Poetry

Responding to @squatbetty’s June prompt for the Love Blippin’ Books challenge #LBB6: poetry. 

The few among you who have kindly followed my journal over many years may recall that I used to compose a micro-poem, haiku or similar, to accompany each daily entry. My enthusiasm for micropoetry had emerged on Twitter around 2010 and for five years or so I was a very active part of a creative community of micropoets on there. However, I reached a point where I couldn’t sustain the cognitive load of daily practice, so now it’s just an occasional treat. I do hope to return to it more fully at some point though.

All of which was a precursor to saying, “But I’ve never read much poetry.” It is something I’ve dipped in and out of, and I made more of an effort when I started writing. Effort is probably a key word there - the sort of poetry that I enjoy is observational or narrative. I am growing to understand that my literal autistic brain really doesn’t pick up on allusion unless I expend serious scholarly effort and am guided to it. As such, I find a lot of poems to be a mess of words, but I can take pleasure in a short phrase, so all is not lost :) So I don’t read much poetry, but as a lifelong gatherer of books I do of course have a shelf full of poetry books (extra). For this challenge I looked along it and selected something slim and accessible - I’m still stinging from my six week encounter with the History of the Peloponnesian War for an earlier challenge :)

John Davies was Head of English at my high school in Prestatyn, and a good friend of my Dad, who also taught there. This volume is inscribed to my Dad. John never taught me, but in one of my life’s many great missed opportunities, my recollection is that he once pulled me out of my registration class when I was about 11 to invite me to write a “ballad” for an upcoming volume (probably Spring in a Small Town, 1979) where he was looking for some contributions from children. A florid poem extolling the delights of the Welsh mountains that I’d entered into the school Eisteddfod may have caught his eye, although it may just have been nepotism. Unfortunately, while being delighted at the invitation, I didn’t really know what a ballad was and I wasn’t set a deadline, so I ended up letting it the opportunity drift off into the ether. 

At The Edge of Town was his third volume, published by Gomer Press in 1981. It includes fifty poems covering a range of themes, some from his time as a student in America, some about being a new Dad, many clearly rooted in life in Prestatyn and Wales. I’ve included two examples as extras: Sunny Prestatyn appealed as it described a migration which I have effectively done in reverse i.e. moved as a young man from a seaside town to a variety of Northern industrial cities; and Lessons, because I’m a teacher too, as were my Mum and Dad and generations before them, and it struck me that I hadn’t seen a lot poetry capturing that experience. 

I enjoyed spending time with the volume, so thank you Sal for the prompt. The accessibility helped, and the fact that I knew the place that a lot of the work was rooted in. It was also a nice surprise to find that John Davies has a very fulsome entry on Wikipedia and I will be looking out for some more of his work. He is also a wood carver, collaborating with his wife Marilyn on birds made from drift wood, so I should probably call in his studio some time and say hello. 

Keep your eyes open for more Love Blippin’ Books challenges, and do join in. 

For today’s image I have clearly had fun aligning At The Edge of Town with the edge of the town that inspired it, and I have geotagged it to my best recollection of the location of the Prestatyn High School English Department.