Many poems which are admired today have either a city or a countryside context, but do not seem to address the vast expanses between, the suburban world of No-Place-in-Particular where so many people, nevertheless, live, too - and they can actually enjoy it! It is an exaggeration to say that poetry as it is first encountered in schools is either urgently interested in the qualities of potatoes as they are dug from the earth (Seamus Heaney) or else seems disgusted at the urban smell of the end product, chips (T. S. Eliot), but there is some truth in that statement, too.
Growing up and then living as an adult in a half-rural, half-urban landscape is not always a guarantee that you will write about that world. For many the imagining of even the suburban world they know intimately is impossible: they have to give in to the temptations of the poetic City or Countryside. Such poets do not live creatively in the place that their body lives, and this may well have an effect on the intensity with which they write (for good or for bad). There may also be a kind of snobbery about this, the same snobbery which is as disdainful of the bungalows in Stephen Spielberg's films as it is of the extraterrestrials. To many poets, it seems, suburbia is the really alien land. Science fiction, as a 'low' genre, is therefore all too appropriate a way of imagining it, and it can be left to others to do so.
I do not share that view (of the rurban or of science fiction), and many of my poems are about the resonating domestic space of suburbia. In 'Hinges', the speaker is remembering how his English father first chose a new house on a greenfield site in Scotland, and how other memories - his brother's terrible accident on a building site, his father's incredibly lucky escape from an air crash - are bound up with the random good fortune of a loving family. Naturally, I have tried to find a form that is in some way analogous to what I am describing.
I am sometimes asked if the incidents I describe are true: yes.
On the airstrip: fog.
Nothing taking off.
Five in the afternoon,
more or less.
I'd have called it a 'flitting'
but it was a year before I was born -
to my father it was 'moving house.'
He was Ma's envoy in Scotland:
he'd just chosen a field
that would grow into a bungalow
and he'd pay for it
whenever the bathroom,
opening on the hall
with a frosted glass door,
trapped her, towelnaked,
before the postman
and something to be signed for.
Through the same melted glass
I saw my first memory:
my eldest brother, nine or ten,
was stretching and not touching anything,
petrolburns on his face and hands,
a human X at the front door
(on a building site a friend
had clicked him alight:
we still don't know the bet).
On the airstrip: fog, night.
Eleven o'clock. My father is being practical
on the hotel phone: 'I am speaking
back in my room.'
In the morning in England, like a new couple
two police officers stood back
as Ma opened the door.
They had to be reassured:
she gave them tea in the fine bone.
(Just beyond the wicker of radar
the first plane out, just past midnight,
had dropped like a figurine.)
In the afternoon
my mother met my father in Arrivals.
Before they held held held each other
he says they shook hands.
(from Sense and Minor Fever, 1993)
Another poem, which also uses the same building site accident in a different way, tries to convey the excitement of living as a child in a place that was visibly growing around you. I've called it 'Compressor' after the ever-present machines used for supplying power in inaccessible places, as roads and houses were made from farmland. As a concentrated sort of poem with the full syntax elided the poem is also itself something which has been 'compressed', and perhaps this is in turn like memory.
A mash of half-bricks, off-cuts of board, glaur. The first foam of alyssum.
Bungalows crating up the fields. Skelfy yellow rafters dreeping girls. Finished halls.
A gripped man-hole lid, a lazy boy. A bath of petrol, a cigarette's disfigurement, teenage inferno.
Twenty years later: a carpenter, a father, a face saved.
(from Green. Field. Site., 2000)
More recently, I have settled with my wife and daughter in a small town on the Thames, Staines, in the borough of Spelthorne. Ironically, this is only about twenty miles from Reading, where I was born. Since I moved up to Scotland from Berkshire when I was only six weeks old, I have no especial loyalty to the area, but I do believe that in-between places like Staines - or like Slough, with which it is often confused - do have a life and lives worth celebrating and recreating, as well as - yes, if need be - criticising, too.
My first attempt at writing about Spelthorne was a series of prose-poems based, at first sight, on the remarkable bird life of such an apparently ugly ducklingish place.
The name Spelthorne is a Saxon word meaning 'Speech Thorn Tree'
John Mills, A Guide to the Industrial History of Spelthorne
You don't see many hedges these days, and the hedges you do see they're not that thorny, it's a shame, and when I say a hedge I'm not talking about a row of twigs between two lines of rusty barbed wire, or more likely just a big prairie where there were whole cities of hedges not fifty years ago, a big desert more like, and I mean thick hedges, with trees nearby for a bit of shade and a field not a road not too far off so you can nip out for an insect or two when you or the youngsters feel like a snack, a whole hedgerow system, as it says in the book, and seven out of ten sparrows say the same, and that's an underestimate, we want a place you can feel safe in again, we're social animals, we want our social life back, and the sooner the better, because in a good hedge you can always talk things over, make decisions, have a laugh if you want to, sing, even with a voice like mine!
The coot was a pint of stout. It slipped out from The Ferry during a fight. Mathematically white, it was plunged by its beak in mathematical black. To uppity swans it does not signify. The same goes for Joe Duck.
The box of a frozen-food tiramisu misfolded into a crumple. Looking for its reading glasses. Feral in Surrey.
My favourite bird is the Great Crested Grebe. It's great! The Romans called it Podiceps Cristastus. It was almost extinct when Queen Victoria was the Queen, but Aldous Huxley, writer of Animal Farm, raised a stink about women's hats. Feathers went out. I think the crest looks like a carpenter's pencil behind the ear, and they do build a nest like an ark. They are brilliant underwater swimmers. My gran says it's a wonder they don't catch polio.
They did not pass the test. Just past the school for private girls, in coats of strips of black blazers, they colonise the flooded pits.
A delicate dad caught dabbling in Debbie Duck's drawer - a green glossy popsock caught at head and neck, lycra in chestnut for his chest, grey the rest. In the brown uniform of a money warden his chosen takes five ducklings through their mocks.
A greying Senior Lecturer in Fish Studies (Thames Valley), he stands in frozen hop concentration, regarding a lectern only he can see. Still, he gets results. He's hoping for a chair.
Pure snow: the remains of icebergs hauled from the Arctic Circle to cure a drought. Their beaks are municipal clamps.
A spotless aristocratic glove puppet. Its last song? Opera.
It's an uplifting call and when you hear it Spring is coming, sure enough, resurrection, promise kept. But I'm not comfortable. That's no life for her and it's no life for anyone else mixed up in the whole business. The parents think the chick is just like them, and it's a hero when it gets bigger. Then it's all me me me, eating its brothers out of home and house, breaking its fostermother's heart as sure as. I can't speak to her about it, and she won't get help. She says: every one of my children is like a little Jesus, and that makes me God.
Pedestrianise the High Street? Crumbs!
Its shirt in ill-advised off-white, customised with blotches of crank-oil, a thrush prods the temporary car park. He/she almost forgets to repeat itself, but on a scaffold a song finds it and finds it again.
They call us Asians. I deny
nothing, neither grandad nor now.
It's just a collar. Please rely
on other data - know the how
beyond the costume green, the why
escaping when we sing our 'row',
the who our chokers signify:
a chain from chains, as times allow.
Headquarters could spare only a couple of officers, rheumatics in all-weather macs. But the old boys knew what was what, they knew what wasn't. Measuring the second field, not three metres from the wood's muddy edge, they found the two of them. Four days, maybe five. 'A pact'.
We packed some snacks, cokes and beer, took the train out to Windsor and walked up to the Great Park. It was September, but as you looked up the avenue there was a heat haze at the knees of the giant Copper Horse and Horseman. They looked like they were stepping out of the waves, turning, about to bear down on you. 'Oaks this old always remind me of root ginger.' We sat in a tree's shade on the tartan blanket he used to have in the car. A stocky brightly coloured bird, chest pink as a perfume counter, flew down from one of the other trees with an acorn in its beak. 'It's a jay,' James said, 'Jay for Jane,' and then he was off, looking at me, laughing. We were both smiling. 'J., the genesis of Joy, a Joint's full lips, first kiss of the spliff, fragrant Jacaranda. Julep, Juju, too. Jay, trumpet-tumbled gentle Jericho, Japanese pyJamas, ma Jolie Jeune fille, ma Joie de vivre, ma Je ne sais quoi.' 'J.,' he said, with an exaggerated sigh, 'my Jeopardy.' The bird had vanished by the time he was finished that lot. He'd been doing actions. Later on, on the way back into town, I saw another one, quite a way off, though he missed it.
More woofers than tweeters, they guard Stereo Component with surroundsound.
They push and they push, and it seems to me they never reach the end of their beak - a stop button. And it's like they're made of delicate ashes themselves. Their first flight. Just to commemorate my two and think of them when I come out here.
There are winners and there are losers in this life. You might as well be a winner. Motorway verges, council grounds, anything landscaped, fine. Have a recce, see what suits, move in. Some creature gives you a look, take its eyes out.
Blue. I mean green. Blue, green. Gone.