When I look up at the seamed sky,
the black teeth of girders, the cracks of fresh air,
I think this is not an accident, but a moment
of refusal, a point I can look on and describe
in bricks of words, then knock down again
before it becomes too fixed,
Nice things happen when you least expect them. I’ve just had a lovely email from Yorkshire Bylines saying that my poem, The Moment (extract above) is currently featured on their website. I wrote it eight years ago, but rereading it tonight it seems oddly pertinent to the current political situation in the US – in so many ways a moment of refusal.
Yorkshire Bylines is primarily a news site but it’s great that they also include poetry and I realise that the lovely Jimmy Andrex, who along with John Irving Clarke has done so much for poetry in Wakefield and beyond, is behind all this. Jimmy’s pamphlet is published by Currock Press and is well worth a read. Of course, as is the way with pamphlets, this one is somewhere on my book case right now, hidden between books with bigger spines (although not necessarily better content) so I’m unable to lay my hands on it. Anyway, I remember that it contains some corking poems, particularly some strong prose poems, and that it has a keen sense of place, rooted in the North without ever being cliched. So, thank you Jimmy for publicising my poem and introducing it to a wider audience.