Tag Archives: writing

Poet in Residence on a Beam Trawler

POET IN RESIDENCE ON A BEAM TRAWLER

Cod, halibut, mackerel, rainbow mullets,
Brown turges, narrow-eyes loomheads,
Grand flappers, suspended marlin,
Norwegian screamers, ribbon-tailed Kenneths,
Sole, turbot, plaice, haddock,
Bulbous flatfish, flounder, spasm ray,
Honey roasted dogfish, the common eel,
To name but twenty species of fish.
And scampi, that’s twenty one.

And me? I think I’m gonna spew,
This old rusty tub flung round like
That Danish weather girl in the
Last series of Strictly,
Last night I honked up in my
Left welly
And only remembered this morning
When I put it on.

The trawlermen here have all got nicknames.
Stinky Sam is our captain,
I’d follow him to the ends of the earth, I would!
And Stinky James, our cook,
And Stinky Jim, who looks after the engine,
And Stinky Bill and Stinky Keith,
Who gut the fish.
These are the nicknames
That I’ve given them.

I was so cold last night
That my nipples went really big.
I had a weird dream
That I was stroking a caterpillar.
And in the morning Stinky Keith said,
‘Gosh, my moustache feels really smooth’.

Oh, the banter!
This morning I was laughingly called
A barnacle-encrusted puke-soaked
Impertinent half-witted buttock,
And I said,
‘Nice to hear from you too, Mum.’

Out on deck,
Hauling in a big load with Stinky Jim.
‘Do trawlers often sink?’, I yelled,
Above the clatter of the engine.
He replied, ‘usually only the once’.

Gutting fish with Stinky Bill,
He’s seen it all, has Stinky Bill
Looks one way, then the other,
And says,
‘Sonny Jim,
Have you ever been sexually aroused
By a walru…’.
I said ‘no.’

And a giant octopus stole my cheese sandwich
And a sperm whale
Tried to mate with us
And I was winked at
By a squid
And I’d never seen so many crabs!
And our captain was out on deck
With a jumping rope
Jumping up and down
I suppose that’s why they call him
The Skipper.

And the sea got rough
And I spent the whole afternoon
Being tossed
As the trawler rose up
Through swell and wave
And the skies spat rain
They were ever so brave
This lonely tub
On the wide wide sea
Perhaps this was the wrong moment
To tell Stinky Pete
That he would make my life complete.

He slapped me
With a gurnard.

Yay!

‘Yay’ is the title of my new book, to be published by Burning Eye, and my new solo show, both of which are due to come out in the Spring of 2021. I’ve been working on both of these projects for a couple of years and I thought I would explain what I’ve been up to.

‘Yay’ will be a collection of upbeat poems, most of which tell a story or deal with a very specific place. Some of them are a little bit silly, some of them are somewhat life affirming, some of them are downright weird! And all of them are comedic in tone. The whole collection has been designed to make you laugh or smile.

The collection was devised a couple of years ago when it seemed that the world couldn’t get any more depressing. Naturally, after I started working on the project, it then suddenly did! The book contains poems from In the Glare of the Neon Yak, and Spout, my two solo shows, as well as material from my new upcoming show which will accompany the book.

The show will be called ‘Yay! : The Search for Happiness’. It was written in the first few months of this year and I have begun the process of trying to learn the thing. Indeed, I have been working with a director, the wonderful Dr Maggie Irving, with some funding from Torbay Culture, and she has been instructing me in the art of mime, movement and body expression. Unlike my previous shows, ‘Yay! : The Search for Happiness’ will have no props at all, just myself and a microphone. So in other words, I need all the help I can get! The reason for this is simply that I wont have to lug bags and boxes of props all over the country.

I’m still working on the collection. At the moment I’m in the process of deciding which poems will definitely be included. And of course, new ones keep arriving. It’s a very exciting time at the moment!

I’m looking forward to getting the book and the show out there into the world. Fingers crossed, of course, that there will be a fringe circuit next year. But if not, I’ll find a way to bring Yay! to your town.

Hive of activity on the hottest day of the year

On the hottest day of the year I went down to the docks and just watched the trawlers and those working on and around them.

Hive of activity on the hottest day of the year

Welders and painters, sparks flying
From angle grinders, clouds of
Black exhaust, electricity generators,
Shouts and yelling and drilling and movement
And fork lifts and pick-ups and crates
Of fresh catch fish ice packed and
Unloaded as ropes are slung and
Boats tied secure and everywhere a motion
‘Of individuals and yellow wellies and
Sweat brows wiped and amidst all
This toil unnoticed across the trawler
Basin entrance, a lone paddle-boarder,
Vain and so painfully superfluous.

All-night humming at the ice factory

One of the most unsettling things of living in Brixham is the presence of a perpetual hum. Not everyone can hear it and these hums have also been heard in other places around the world. Some people reckon that this is a supernatural manifestation. And while I’m not discounting that, the most likely explanation for Brixham is that it is the ice factory down on the quay, manufacturing ice for the trawlers to use for their catch.

All-night humming at the ice factory

At night I dream of the ice factory
Manufacturing glittered frost under corrugated iron,
Snow on cue, sleet on demand,
I dream as it chills the night for me
And glaciers the dawn.

Three in the morning, in sweated sheets
Flung aside!
Windows open and not a breath of air,
There’s a humming noise coming from the quay.
What could that purring
Possibly be?

I’d like a snowdrift, please,
And ice so fine you can
See right through it!
I want to see my breath
In the trawler lights!

The sweat is rolling down my face,
And the hum, that’s just adding to the
Intensity of it all,
And a throb of engines too,
The sweat is rolling down my face.
Don’t tease me.
Freeze me.
be my icy queen!

Get me through this night!

At night I dream of the ice factory,
An ice conveyer belt and iced up workers,
Hauling ice and shovelling ice
And moaning about the cold.
Snow on cue, sleet on demand,
Blizzarding the morning as the sun rises
Over the trawler basin
And I moan and sweat as a clock strikes three.

Thirty years man and boy

I chatted to a trawlerman who’d done nothing else since leaving school. All he ever wanted to be was a fisherman.

Thirty years man and boy

For the sea creates sublime the mystery into which
A sprinkling of science and good knowledge of
Fish behaviour, patterns, historical trends and tides,
Like magicians, I am unable to divulge
The secrets at the heart of it lest less
Moral skippers may learn my methods;
Nonetheless let it be said that I often point my craft
Away from the fleet, tap into knowledge and
Then return with bigger loads; are you
Familiar with the methodology? And of course,
A hint of guesswork.

Thirty years man and boy, I’ve not done anything else,
Got my sea legs but even I spent the first six months
Spewing into a bucket, had to hide it,
Didn’t want the others to think I was soft or
Not cut out for this, but the sunrise over the
Eastern sea when you stare up the Channel that,
Oh, that can lift you and it lasts all day, a
Bright sun over a flat calm sea and you just know
It’s going to be a good haul.

In the dead of night in fluorescent glare I
Toil amid the flung sea spray salt lipped
In the inky boiling mass whose mystery is a
Locker that even the bravest dare not ponder,
Treacherous death washed with every foam-topped wave,
The craft itself rocking, you really don’t want
To think of the dynamics as the nets slung each side
Reach down ever so into oblivion, there are
Mechanics at work here that can be
Truly frightening, you just don’t want to think.

In a bed-warm slumbers my wife and kids and
While I envy their comfort, my toil makes it so,
Industry and sweat into eiderdown and a full fridge,
While those loving arms propel me forwards, further,
More exuberant, before beckoning me home that I
May regain my strength on the sofa surrounded by love.
What kind of amnesiac goes back?
But as I say, thirty years man and boy, and
The sea – oh, it runs through my veins.

I like it here

I like it here

They cling to the hills like multicoloured limpets,
Slate tile roofs shining, fish scales reflecting
Sodium streetlights, the salt air
Curling in from a dark abyss.

This whole place is yours, right?
No, just two rooms on the second floor.

And is either of those a private cinema?
No, but you can get nextdoor’s wifi in the khazi.

I like it here.
This corner of the universe.
I dream of escape
But I’ll never leave.

I like it here.
It matches my soul
The centuries fold in
They embrace me.

I like it here.
So cosy here.
It feels I’m the century’s daughter
Though I feel like a fish out of water.

I like it here.
I feel no fear.
I can be me here.

I like it here,
This is my home.
If only I didn’t
Feel so . .

(Get a proper place)
I like it here
(Move on to another town)
I like it here
(Buy a mansion in the Hollywood hills)
I like it here
(Let me show you the world!)
I like it here
I like it here
I like it here

They cling to the hills like multicoloured limpets,
Slate tile roofs shining, fish scales reflecting
Sodium streetlights, the salt air
Curling in from a dark abyss.
I like it here.

Do you hear the sea still calling?

When the First World War started, the Brixham fishing fleet found itself depleted with sailors and fishermen called away to war. Others stayed behind, exempt so long as they carried on supplying the nation with fish. Old sea hands found themselves back out at sea with cadets and schoolboys. But there was danger, beyond the usual danger, of mines and U-boats, and snagging nets on sunken wrecks.

Do you hear the sea still calling?

Sea-dogs and cabin-lads,
Cooks and schoolboys, cadets
And old hands with tales to tell.
It’s so dark at one in the morning.
Do you hear the sea still calling?

A generation called to war,
A fleet depleted,
A country undefeated,
Patriotic employment,
U-boat periscope deployment
Seemingly without any warning,
Do you hear the sea still calling?

A metal spike broke the surface,
Gift from a silent foe this
Mechanical creature from the deep,
‘Say your prayers, lads’,
And every hand dare not breathe lest
An errant wave should draw it to the hull . . .
Detonate
Deploy
Smithereens
Heart-rates slowly falling,
Do you hear the sea still calling?

Tin fish on the high seas,
Literal minefields,
Sweepers and sleepers
Trawler nets a-haul
Souls entwined in brine
The ceaseless march of time
Trawlers keep on trawling,
Do you hear the sea still calling?

Margaret of Ladram Leaves the Quay

Margaret of Ladram Leaves the Quay

A single blast from the horn
Echoes from the quayside wall –
Margaret of Ladram
Moves at a crawl,
Stately in her choreographed dance,
With a slow turn, churns the sea
And moves with a surprising ease,
This hulk of metal and rope and hope,
Yellow beams high like a surrendering thief.

Solo skipper

As a part of the ongoing Squidbox project, I spent an enjoyable half hour or so on a trawler in the harbour owned by a wonderful chap called Tristan, who told me all about his job as a solo skipper on the smallest boat in the Brixham fleet.

Solo skipper

Just for a moment, when you’re out there
With the sun and the gulls and the sea,
If you have time, you let out a sigh
And think,
‘I am my own boss, master of my destiny.
I have grabbed the day and made it mine!’

I may be a solo skipper,
A crew of one on the smallest boat in the fleet,
But I’m part of something larger,
A passion that is in my blood and in the souls
Of everyone in this town whose livelihoods
And dreams are at one with the tides.

It doesn’t really matter what I catch
So long as it’s got eyes and an arsehole,
It’s caught by me, from sea to shore and sold by me,
A lonely dot on the wild wide sea,
From net to quay,
Yes, master of my destiny!

Through winter squalls and the squawk of gulls
To the slap of waves on the bow and the hull,
Through summer sun and autumn fogs
To the warm embrace of this rock-clung port,
This sixty year-old sturdy machine
Purrs and throbs like a living thing.

When tides are rough and times are tough
And the day is an ache and you’ve had enough,
Tomorrow will be different,
The sea less belligerent,
And though I’m always vigilant I’ll feel that sweetness
Deep inside enmeshed in belief
And the usual, eternal pride.

In the Glare of the Neon Yak

In the Glare of the Neon Yak was written between 2016 and 2017 having gone through several incarnations, starting as a show called Vestibule Dreams, about people standing at the end of a packed train and sharing their stories.

The story of the Yak is based on that of Herne the Hunter, the mythical ghost who used to haunt several places including Windsor Great Park, near where I grew up.

I took the show all over the UK to various fringes and festivals culminating in a run at Edinburgh. And in 2019 I did a live version with the Totnes jazz band Shadow Factory.