Devon – Page 4 – Robert Garnham

Squidbox

Today’s poem is the title poem of this whole Squidbox project, I suppose!

Squidbox

Of all the buckets,
Containers, plastic tubs,
Amid forklift reverse hooters,
Shouting, throbbing
Trawler engines, plastic
Yellow coats, wellies,
High viz,
Of all the buckets
Of the aforementioned
None can be more repulsive
Than
The squidbox.

Deep sea dreams and
Night time beam trawlers
Dipping down on wave vales
Off the coast of Wales
With sonar and shouting,
Excitable as the net is
Brought up dripping
For commerce, there
Is no sport in this

And thence homewards
With a belly full of tubs trays
Buckets boxes profit gain
And rusty flanks from dripping nets
The loving embrace of a concrete
Breakwater.

The squidbox
Under fluorescent lights stark.

Rough

We ride up,
Hold it there just for a second,
Then drop down, down,
Tingle in your stomach,
A grey angry foam-dotted wall,
The vehemence of nature,
How small we are.

I find comfort in the smallest things.
The sweep of the windscreen wiper.
No matter how precarious,
It keeps on sweeping.
It still does its job.

After a while you get into the rhythm,
Become at one with the sea.
It sets out its rules, and you obey,
Though every now and then
A freak wave, some dissonance,
A jarring note to make sure
You’re paying attention.

And the old trawler, she
Creaks just like ships on films,
Juddering, straining, throbbing.
Hold on, here comes a big one.

You OK down there, cook?
He’s bashing out an omelette.
I don’t know how he does it.

The Fish Market has gone online

I chatted to a trawlerman and he loved his job but the one thing he regretted was the fact that there’s no longer an actual fish market. It’s a sign of the future, he said. Everything is online these days.

The fish market has gone online

The fish market has gone online
And with it, the soul of a town whose
Existence is built on danger,
Humour rejecting the obvious over these
Hard-won trawls, a place to display
The catch of the day
And to laugh, and joke, and josh, and gibe
And welcome home the weary crew.

Under white fluorescent lights
In an atmosphere so clinical as to
Bely the sweat and grime of its industry,
(Not like the old days when
They’d slam the fish down on the pavement),
A ballet of lab technicians these
Restauranteurs and dealers in their white coats,
White walls, white trays filled with white ice,
Even in this,
There was camaraderie.

The dance of figures tripping from the auctioneer’s tongue,
A babble and confusion of numbers and percentage notations,
Earnest bartering, a price laid on each in
Humanistic terms, labour weighted and fortunes made public
Amid the gleam and sheen this raucous machine
Of social tradition and occasional profanity,
The eternal search for the highest bidder
Budgeted and boisterous and occasionally brave,
Face to face, seller, sailor, trawler.

There’s a relief at the heart of it, each transaction is
Gritty in so many ways but greeted eye to eye,
A shake of the hand, a pat on the back, a grin, a smile,
A joke.
The only connection now is broadband.
The heart of the community is a click of a mouse.

Squidbox : Homecoming

This week I embarked on a new project, writing a sequence of poems about the Brixham fishing industry, with the help of Torbay Culture and the Arts Council. Fishing is a major part of Brixham life and has been so for hundreds of years, and the town has the biggest fishing fleet in the UK. I thought this would be a great opportunity to get to know exactly what it is that makes people want to go out on the high seas and risk their lives week after week.

This is the first poem from what, hopefully, will become a sequence. Homecoming is inspired by watching the trawlers come back home after a long stint at sea.

A lonely dot on a wild wild sea,

A nestle of rigs and beams, a mess

Of rust with nets slung low,

Giant spools and ropes slack dripping brine.

The hairpin concrete bend of jutted brick breakwater,

Of faded dead slow lettering, a test of time,

Scratched and blotched this tub sides a-slap

With the remnants of a sea bed scoured,

Hauled loads from sonar technology blips. At night

Each bunk holds dreams or high sea murmurs

As plastic macks drip dry, this metal tin

Of deckhand muscle, winches, graft, sweat.

They gain their sea legs, these sons and daughters.

A throb of diesel purrs the shuddering deck

And slantwise rain in a spotlight’s glare,

Bow break waves and quayside forklifts, home, home.

Seaside Soul, a Poem for Paignton

Today’s daily poem podcast is a poem about the town I live in!

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An poem about Paignton.

I wrote this a while ago. It’s about the town where I live. It’s a strange little place.

Poem

Take a walk with me a while
Amid the gleaming downtown edifices of
This Devonian utopia,
The night pounding rhythms of
Bawdy talk and seagull squawk,
How could any soul not submit?
The Neon shining brightly nightly
Brash words info the ether,
Amusements
Amusements
Amusements
Soup of the day,
Have you paid and displayed?
The all day breakfast
Is only served till midday.
Hushed tones hint at pride,
Just a whisper of this town’s name
Instills a quiet awe,
Oh, Paignton.

Here did philosophers dream
And hold their sway
The jewel of Torbay
Hellegevoetsluis Way
Big bands and jazz hands
A smile, a laugh
A night on the town
A punch in the schnozz at Winstons,
Oh, Paignton.

Verily did I dream of this and that,
A kiss me quick hat
And shops selling tat
Groovy nightclubs and movie scenes
The beautiful, the obscene,
Twirl me across the dance floor once more!
And then honking up in a taxi,
Oh, Paignton.

Dreaming big and living large,
Life in all its grace sublime,
It’s skyline replete with
Architectural wonder, Edwardian villas,
The stylised Victorian pier,
How just a glimpse causes my heart
To thump and jive with
A sultry palpitation,
Garfield Road car park and the bus station,
Oh, Paignton.

Wordsmiths and poets feint at its beauty,
Wordsworth was said to have cried
At its sheer sublimity
My mother also looked at it and cried
But that was for entirely different reasons,
Oh, Paignton.

This city of dreams,
This glitch in time,
Peak mugging hours are four till nine,
Many a hapless soul has gazed
Upon the sleek facade of the
Poundland Building and felt
The mundanity of their existence
Shouting out to the world as if
Declaiming their faith,
How worthless am I,
How worthless am I,
Oh, Paignton.

My friend Jim lives here
And gets an orgasm every time he sees the town,
He mostly keeps his curtains closed,
Oh, Paignton.

The famous names,
Personalities of merit and celebration,
How many names
Come from this mighty conurbation,
Household names like Sue Barker
And . . . .
Oh, Paignton.

The fizz
The rhythms
The heat
That metropolitan burn
That inner city beat
Dancing like lovers on the prom in the rain
Fighting off a seagull for a battered sausage
Gasping in wonder at the towers so chic
Stocking up on novelty gift farting gnomes
The romance of Lidls Neon reflected on wet paving slab
Romantic Latin music and a snog in Crossways
This sensual town
This gleaming barnacle
This paradise dank
This magical place
Oh, oh, oh!
Paignton.

Elvis Impersonator, Newton Abbot Station

A couple of weeks ago I was at Newton Abbot doing a bit of train-surfing. Train-surfing, I hear you ask. What’s he going on about? Train-surfing is a method I use so that I don’t have to get the local service all the way from Exeter to Paignton. It’s usually full of drunks and ne’erdowells and it clatters along like a bouncy castle and it’s really most uncomfortable. So if I get in it at Exeter Central, then I get off it at Exeter St David’s and catch the fast service as far as Newton Abbot.
That’s Train-surfing.
So I was at Newton Abbot the other day having train surfed from Exeter, and the local service to Paignton was just about to arrive, I was getting ready for it to pull in. When an Elvis impersonator shambled along the platform. And he was drunk.
‘Excuse me’, quoth he, ‘Do you like Elvis?’
Now I know this is sort of like seeing a vicar or a priest and the first thing them saying is ‘Do you like Jesus?’ But it actually happened. That’s the first thing that he asked.
‘He’s okay’, I replied.
‘Them people’, he said, pointing in a kind of drunk way to the town of Newton Abbot in general, ‘keep laughing at me’.
The man is dressed as Elvis.
‘How come?’
‘They only care that Elvis died on the toilet. I keep telling them that there’s more than that. He made great music. But all they care about was that he died on the toilet’.
‘He died on the toilet?’
‘Yeah. And they’re laughing at me because of it’.
I’ve never really liked Elvis, but I didn’t want to tell him this. I appreciate that he had a good voice and some good songs, but I’ve never really seen him as one of my favourite singers.
‘Do you like Elvis?’ He asked.
‘He was ok. But for me, the best singer of that period was Roy Orbison’.
Now, I’ve told this story to a friend of mine and she said that this is the moment when the whole encounter could have gone tits up. He could have reacted badly. But instead he said,
‘I love Roy Orbison! He was the best! Well, apart from Elvis, that is’.
By now the train was coming in and I decided that I didn’t want to be stuck with a drunk Elvis impersonator for the rest of the journey, so I decided on a cunning plan. I would let him get on and then run down to the next carriage.
‘Here’s your train’ I said to him.
‘You are’, he said, ‘a good bloke’.
And then he started that drunk persons thing that drunk men do when they have to shake your hand. Except he did it about three times.
‘A good bloke. And I’ve really enjoyed talking. Such a good bloke. If I ever see you in the pub I will buy you a pint. So good to meet you. Yeah. Roy Orbison. So good to meet a good person’. He said all this while shaking my hand.
At this point I realised that if I didn’t get on the train I’d miss it altogether. ‘You’d better get on’, I said, looking at the guard.
And as I watched him stumble on board, I managed to time it to perfection, running down to the next carriage and jumping on just as the guard blew his whistle.
I spent the rest of the journey hiding in the next carriage, squeezed up against the wall hoping that the Elvis impersonator didn’t see me.
As my friend Anne says, I seem to attract these sorts of people.