyke rd, you knew you were
in old country, a latin vicus – settlement –
or a viking vik – inlet or creek – the weak point
to invade, then a trading post. in middle english
it became -wich in salt brine wells and spas:
droitwich or nantwich, or a -wich which was
a landing place for goods special to that place
like wool-wich –woolwich – or a trait of the place
such as green-wich – greenwich – or a -wick where
the village grew up around dairy farms like
hackney wick – the 13th century ferm of wyk –
or around dairy produce, cheese wick – chiswick –
and goat wick – gatwick. just as a candle
dies down leaving only the trace of a wick,
when the land disappears, so too does the language.
haibun
a few steps away from the stream of traffic on lea bridge rd, an open gate draws us into a thicket of hawthorn and nettles. we go along a narrow path a little way. on our left, we find a tree with charred branches that forms a burnt-out hollow, where the light is sickly. underneath there’s a make-do shrine – a few yellow chrysanths in a vase, three lanterns in a row, sturdy enough to weather any storm and a white cross made out of skirting, tied at a tilt as though it has dislocated a shoulder. a small board commemorates krzystof in fragments of polish that declare:
memory never dies
i love you dad i am with you
it’s us at staffa rd
it dawns on my companion this is the place he’s read about, where a migrant died in a fire. we walk on a few steps past a windowless brick hut sprayed with a line of gold towers, cupolas and crosses:
the artist imagines
the city of god as ours
all-encompassing
the place perhaps the man was trying to get to before he was burnt to death. as i come out into an opening i’m struck by a dirty white, ragged guy you might throw on a bonfire. its uncanny presence is so petrifying, i can’t move. i call out to charlie who’s also transfixed. but then he runs forward as though to dare the effigy, show he isn’t scared. he kicks it. and it turns out to be nothing more than a tied-up duvet whose contents spill out.
the traces obscure
the man’s fear and inner flame –
invisible remains
