Wharfedale Poets have been off-line for a couple of years, but we have not been inactive. We have gained two new members - Mike Farren and David Hesmondhalgh - and have published two anthologies, about which there will be more in a future post.

In the mean time, there is a show coming up, featuring two members of Wharfedale Poets, along with great contemporary folk music in a beautiful and atmospheric setting.

The Manor House in Ilkley is the venue for this special evening of poetry and songs on the evening of Saturday 16^th June at 7.30pm.

The Moonbeams, the well known and loved contemporary folk musicians will bring their original songs from the Dales to the party. The Moonbeams are part of TheMoonbeam Collective, a community organisation that aims to celebrate the environment, countryside and rural life through the arts. They have just released their third album This Land and their 2015 album Watching Wildlife was critically acclaimed as well as being voted in the top 50 Daily Telegraph albums of the year.

Two members of The Wharfedale Poets will be reading from their work.  Colin Speakman is a well-known poet, author and environmental campaigner and Ilkley’s Mandy Sutter, as well as being an acclaimed poet, recently won a prestigious national short-storywriting award.

The Wharfedale Poets were established in 2010 and have since grown and reputation, counting published poets and national poetry prize winners amongst their numbers. They regularly give performances in the region and the group have produced four highly praised anthologies since 2014.

The latest, Music and Milestones (Ings Poetry, 2018) was published in April.

Jon Avison of The Moonbeam Collective said ‘We are looking forward to bringing our music to Ilkley and it is a particular joy to be able to play at The Manor House and share the evening with The Wharfedale Poets. The combination of poems and music always works well’

Colin Speakman of The Wharfedale Poets said: “It will be a real privilege and pleasure to share a platform with Moonbeams. Music and poetry are sister arts, and what better way to celebrate a summer evening in the Yorkshire Dales than with wonderful music and words”.

The evening starts at 7.30pm and tickets available on the door cost £6 and include a free glass of wine.

Out went macaroons

When I was twelve and fat, my mother stopped baking. 

Out went macaroons, and butter sinking

slowly through hot scones. Out went rock buns

with their shy request for half an egg. In came

Ryvitas, dry as dead men’s ashes. In came 

skimmed milk measured in a 20-calorie jug. 

Behind closed doors, soft bags of ground almonds

still rubbed shoulders with bottles of vanilla essence 

and cochineal. Shelves were sticky

with the pink rings of glace cherry tubs, immanent 

with the rattle of cake racks against blackened tins. 

Greaseproof sheets still jammed the drawer 

but my mother’s back was turned. In fear she went

shop-bought, hid Wagon Wheels 

in the spare room wardrobe. I stole them often: 

ate whole packets in one go, to keep the crime clean.

Her cookbooks, plump with cuttings, look modest

on my shelf. Her inked instructions are neat 

and strict. ‘Bake in deep tin – it rises!’ ‘Heat but 

do not boil!’ Despite my broken waistline, these days

I bake often, finding her in the sweet density 

of marzipan, the bitter puff of burnt currants. 

Mandy Sutter.

The Knowledge

It passes by unrecognized

as the years spin;

no cake, cards, candles celebrate

birthday’s darker twin.

To moles that burrow in the earth,

to beetle, moth and crow,

death comes to everyone at last

but we’re the ones who know.

The blackbird sings to greet the day,

his voice is sure and strong.

He doesn’t know that he will die,

what matters is the sun, the sky,

what matters is the song.

Jenny Dixon.

From her latest collection, 'Marking Time'.

MATA-ATUA ^{1                                        1}  The first voyaging canoe & Air New Zealand Boeing 777.

Cloud stitcher,

celestial elephant.

He’s all the sevens,

two Barlick turbos, ^{2 2}  Rolls Royce, Barnoldswick.

and a Koru on his tail. ^{3 3}  Maori, Spiral design.

Up there,

six minutes to Lockerbie,

thirty thousand feet

and the seat belts’ sign off.

Time for a Bourbon on the rocks,

a Chardonnay

and another ten hours to LA.

Now - below,

I sit in my Yorkshire garden

and everyday,

six miles away,

his white yarn

stitching the clouds, he goes.

I raise my glass and say

“Haere Ra! ⁴  Maori, Farewell.

Haere - Haere - Haere.”

When you visit 'The Flying Duck', go upstairs and see The Wharfedale Poets, 'Poem of the Month' in a white frame on one of the tables there.

From 'Whetstone Words'.

Adlestrop Remembered 1956

Bad enough to leave my wife,

For a barrack room, woken at five.

Yob Corporal bike rides through and howls

 ‘ . . . Y’ain’t nuthin but a houn’ dog’.

Kicks kit and coal bucket flying.

We stand in line under a shivering moon,

In lonely misery for both years to come.

More drill, our stupid squad, robbed of ourselves,

Hair cut short, shabby denims and to crown it all

A North Irish bigot chaplain to teach us morals!

Malvern camp, no Elgar here.

Just threats and shouts but

At last a troop train out

A time for sleep,

To rest,

In the coach’s moquette fug.

A slowing, a blessed quiet, a stop.

No birdsong on this hoar frost day,

A whistle, lurch, a hiss,  - then on our way

from

Adlestrop.

To Aldershot,

To the drill pigs’ bawls,

And hope for leave . . . which we have not got.

Bill Berrett

'Whetstone Words', our second anthology, Autumn 2015.

         

The Wharfedale Poets' first collection 'Drystone Lines' was launched at the Ilkley Literature Festival's Fringe Event on 8th October 2014. It is dedicated to Walter Swan who died in Spring 2014.

Copies can be obtained from  http://www.lulu.com/shop/search.ep?keyWords=drystone+lines&type=

Walter Swan

Everyone here at Wharfedale Poets was deeply saddened to learn that one of our number, Walter Swan, died suddenly on 21st April 2014 of a suspected heart attack. He was a sensitive, kind and very talented man who played a vital role in our community and we will miss him beyond measure.

IN  THE  NORTH

This year I saw a winter quite anew

and watched the darkening days devour the light,

reduce the sky’s palette to sombre hue,

leach crags and dales and walls of modeled life.

Each day another pace towards a dark,

a place of velvet black of deepest mystery, 

a void enclosed within the flakes of bark

the sculptor made which draws me in inexorably.

But we both saw the void the sculptor rimmed.

You see the edge, I see the whole within. 

The rim which contrasts faintest hints of green,

which gives us hope beyond our dream.

We too are more than each upon our own,

so together see both dark and rising dawn.

Andy Goldsworthy’s work at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park,December 2007.

Reading

In the gap between an English afternoon and evening,

we're let into the bookshop, leaving the dishevelled city

with its relentless pavements for the civilisation

of folding pine chairs and carpeting; books.

She enters to held breaths wall-to-wall. She's slight, tanned,

more this, less that than anyone expected, hair bright as a globe.

She shows slides: cooking monkey in Gambo, on a pirogue

up the Zaire river, getting stoned by children in Senegal.

But my eyes are on her more than the pictures. She brings me

the world on her feet, skin, breasts, in my own tongue.

It silences me, an islander holidaying on other islands;

Ibiza, Crete, Tenerife. A woman walking continents raises dust.

Willing to see more sense in a grain of desert sand

than in all of England, I queue for her book, her signature.

Meeting her eyes, I receive my blessing and leave smiling.

We all do. We have been saved: already we are less ordinary.

Mandy Sutter

Mandy's new novel, Stretching It, a light-hearted look at love, papier-mache and caring for an impossible parent, is available at Amazon UK

At least

At least, he said
you'll get a poem out of this.
Yeah, I thought:
a short one.

Mandy Sutter

Les Nymphéas – Tree Reflections

Les Nymphéas – Tree Reflections

 

He sits in a wicker chair, gazing at trees,

straw hat, old suit, patrician beard,

cigarette held in limp fingers: Claude Monet.

Our cessation is not sudden. Like stars

across the black dome of a sky, one by one,

flickering, unnoticed, into oblivion,

senses lose their clarity. Seeing is all,

the sensual beauty of being. Dying eyes

blur what memory tells, what paint recalls.      

Giverny, when daylight and darkness

share a moment of equilibrium;

lake mirrors last hints of brightness

in the imagined sky. Shadow of willow,

trunk and whispy branches, shimmer

against blues of echoed, vanishing light.

Yet rose pink, palest white, green, luminous,

lilies, floating spirits, gently drift

across the blackness, suspended,

forever, against impending night.

Rain on a carriage window

Rain on a carriage window

The train has stopped.  Beyond a barrier of glass

grey fields; by the track a broken fence,

ditch, reeds, dark scrub of bramble.

Towards the horizon tall trees, wires, towers,

denote a nameless town.

We wait, watching the droplets of rain,

tadpoles of light, that sliver, quiver,

coalesce, then slip to oblivion.

Somewhere at the front of this train, a locomotive

hisses or growls, awaiting a signal

for the main line, or maybe the branch

- we are no longer sure.

Time is here suspended. Our way defined

by tracks untravelled, a route unknown.

Only raindrops, quick, elusive as thought,

gently tease at memory.