The Psychogeographer – Page 14

Posted on September 27, 2022September 29, 2022 by Liam Guilar

A Queen in the Wilderness

LIAM GUILAR‘s epic of post-Roman Britain enters its eighth chapter

The Story So Far (Chapters 2-7 inclusive have all previously been published on this site, starting here). The complete poem will be published as A Man of Heart in 2023, by Shearsman.

Mid Fifth Century Britain. After the legions have withdrawn, the island is facing civil war, a growing number of external enemies and a steady tide of pagan migrants looking for land.

Vortigern has been appointed to protect what’s left of Roman Britain. Following standard imperial practice, he has employed Saxon mercenaries led by Hengist. Together they have defeated the immediate threat of an army of Picts and a Northern rebellion and stabilised the province. Vortigern has married Hengist’s daughter.

Part two begins with Vortigern leading the Field Army towards a meeting of the Northern Lords, hoping to convince them that a unified province is in their best interests. The precarious balance of power he has established is about to be destroyed.

1

Damp woollen clothes,

the itch and stink of them,

never dried, except when smoked

acrid by the heat of a fire.

Rain falls, drifts, batters,

the wind skins the rocks

or drags mist from the hollows

while the clouds smother the hill tops.

Ragged local guides thread

the mounted column

through unmapped valleys.

Occasionally the mountain wall

greyer than the clouds

curves the northern horizon.

Riders keeping below the ridge,

following the main party.

Like guilt, thought Vortigern,

not enough to stop his progress;

a persistent qualification

intent on being noticed.

Confrontation seemed inevitable.

He rode towards it.

The lead rider, Hengist’s latimer,

dismounted, knelt and greeted him.

The second removed the gilded helmet

shook out her hair and said:

‘Wæs hæilVortigern Cyning.’[ii]

The drab hillsides patched with torn cloud,

the finest of drizzle-intensified colours,

the brown horse, the green, rain darkened cape.

Her hair, like dull gold, shaking loose.

Hengist’s delighted chuckle.

A sound so rare,

he turned to see who was behind him.

Dull gold of her hair.

Finger tipping an impossible softness.

He claws for his mind but undressing

a marvel

green eyes

watch

like a diver

assessing the risk

before

committing herself to gravity.

Fingertipping, soft

a marvel but

it’s cold here and the escort is waiting.

Green eyes

wide open, watching?

‘Lauerd king wæs hæil;

For þine kime ich æm uæin.’

It’s cold here and the escort is waiting.

‘This is no place for a Queen.

I left you safe, with your uncle.

We ride towards a confrontation.

Go home.’

‘My home is with my husband.

I have come to see the lands you gave me.

You are riding I think to a council,

a gathering of the northern tribes.’

‘Go home, lady.

This is no fit place for a Queen.’

He turns back to the valley floor.

The riders follow,

keeping just below the ridge line.

Like guilt, he thinks.

The column camped beside dark water.

He approved the choice of ground,

checked there were skirmishers along the heights,

made sure the baggage train was safely in,

waited for the rear guard to arrive.

See him talking with his officers,

noticing their discipline

making time to hear their stories,

in the bustle of the camp,

where behaviour is defined

as clearly as the perimeter

he rides out to inspect,

ignoring the presence

dragging at his attention.

Tents pitched, guards posted,

before the light began to fade

he wandered through the lines,

through the susurration

of tired conversations

stopping to talk to weary riders

commending them on the care

they gave each other, their arms and horses.

His world, where he was most at home,

contaminated by their shadow,

stopped on higher ground,

erecting simple shelters.

She sits beside the latimer

watching the busy camp below.

‘I stopped counting things I’d never seen before.’

‘There were too many?’

‘Yes. The way

water spills from the cliff top and wavers as it falls.

Clouds and birds below us, in the valley.

My uncle hates mountains,

says they remind him of a heaving sea.

What is the best word to describe

how stray clouds drift across the hillside?’

‘Drift is good.’

‘They remind me of assassins.’

‘In daylight?’

‘Not all assassins wait for darkness.’

Small figures

scrambling towards them,

become Vortigern

and his guard

slithering in the scree.

Keredic removed himself.

A man can turn a hill into a mountain;

an evening stroll into an epic climb.

From the valley floor

he could see a band of rock,

her tethered horse cropping the grass,

the shadow of a cave.

Then the damp fog became the world.

Smooth stones skittering behind him,

stalled in a dreamlike lack of progress.

She was sitting inside the cave.

She did not rise or greet him.

‘Lady. This is not wise or safe.’

‘Not safe? Here?

In the green world, in the wind and rain.

There are no dangers here that can’t be faced.

But stranded in a hut, hedged

by brutal threats and body parts?

No reason to greet the day

or welcome the night?

This is not safety but burial,

alive, behind locked doors

until the stallion calls to rut.

I am not ‘Hengist’s daughter’

live bait to trap a wary fox.

I am myself. And I chose you.’

When he had finished,

she waited for him to leave

but he lay beside her,

on one side of the causeway

looking to the mythic landfall

on the other side.

He had heard the stories

of the cottage in the woods.

A stand of body parts

and heads that shrieked

if anyone approached.

What had she recognised in him?

He had done nothing to earn

this devotion.

2.

The rain intensifies.

A man is speaking quietly,

someone laughs.

Keredic is singing.

His song sounds older than the rocks.

She is no longer Hengist’s daughter.

Or the wife of Vortigern the King.

She is like rock, tree or river,

as certain as the mountains

and as patient, waiting

for his act of recognition.

Half way across, and no more stones.

He can go back, he’s always done before.

Rise, fumble for his clothes.

Or he can brave the distance to the other side.

If it’s a choice?

A man stands in the cathedral ruins

looking at the sky.

The bombed reality softened by a memory

of upright walls, unbroken roof.

Even if ghosts and stray dogs

scuffle in the garbage

he can remember people in the pews,

the drift of sacred music,

the certainties of ritual.

Easier to live here,

where the shattered past

still feels like home than leap into a world

that’s blank and waiting to be born?

No maps, no rules, no precedent.

When a Queen rides, armed, in the wilderness

this is an unimagined world.

‘Lady, may I stay with you tonight?

And tomorrow, would you ride with me?’

They say: her smile is like the sunrise;

the slow spread of light and promise

after the horrors of the night,

but she never smiled at ‘them’ like this.

And later, she says, ‘But tomorrow night

we find a bed with fewer stones?’

3

Teetering over the river

the complex was scattered,

across the flat hill top

like bad teeth in a jawbone;

great hall like a strange squat wooden tent

with a scattering of huts

surrounded by a ditch and palisade.

A growth on the land,

like hanging smoke,

beside a barrow

where the ancestors slept.

A chaos of temporary shelters

festering down the slope;

banners and stacked spears,

horses, mules, carts.

Men clustered around small fires,

watching as they pass.

After days in the dripping quiet of the hills,

they were ambushed by noise and movement

crashing the private space she had begun to craft.

The bellowing of slaughtered cattle.

Carpenters hammering and sawing

as huts went up to hold guests;

the smiths at work. Everyone

with a job to do and a place to be

swirling them into public routines.

She watched the Lords accumulate to greet him.

Then he was gone, as though the sea had surged

and dragged him off the beach into the rip

that sped him out towards the sky line

leaving her bereft and stranded.

Wives and daughters came to greet her,

took the bridle, set off in procession,

leading her towards an isolated hut.

Slaves brought silver bowls

with steaming water,

sweet smelling oils;

the women bobbed and fussed,

admired how beautiful she was,

then left and closed the door.

Next day, in the great hall,

Vortigern accepted homage,

dispensed gifts, discussed plans,

handed down judgements.

Alone in a hut that smelt

of smoke and fresh cut timber,

she was prowling from wall to wall.

Dressed in the finest silk

provided by their hosts,

hair dressed, jewels shining,

a predatory goddess

no slaughter could appease.

The silver dishes

scattered to the corners,

fine white towels thrown across the room,

the servants fled in terror.

She was waiting for the horns

that would summon her to the feast

when Keredic entered

to escort her to the hall.

Wall hangings flicking the firelight.

A tripod burning something fragrant.

No loom, no Mother Gothel.

I will hone my knife and hunt him down.

‘If I am Queen: this is my country?

Should I not be there when they discuss its future?’

Impossible to explain,

not one man in ten thousand

would have taken her to the gathering

and of that number, not one in a million

would have listened to a word she said.

‘Twenty four paces from hut to hall?

The door shut and guards all round.

Twenty four paces from where I should be.

I might as well be stranded on an island

staring at the cliffs and cut off by the tide,

locked here until he wants to fuck

his princess titznkuntnhair.’

4

If you were listening,

you could hear Dame Fortune

spin her wheel

and smile.

‘Chieftain,’ said his host,

‘God smiles on you.

Lords of the North,

retinues like honed blades

ready for war,

secure in their indifference

came here to talk.

Bishops and book-learned men

recording their agreements.

3 weeks, and not one death.

You have sold them an idea:

the priest safe with his flock,

the famer will go to his field,

the merchant to the market.

Ships bringing goods to our ports

and our roads busy with trade.

Chieftain, you are truly blest.

3 weeks we’ve feasted.

The bards of the north

have come to compete

for praise and honeyed mead.

Magnificent stories,

music to gladden the heart

and the last three nights

your wife as my companion at the table.

On God’s wide earth she has no match

for wit and wisdom. She knows

5

Rowena sitting straight backed

staring at her fire.

We see her from behind.

Then her face in profile

as the sound she’s waiting for

breaks.

Vortigern straightens,

entering the room.

Stalled. Baffled. Wondering.

She rises. ‘Oh foolish man,’

she says, seeing his surprise,

‘when will you ever learn?’

The sound of a door being closed.

Perhaps he managed,

‘I watched you leave’

or, ‘I’m so sorry.’

An awkward blur of mouths,

hands, her hands, his hands, hard to tell.

Nose to nose,

he asks the golden lady,

‘What would you do?’

She had waited for this door to open.

But now the gate’s swung wide,

invited in, she pauses on the threshold;

‘I can taste winter; smell it on the wind.

Ice darkens the edges of puddles,

the thick mud hardens into rut and fold

and the wind tests the walls.

Outdoors everyone has begun to hurry.

The space from dwelling to hall becomes an ordeal.

Soon only the numbed sentry,

counting the cursed hours of his watch,

will stay squinting into the hazed light,

knowing no army moves in winter.’

‘Gloucester knows the northern winter.

He was trapped here on The Wall,

searching for his legion.

We’ve all heard his snowbound stories;

roads they had to swim across,

mud so deep men drowned in it.’

‘They were impatient,

their timing is inept.

Why are you smiling?’

‘Because incompetence is unpredictable.

They went too late or far too early.

The gods look down,

indifferent to our careful planning

and give their blessings to stupidity.’

‘I would go deep into the hills,

find a place we can defend

with half the men we have.

Then wait for Hengist to return.

And if I couldn’t find that place,

I’d build it, quickly.’

‘They‘ll expect us to go north.

We will go south and west and then

prey upon those who have betrayed us.’

‘We’ll plague the sleeping lords,

drunk by their cosy fires.

Burn their homes, steal their cattle,

kill their friends and families

and then come spring,

with Hengist’s help,

brush the remnants off the map.’

Vortigern called his officers together,

explained the friends and places lost,

named those who stood beside them.

‘You have been loyal. Now,

we travel to high country,

hard travelling, constant vigil.

From the mountains in the west,

we will fall upon the rebel lords,

we will reprimand their insolence.

They will learn the price of disobedience.’

The northern lords knelt before him.

‘Send for us when you are ready:

we will ride beside you.

Take our sons as hostages and guides.’

Local guides thread the column

through unmapped valleys.

The mountain wall

greyer than the clouds

leans forward to embrace them.

[i] Old English Cwēn meant both ‘woman’ and ‘queen’.

[ii] Cyning, Old English for King, is pronounced ku-ning.

[iii] From The Vulgate. Genesis 2:18: ‘The Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him’

Liam Guilar

LIAM GUILAR is Poetry Editor of The Brazen Head, and the author of several poetry collections, including the series A Man of Heart, Presentment of Englishry and The Fabled Third (Shearsman), set in post-Roman Britain. His most recent publication is a translation of the Mabinogion folk-tale How Culhwch Won Olwen (Shearsman, 2026)

Posted on September 25, 2022October 4, 2022 by Paul Garner

Lincolnshire – a land apart

Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire

Derek Turner, Hurst & Co., 2022, hb., 446pps, 32 col. Illus. & map, £20

PAUL GARNER enjoys a survey of an oddly little-known county

Edge of England is a rich tapestry woven of many threads—history, nature, industry, geography, religion and folklore—all intertwining to create a picture full of interest. It tells the story, or rather multiplexity of stories, of the author’s adopted county of Lincolnshire, an unjustly overlooked and unfashionable part of England, one that is often, as the author reminds us in his opening chapter, the butt of snide jokes and liberal disdain. Turner’s book challenges this snobbery and prejudice, revealing “a county like no other … an England time half-forgot, where you can still find an unabashed past inside an unpretentious present—and freedom and space on a little offshore island”.

Turner delights the reader with captivating tales of eccentric characters, atmospheric places and intriguing events, his wide reading and breadth of knowledge apparent on every page. A thousand and one rabbit trails are laid by the author, any one of which could profitably be followed by an inquisitive reader. We learn about the lives and times of many sons and daughters of the shire, some well-known, others less so. Among the colourful characters that we meet are parliamentarians, scientists, explorers, military men, poets and writers, and religious figures.

The more familiar include John Wesley, the evangelical clergyman whose spirited preaching was the fountainhead of the emerging Methodist movement, Sir Isaac Newton, the scientific prodigy who developed differential calculus while sheltering from the plague at Woolsthorpe in 1665, and Dutch engineer, Cornelius Vermuyden, whose land reclamation work met with fierce opposition from locals, who feared dispossession. But we are also introduced to less familiar personalities, such as the cantankerous nineteenth-century contrarian, Sir Charles Sibthorp, who, as MP for the city of Lincoln, vehemently opposed steam railways, water closets and barrel organs, the polymathic Sir Joseph Banks, who accompanied Captain Cook aboard HMS Endeavour, and amassed important collections of botanical specimens, and the demon-afflicted Saint Guthlac, who, at the end of the seventh century, established a hermitage at Crowland, destined, after his death, to become a monastic centre and place of Christian pilgrimage.

Turner writes with affection of the ordinary people of Lincolnshire. They are kind, practical, helpful and courteous, even to outsiders, and when they get to know you “accord you the ultimate sign of acceptance—telling you about the idiocy of London”. He describes, with wistful melancholia, Lincolnshire’s lost villages, decaying industries and disappearing ways of life, but does not rub salt into the wounds in the fashion of some unkind commentators. Grimsby may be down-at-heel today, with “a depressed town centre, and too much bad housing”, but Turner writes movingly of the skill and bravery of its sailors and fishermen, and the fortitude of their families, ensuring that the reader knows of the town’s epic origins, regal connections, and dogged “tough pride.”

Many absorbing stories are related, ranging from the whimsical and quirky to the ghoulish and macabre. There is the curious tale of the “Stamford Schism”, an ill-fated attempt by a cadre of unhappy students and tutors from Oxford to establish a rival institution at Stamford in 1333. It was a short-lived venture, the brass door knocker the students took with them when they left Oxford now proudly displayed above high table at Brasenose, in the manner of a spoil of war. The Haxey Hood is another oddity, a game played every January in the town of Haxey, during which enthusiastic locals chase a group of costumed “Boggins” around the town in pursuit of a leather bolster, ostensibly re-enacting an incident with a riding hood said to have taken place almost 700 years ago.

Grisly crimes, pogroms and witch trials are also part of the county’s story. For instance, Turner tells of the tragic death of poor Mary Kirkham in 1806, and the execution of her murderer and erstwhile suitor, Tom Otter, whose skull was said to have provided a home for nesting blue tits when he was gibbeted at Saxilby. However, one of the darkest episodes in the county’s history took place in 1255, when an antisemitic rumour began to circulate in Lincoln that a young boy named Hugh had been murdered by a local Jewish man. This led not only to the arrest, torture and execution of the suspect, but the imprisonment of ninety-one others, eighteen of whom were also executed. The boy’s burial place became a shrine, and “Little Saint Hugh” acquired legendary status, becoming the subject of ballads and folk songs.

Those who, like me, appreciate tales of the strange and uncanny will enjoy reading about the ghostly goings-on at Epworth Rectory, home, in the eighteenth century, not only to the Wesleys, but also, it was said, to a noisy and disincarnate spirit called “Old Jeffrey”. We learn of the spectral “Green Lady” who haunts a tree-lined avenue near Thorpe Hall in Louth, and the “Black Lady” of Bradley Woods, still weeping for her lost children. The county also has tales of water sprites, wild men and mysterious big cats, and, although not mentioned by Turner, Black Shuck, the demonic hellhound that patrols the county’s byways, its red eyes flaming like coals through the fen mists.¹ Anyone eager to explore the supernatural aspects of Lincolnshire further may want to consult a series of hair-raising articles by Rob Gandy in recent editions of Fortean Times.²

Turner says of the Lincolnshire-born antiquarian, William Stukeley, that he could see “the magic of words”. If so, Stukeley would have appreciated the spellbinding mellifluosity of Turner’s own writing. Almost every page yields memorable examples. Consider, for instance, Turner’s charming distillation of one village’s peculiarities and idiosyncrasies as “a little ampoule of English eccentricity” – his spinetingling description of old gateways as “unquiet, touched by the memories of everyone who has ever gone through them, especially if they never came back” – and his description of a carved stone man, high on the forlorn ruins of Barlings Abbey, abandoned at the time of the Dissolution, “stuck in eternal outrage, his mouth forever open as if howling at all this sacrilege and sky”. Turner sees poetry in the everyday, as when he recalls a dead carrion crow, “lying in a patch of sun beneath trees, intact and gleamingly black, studded with iridescent greenbottles, like a mislaid piece of Visigoth jewellery”, or when he waxes lyrical about the vistas that open up from the Humber bridge, “especially to the west on a warm evening when it has been raining, with the sun going down in splendour, and backlit air and water so full of each other that it is like being inside a pearl”.

The reader is also treated to some wonderfully dry asides, perhaps my favourite being an anecdote about a cringeworthy sermon given by the new Bishop of Lincoln at his enthronement, its low culture references jarring awkwardly with the high pomp of the ceremony that had preceded it. Turner concludes, somewhat archly, “The Order of Service read ‘After the sermon, silence is kept for a few moments,’ and it was, but not necessarily for the right reasons”.

Edge of England is a book to savour and is accompanied by thirty-two colour plates and a rather beautiful, Tolkienesque map in which the Wolds take on something of the aspect of the “misty mountains”.

Notes

Ethel Rudkin, ‘The Black Dog,’ Folklore 49 no. 2, 111-131 (1938).
‘The Ruskington horror,’ Fortean Times 401, 32-38 (January 2021); ‘The Ruskington horror: part 2,’ Fortean Times 402, 38-43 (February 2021); ‘The Ruskington goblin,’ Fortean Times 405, 48-38 (May 2021); ‘Weird wheels of the Wolds,’ Fortean Times 407, 48-51 (July 2021); ‘Scary stories from Scunthorpe,’ Fortean Times 411, 48-52 (November 2021); ‘Not the face,’ Fortean Times 414, 46-47 (January 2022); ‘Lincolnshire’s bevy of the bizarre,’ Fortean Times 416, 44-48 (March 2022); ‘A warning to the Fortean,’ Fortean Times 421, 42-45 (August 2022); ‘A grand fen-ale!’ Fortean Times 423, 42-45 (October 2022)

Paul Garner

PAUL GARNER is a researcher, speaker and writer based in the Cambridgeshire Fens. His interests include the natural sciences, Christian theology, classic TV sci-fi and fantasy, British folklore, and the ghost stories of M. R. James. He is also a dancer with the Devil’s Dyke Morris Men

Posted on September 23, 2022September 24, 2022 by Derek Turner

A painter’s peregrinations

Field Notes: Walking the Territory

Maxim Peter Griffin, London: Unbound, 132pps, hb., £16.99

DEREK TURNER admires a unique landscape artist

Several years ago, when I was thinking about writing a book about Lincolnshire, I found a strikingly original Twitter account. Almost every day, the seemingly tireless Maximpetergriff posted pictures painted during or after apparently endless walks across Lincolnshire, in all weathers and states of mind, showing the things he had seen in clear and luminous tones – birds, buildings, clouds, dogs, people, planes, planets, plants, pylons, rains, roads, skies, stars and suns.

These things had not just been seen, but looked at – everyday things uplifted by a strong sense of their possibilities, made resplendent in modern hues. Nothing seemed beneath this observer’s notice, nothing predictable in this parallel Lincolnshire, his glowing images intercut with staccato captions about bats overflying, bridges crossed, dogs howling, insects hurrying, litter lying, people overheard, the smell from takeaways, strange stones picked up, waterways running slickly away under moonlight.

The images were small, apparently simple and spontaneous, but in truth were full of thought. This was a county beyond conventional depictions, a painterly psychogeography; here were Englands within England. This walker was no pedestrian, but dashed off little-known vistas with verve, influenced by the likes of Nash and Piper while also being confidently contemporary; as he records, “two older ramblers look on the work with dismay”.

Some of these evanescent images have now been confined within the boundaries of a book, crowdfunded by those who liked this take on this territory. Field Notes’ freeze-frame cover suggests the unusualness of the author’s perspectives, and the élan of his approach. A redder than real sun stands in a yellow-brown sky, silhouetting black grasses. Geese power south from Scandinavia in a sky like a destroyer’s dazzle pattern. Suggestions of cirrus shadows spot Ravilious-reminiscent fields. Cruciform crows angle home over saltmarsh. White pylons overlay lands filled with decayed life-forms. On the inside back cover, where we expect an author photograph, we find a fugitive Everyman in a raincoat, painted from behind on a beach improbably alchemised from greens and blacks – the self-effacing artist as Sebaldian character, stepping out sturdily across the echoing east.

Griffin is sometimes sentimental, but never nostalgic; the book, like many of his Twitter posts, ends on the word “Onwards”. Yet he honours equally the mammoths that stomped drowned Doggerland (whose bones are taken up by trawlers), the antiquarians and eccentrics who discovered or dreamed our ideas of England, and today’s young English, heedlessly in the moment yet standing on the same fossiliferous foundations. Seams of gaseous Kimmeridge, outcrops of chalk, flint hagstones, the slimed tree-roots exposed at the lowest tides and the movements of muntjac are in a continuum with John Aubrey, boys on BMX bikes, exhausted seaside resorts and whooshing wind-turbines, while overhead ley-lines intersect with jet-fighter flight paths.

Field Notes is an account of one closely-noticed, deeply felt year in Lincolnshire, starting for the author (predictably, unpredictably) in October, with a Humbrol-hazed moon announcing the equinox, and the coming of the cold. “Look – the peak of autumn”, he marvels – with anthropophagical arachnids eating each other on barbed wire, RAF Chinooks, leaking boots, geological specimens arriving in the post, and ancient tracks to towerless churches passed over by Pevsner. “Look” again, he urges us, at the waning of the year, the chiaroscuros of clouds, the shadows of fences, the darkness under trees, the unlikely reds of earth, the arsenics and Prussian blues of limitless firmaments.

November brings branches waving against vastness, bleached bones in dunes, beachcombed sealskins and plastic bottles, deserted caravan parks, huge ships hove to off Spurn Point, memories of the drowned. An Airfix-coloured pillbox gives rigidity to the dynamic landscape, and a gun port leads into blacker than blackness. December holds the old names of ditches, mysterious murmurations, Mesolithic mirrors, thoughts of Raymond Briggs and memories of Mablethorpe Carnival Queens, the turning of this twelvemonth accepted as part of the epic, indifferent, unalterable cosmic churn; “The ocean will have us all – good.” Deep Time, East Midlandian history and today meet and mingle, even his cooking over campfires a sensory link with aurochs-eating, the crude charcuterie once carried out in willow-meads ages ago eaten by the waves.

Month by month, step by sometimes blistered step, sketch by swift sketch, we glimpse something of this arcane county’s blend of beauty and bathos, its grand desolations so often made mean by bungalows, car boots, leylandii, phone masts, and the demolition derbies of Skegness. There is grit in this Lincolnshire, some hardness and ugliness – asbestos sheds, chicken concentration-camps with humming extractors and the sharp stink of ammonia, algae-choked dykes, desperate biro notes found on the ground, rat-gnawed rubbish, washed-up whales, a man in an oxygen mask expending too much of his short time selling 1970s cassettes. But the overarching impression is deeply positive – room to breathe and self-realisation under the biggest of big skies, despite the oncoming storm-fronts of life.

Field Notes is filmic, impressionistic, and personal. It also manages to be unpretentious. In Griffinland, knowledge of the exploits of Alexander, Welsh poetry, Kurosawa, or “our pal Pieter Bruegel the Elder” co-exist chummily with pop blasting from cars, addicts passed out in hedges, shops selling tourist tat, and lost footballs floating out to the estuary. Phrases that from others might have been merely gnomic point towards places you’d want to visit. Even those who have some acquaintance with Lincolnshire will not be familiar with all the artist’s itineraries, and are certain to see new sights from his very particular vantage-points.

After long obscurity, Lincolnshire may be rejoining the mainstream of national history, with uncertain effects. This paean to little-known landmarks carries folk-memories forwards, while facing “Onwards” with equanimity. Ultimately, it suggests that whatever happens or is done, Lincolnshire has always been, and will always be, a land of graphic dreams.

Derek Turner

DEREK TURNER is the editor of The Brazen Head, as well as a novelist (A Modern Journey, Displacement, and Sea Changes) and widely-published reviewer. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published June 2022. Some of his writing may be found at www.derek-turner.com He is also on X – @derekturner1964

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Posted on September 23, 2022September 23, 2022 by Michael Yost

The Deadlift & Towards the Pebbled Shore

MICHAEL YOST is an essayist and poet living in rural New Hampshire with his wife and children. His essays and poems can be read at Crisis Magazine, Dappled Things, the St. Austin Review and Hearth and Field, as well as at his website, poetryofmichaelyost.com.

The Deadlift

The name rings hollow: pig-iron

In gravity’s deep wallow.

The unpoetic callus

On each palm’s pad too hard

To feel the microscopic knurl

Packed white with chalk, the burnished steel

Bar like some eel of river shining

Yet stippled still with the pock of rust.

The body, braced against itself feels fear

For its own softness, singing for sweet rest.

The plates all packed like brothers on the bar,

Their edges sharp from the white hot lip of the mold.

Then suddenly, the mind resolves itself to mass,

White pylons of tense bone, and round well fatted muscle,

Presses itself in feet and shin through concrete ground

And grinning, pulls through gravity like broken glass.

And there they hang, the bar and plate, all clattering in air,

Yet shaking violently as if they cannot stay, like leaves

or bells quite badly made, to ring the chimes and iron hours

Of body’s powers, pains, and passing finally away.

Towards the Pebbled Shore

My Papa took me out the day before

to sit outside the ancient red barn’s door,

All painted black, and sliding back to shut.

He told me I was helping him out, but

I couldn’t help but feel he wanted me

To witness something. I was there to see.

The barn’s inside was dim, and cellar-cool.

Its walls were lined with seed-bag, wire and tool;

The floorboards wide, unvarnished, roofbeams barked.

One long swift century had weathered, marked

It for its own. The sun outside showed all

The colors of the world there were. The ball

I played with sat still in the north field’s green

Long blades, bright rubber blue. The sheen

Of light struck firmly off each branch and stone

And gave each thing a presence all its own,

And lit the rock wall flaming low with moss,

As coals flame low and heavy in the loss

Of fire in evening. Papa loped out, took

The cockerel by his claws, and with a look

Of concentration laid him down upon

A stump, quite still. A stroke: the head was gone.

It fell down flat, heraldic, violently;

Beak parted, tongue out, crowing silently.

One eye looked up; alone, to watch the sky,

The other gazed at earth. The pool and dye

Of blood, much brighter red than you would think

Dripped down the empty ruff, in squib and plink

Into the metal bucket, drops of jewels

Upon a field. Invert, above these pools,

The bag of muscles twitched just where it was.

The dead bird’s gray pin feathers and gray fuzz

Soon littered all the lawn. The entrails out,

The feet off, Papa turned the bird about

And carved at each distinct and white-pink joint.

I stood and shuffled, looking at one point

At ground and sky, and back again as well,

Made nervous by the casual, wholesome smell

Of cockerel’s blood and feathers in the air.

I grabbed a quill, and put it in my hair.

At that age, I could barely think or talk;

But still some thing as round and firm as rock,

And yet as broad and moving as the gust

Of wind that blew that day came as it must;

Yet everything retained its form and color

And multiplied its mass; no shade was duller.

I knew myself as something with a shore,

Where water laps and freely spills. Before

I thought myself the world, some kind of all

Without circumference, gravity, or fall.

Michael Yost

MICHAEL YOST is a poet and essayist living in rural New Hampshire with his wife and children. His essays and poems have been published in places like Modern Age, First Things, The University Bookman, Dappled Things, The Brazen Head, and others. He substacks at The Weight of Form

Posted on August 3, 2022August 3, 2022 by Stuart Millson · 1 Comment

Summer with the Sinfonia

Tintagel. Photo: Chris Gunn. Wikimedia Commons

STUART MILLSON enjoys a super-orchestra’s seasonal offerings

The re-formed Sinfonia of London (a recording and film-score orchestra of the 1960s) appeared at the Proms on Saturday 16th July under the baton of the ever-popular John Wilson, for a concert of music by British composers. The programme was made up of Vaughan Williams’ 1910 Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, Welsh composer, Huw Watkins’s new Flute Concerto, the Partita by Walton, Bax’s 1917 Arthurian tone-poem, Tintagel, and Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’ of 1899.

The Sinfonia is a handpicked, super-orchestra – a superior “scratch-band” of top freelancers, players drawn from existing orchestras and even members of string quartets and chamber groups, dedicated to reviving the idea of “demonstration sound quality”, i.e. dazzling, virtuoso performance, chiefly in a studio setting. A previous example of this type of ensemble was the old National Philharmonic Orchestra, which appeared on the RCA label and notched up some notable recordings, often under conductors such as the suave American, Charles Gerhardt. But to have real life and vigour, an orchestra must play in public, so what better arena for publicising the dynamic stage presence of your orchestra than at the Proms on a Saturday evening, right at the beginning of the season?

And what finer non-ecclesiastical setting for a cathedral-inspired piece, such as the Tallis Fantasia, than the Royal Albert Hall, in which John Wilson cleverly created antiphonal special effects by placing part of his string band in a line, high on the right at the rear of the platform? The two bodies of strings answered each other: the music moving across the centuries, from Tallis’s Elizabethan sound-world of church voices, to the well-upholstered, romantic early 20th-century string writing of Vaughan Williams.

Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1898. British Library. Wikimedia Commons

The one new work in the programme, the Huw Watkins Flute Concerto also suited the hall’s great acoustic – a beautifully air-borne thing and (for this reviewer) strangely reminiscent of a scene from the Ken Loach film, Kes, about a boy from a deprived background, spiritually rescued by a chance ownership of a hawk. In the film, there is a moving scene where the boy takes his kestrel to a field at the edge of the northern town in which he little more than exists, and flies him with all the skill of a mediaeval falconer. The bird takes to the wing, accompanied by flute music, neither tuneful nor atonal, which seems to represent freedom, air, longing, space. All of those qualities were to be found in the Huw Watkins piece, played by distinguished soloist, Adam Walker.

The great (literally) landmark work of the evening was the 1917 tone-poem by Englishman and also Celtic enthusiast, Arnold Bax, Tintagel. The composer visited the dreamy north Cornwall coast with his mistress, fellow musician Harriet Cohen, and found deep escapism and solace in the ancient surroundings of rocky coast and the ever-present gentle, heaving breast of the sleepy Atlantic. The work begins in pure, clear-blue summertime, but as Bax pointed out in an explanation of the piece, not a windless day.

John Wilson’s orchestra began their evocation with gentle, dreamy woodwind conjuring a feeling of sea-birds and distances. The growing swell of the sea against the rocky sentinels of Cornwall’s headlands was beautifully executed in the surging, strong, cohesive orchestral tide of sound created by the Sinfonia. But just as quickly as the physical setting of Cornwall has been established, Bax then begins to dissolve it all, with the supernatural drama of the ancient kings, Arthur and Mark, and the destructive, legendary love of Tristan and Isolde – the latter, a symbol of Bax’s own romantic entanglement. The composer wrote several Celtic-folklore-inspired pieces and seven impressive, well-orchestrated symphonies (the Fourth being the most radiant and most-often played, although an outing for a Bax symphony is still a rare occasion).

What Tintagel represents is a (nearly) fifteen minutes-long condensed symphony – a clear, concise distillation of some of the more long-winded ideas which all long symphonic structures have, but which in the case of this piece are assembled with utterly persuasive and spellbinding cohesion and power. Not a note is wasted in Tintagel: there is a beginning, middle and an end, and like Sibelius’s The Oceanides (a tone-poem of some ten minutes), a listener or concertgoer can instantly know the composer just from this one calling-card piece.

With instantly recognisable pieces in mind, the concert concluded with Walton’s shimmering, Italianate Partita, written in the Mediterranean sun and siesta of the late 1950s – and Elgar’s Variations on an Original Theme, (‘Enigma’), penned at the end of the 19^th century, but looking forward with masterful confidence to a new century and (for Elgar) new successes and untold honours. Again, the Sinfonia of London matched the mood, its players responding with great physical commitment to the scores of these British giants; men whose music, in different ways, captured the spirit of our native music.

Skara Brae on the Orkneys. Photo: Daniel Bordeleau. Wikimedia Commons

Yet what really is our native music? – as BBC Radio 3’s Tom Service (a Scot) asked in the evening’s programme notes. Slightly dismissive of the insularity of the land “sandwiched between Hadrian’s Wall and the South Coast” (his words), the writer nevertheless correctly noted the way in which our music has transcended the country’s physical boundaries. However, metropolitan observers should not be so quick to dismiss country cottages and “folky-wolky melodies”. As Vaughan Williams pointed out, all great universal art is rooted in a place, whether Bach’s Lutheran northern Germany, or the Spain of Velazquez. And as Tom Service should know, modern composer Peter Maxwell Davies, who settled in the Orkney Islands, immersed himself in a Scottish island identity, garnering, like a beachcomber, every conceivable Orcadian cadence, myth into his music, showing just how powerful “insularity” can be as a creative inspiration.

The capacity audience at the Royal Albert Hall, not a bit dissuaded by the Met. Office’s red-alert, heat-wave weather warnings, gave the performers a typical Proms ovation. And John Wilson gave them in return, one more piece – an encore from Eric Coates’s Summer Days suite, a nostalgic, innocent waltz. Judging by the overflowing applause, it is a world that still means something to so many.

Stuart Millson

STUART MILLSON is a member of the Chartered Institute of Journalists, and a Contributing Editor to The Brazen Head

Posted on June 5, 2022June 5, 2022 by Liam Guilar

The good old days?

This is chapter Seven of LIAM GUILAR’s almost completed epic of Britain. Chapter One was published in Long Poem Magazine #25 Spring 2021, and Chapters Two, Three, Four, Five and Six in The Brazen Head. For more information about Hengist, Vortigern and the Legendary History, see www.liamguilar.com

The story so far. Mid Fifth Century Britain. After the legions have withdrawn, the island is facing civil war and a growing number of external enemies. It is also experiencing a steady tide of pagan, Germanic migrants looking for land.

A united province could withstand any invader, but Vortigern faces growing resistance from his own people, potential betrayal by his own officers, and a simmering threat to his leadership from the exiled sons of Constantine. Before travelling to a meeting with the Northern Lords, he has to ensure the South West is safe. He uses his travels to gather information about his province.

This brief chapter ends part one of the book.

The Britons object

‘Now listen to us, our lord the King,

listen to the advice of your councillors,

Bishops and book learned men,

chieftains and their men at arms.

You have bought disaster and evil upon yourself.

You have favoured heathens, abandoned God’s laws,

and fornicated with a foreign, pagan woman.

We beg you, for the sake of peace,

and God’s favour to your people,

cast them off, drive them out.

If you will not do so, we will drive them from the land

and cut them down, or die in the attempt.’[i]

Vortigern took the speaker’s sleeve,

gently between his thumb and finger.

‘Such fine brocaded silk.

Boots of finest Cordovan.

I see your wealth: I see no scars.

How will you fight with Hengist and his people?

You could not stop the rabble

who plundered your homes,

stole your wives and daughters,

dragged your sons to slavery.

You ran away and hid,

then crawled back on your bellies,

sniveling round your huts

as though your tears could put the fires out.

How will you fight these people,

when you could not fight without them?

No raider dares come south.

The crops are in, the cattle fed.

Where there was famine we have brought relief.

The traders bring the wine you drink,

the silk you wear. Men go to sleep

expecting they will see the morning.

What else do you require?’

‘We want them gone. They are a plague

corrupting everything they touch,

a filth that should be scoured from our land.

When they exhaust their pigs, they chase our women.

Their women whore themselves for pleasure,

leading our young men to perversion and damnation.

Their grunting language hurts our ears.

Their disgusting customs foul our country.’

Keredic helps Vortigern to collect stories

Wondering what atrocity I’d be forced to witness,

I followed the Thin Man at Hengist’s insistence.

A slave does not demand an explanation.

Nor does he ask what’s in the cart

that slows armed riders to a painful crawl.

A scattering of huts,

angular and box like,

not the usual beehives.

There was no ditch or palisade.

They did not run away.

A tall blonde man, an axe in hand

strode towards us; Wes Þu hal.

He hadn’t heard of Vortigern

or was a brave man who didn’t flinch.

The cart is brought forward.

Inside there’s the carcass of a pig

and jars of wine and mead.

‘Tell him, if he cooks this,

I will share it with him.’

The man is impressed.

‘What does he want?’

Vortigern replies: ‘Stories’.

The pregnant girl

This was my family’s land, but my brother went with Constantine.

We never heard from him again. Mam died soon after.

One day this old man and his two sons appeared.

Tad was glad to have some help about the place

even if we couldn’t understand a word they said.

The boys worked hard. The old man knew his stuff

where sheep and pigs and cattle were concerned.

When the coughing sickness took their father,

tad asked the boys to stay. When he was dying,

he left our land to them. This bump will be our second child.

Their cousins are arriving soon. More workers in the fields.

More arms when neighbors try to filch our cows.

The wife

We were desperate.

First year we grew nothing.

The rain was late, the frost came early.

Scrabbling on marginal land

I’d have whored my starving bones

for the leavings from their table

to feed the children.

But the local big man gave us food,

suggested we move here.

Fed us through the winter.

We’ll repay him with a pig this year.

And when it comes to fighting

my man’s arm will pay our debt.

We were lucky.

My sister and her daughter went begging at another villa’s door.

They stripped them both and beat them to the boundary.

She died soon after, but not before

they burnt her house, enslaved her children,

killed her man then went down on their knees

to thank their loving god.[ii]

At first I couldn’t understand

I jumped at any sudden noise.

At night it was so quiet

I couldn’t sleep.

He’d go off to work

and he’d come back!

Days, then weeks and months,

when no one died.

Vortigern asks questions

Inside their well-built house,

Vortigern admires the skill

of the woman’s weaving;

the well-made cloth.

He touches the solid jointed wood,

admires the functional designs

sees that an age of wood

might have its own attractions.

Curiosity is an appetite he can’t appease,

like the golden lady,

asking questions about everything.

Nothing is beyond his interest.

‘What is his name?’

It is not a slave’s place to disobey,

but I do say If I ask him that

he will recite his genealogy all the way to Woden

and the pig will be burnt before he’s finished.

‘Call him hlāford, it is an honorary title.’

‘And the woman?’ ‘Hlǽfdige.’

‘Ask him why he came to Britain?’

‘He says, my children.’

But he knows that’s not enough.

‘There was only so much land;

bad for crops and worse for cattle.

We’d heard the ground is fertile here

and if a man stays clear of strife

his children have a future.’

We left them to their pigs and fields.

The Thin Man paused on the hill,

overlooking the farm. Now, I thought.

Now they all die. But he said,

to me, to the slave,

to the less than nothing;

‘You can teach a soldier to be brave.

Train him well, he’ll stand his ground

when his drinking partner from the night before,

is split open and his guts are tangling his feet.

But you can’t teach the heroism of parents

faced with a sick child or a failed crop,

or the courage of migrant families.

Why should these people be my enemies?’

The broken work of giants[iii]

Vortigern moves around the country,

listening, making others listen.

Heading west after the wedding,

with Hengist and Rowena,

to visit his estates.

Her reaction to his villa.

How easily she was lost indoors;

hesitation entering any room,

hand reaching for her knife.

The way she was confused by corridors.

He heads off track towards

the largest building he had ever seen.

But the portico, with its broken columns,

its neck-wrecking upward reach,

was an immediate affront.

He overheard her muttering with her father:

‘Wrætlic is þes wealstan’

‘Wyrde gebræcon’

‘Burgstede burston’

‘brosnað enta geweorc.’[iv]

Hengist had remained outside.

She crept into the building, dwarfed and daunted.

Her escort, Hengist’s hand-picked, finest killers,

like frightened dogs nosing into a bad place.

Where the walls had fallen,

they left the escort and went on alone

over rubble and shadows,

hearing the scrabbling echoes of startled beasts

in the rattling echoes of their footsteps

‘till they emerged into the great pool;

the vast chambered emptiness of it.

Steam rising from the dark grey waters,

ribboned silver where the sunlight,

streaming through the broken ceiling

fifty feet above their heads,

patterned the water’s surface, flicking the walls.

He heard her muttering ‘giants’ and ‘magic’.

Ignore the memory of her body,

and the knowledge she had used that knife

to carve more than her meals.

He saw that he had frightened her and was ashamed.

Sit on the steps that lead down to the water,

explain, the way your grandfather explained,

how Baldud King, doomed by the rotting of his flesh,

came here, and bathed, and was made beautiful and whole.

How Romans came and bult a temple to Minerva

and prayed to her then let their slaves

scrape, pummel and then massage them clean.

Take her hand, explain the building and its functions.

Evoke the voices and the rituals,

memories from your granddad’s childhood,

and learn your explanation is another fairytale

no more credible than her mutterings

of vanished giants and sorcery.

He wanted to take her in the pool,

watch her wide-eyed wonder at its warmth,

but there was no time for self-indulgence.

Stepping into daylight, Saxons standing upright,

shaking away the shadows,

Hengist’s hand-picked killers once again.

They parted ways, Rowena, for her safety,

returning to her uncle in the east,

while Vortigern and Hengist headed west

to meet the man who had united

Dumnoni and Durotriges

and was now acknowledged as their leader.

Enter Gorlois[v]

Clean upright walls, no tiles missing on the roof,

memory made real in the present,

the strangeness of it lost in its familiarity.

The floors had been repaired, the garden tended.

The water feature was still working.

The room he waited in was someone’s library.

His hands hovered near the scrolls

but he resisted the urge to take one out,

drift on the beauty of carefully chosen words.

God save all bookish men, thinks Vortigern,

perhaps their time will come again.

A time for Latin poetry and dinners,

evenings in the garden, making plans,

knowing talk of literary sinners.

Gwendolin mustered Cornwall,

trashed her husband and his army

then ruled Britannia with an iron fist

disguised as women’s hands.

Has he fallen for the story?

Is he looking to the west

for a saviour who will rise?

So enter Gorlois.

A neat man, a tidy man.

A pious, praying man.

Gloucester said he looks so young

he could be taken for the 12 year old

he’d married to secure his future. Now

the western tribes acknowledge him as leader.

But the western tribes are so much landfill

if Vortigern decides they need to be subdued.

Given small commands, he’s been methodical,

imaginative and ruthless. Trustworthy,

obvious, but vague around the edges.

Impatient with stupidity. Often tactless.

Ambitious. Capable. But Loyal? Possibly.

Gorlois waits, doing his version of inscrutability.

Impassive as a figure painted on a wall:

‘Loyal soldier waiting for his orders.’

‘You can read? Good.’

Vortigern hands him two sealed scrolls.

‘Not now. Later. That one first.’

‘We head towards a gathering of the northern lords.

I’m giving you the land south of the Severn’s Mouth.

All forces west of Tamar are under your command.

You are to fortify the land and keep the raiders out.

Make sure the trade routes to the continent

stay open.’ He stops. There’s nothing else to say.

If Gorlois is intelligent he knows what needs be done.

If not, then telling him just wastes the time.

But the wall painting doesn’t speak.

Vortigern can hear the small unhurried sounds,

the breathing of his guards,

knows he cannot laugh, not now.

God save me from these amateur theatricals.

Gorlois kneels. And he could say;

Screw you, the West’s already mine;

Thank you, I’m honoured;

I am too young. I am not worthy;

I will repay your trust. Instead, he says

‘I accept.’ As though he had a choice.

Gloucester to his messenger

Take this to The Boys.

You will find them in Gaul,

where rivers flow uphill, springs geyser blood,

the dead walk home from battle fields

and mad dogs gambol in their wake.

Take my message. Tell them: soon.

End of Part One

[i] This first section is a close version of Laȝamon’s lines. He doesn’t identify the speaker. Vortigern’s reply is not Laȝamon’s.

[ii] See ‘The Landowner’ in A Presentment of Englishry.

[iii] The idea that Roman ruins were the work of Giants, ‘enta geweorc’, occurs in Old English poetry.

[iv] The first two lines of ‘The Ruin’. Literally: This stone work is wonderful/ fate broke it/the fortified place is broken open/ the work of giants, decaying. (A less literal translation would do justice to the music of the lines.)

[v] Gorlois’ story is told in part three of A Presentment of Englishry.

Liam Guilar

Posted on June 5, 2022June 5, 2022 by David Lee

How time flies – British Art Show 9

DAVID LEE attempts to take an interest in a forty-year old artistic institution

Not that it’s much fun remembering, but can it really have been more than 40 years ago that, like a new comet, the British Art Show (Arts Council prop.) first swam into our ken? It’s been coming back to haunt us every five years since, and now here it is again, ninth time round and laden as ever with empty promises and disappointment. Do we mind? No, not that much, for minding even mildly requires the taking of at least a little serious interest in the first place, which no one really does these days, and small wonder. I most certainly don’t – as the blank space in the index to Moping On – the Collected Works (rejection slip pending) amply testifies. I did see BAS8, or was it number 7, but, whichever, only out of convenient and idle curiosity. Remembering the faintest of anything in it is quite another matter: blur doesn’t come near it.

The pity is that it did seem quite a good idea, back in that Golden Age of Wislon, Sunny Jim and Dolly Scargill, oh, so long ago. It was the brainchild of one Frank Constantine, benign and enterprising director of the Sheffield City Art Galleries at the time – and in his youth, a seriously fast opening bowler, I believe, and a stylish middle-order batsman too: though I may be thinking of someone else – who, feeling that too little of the best and brightest of contemporary British art was ever to be seen north of Hampstead, persuaded the Arts Council to commission a major touring show, every so often, of just such stuff but one which – and this is the nub and very heart of the matter – would never, as it were, be seen in Town.

The guiding premise, as I remember, was that it should offer a generous if idiosyncratic overview of whatever of interest or merit, preferably both, had been produced within the previous two or three years, sought across the full field of current engagement in painting and sculpture and allied trades. Furthermore, there were two defining conditions attached: first, that the selection should be entrusted to a single selector; and second, that practical or logistical constraints apart, the choice was to remain a personally accountable judgement quite free of any policy or pressure on the Council’s part. Independence was the rubric, and, mirabile dictu, so it was: Amen to that, I hear you cry.

In the event, work by just over 100 artists was shown, from unabashed representation to abstraction at its most minimal and austere, with a leavening of conceptualism for good measure. There was of course the usual hullabaloo. ‘My child could do better than that, or would be severely punished if he didn’t’, of course, and ‘what a waste of good wood and canvas’. Sheffield’s steel mills closing down on a daily basis hardly helped. Even the Arts Council’s own General Secretary at the time – a worthy Yorkshireman from Sheffield called Shaw, which explains a lot – after giving it the honour of a single sentence in his annual report, with due emphasis laid upon how much it had cost, a little later condemned out of hand an exhibition he had never seen.

And so of course the Arts Council lost its nerve. A single selector? Goodness no, far too risky. From BAS2 it has always been a committee job, if only one of two or three. And since no self-respecting committee meets without an agenda, so by grandmother’s footsteps themes and policies, the more correct the better, crept in and for many years now the Arts Council’s cold hand has been firmly on the tiller. Which dire conclusion brings me back to how boring and correct in its self-congratulatory diversity it all now is.

BAS9, selected by Irene Aristizaval and Hammad Nasar, began its tour in Aberdeen last autumn, and, having lately closed at Wolverhampton, is now inflicting itself on Manchester before moving on to Plymouth for the coup de grâce. A brief account of its sojourn amongst the Wolverhamptonians may offer the ever-patient denizens of Manchester some idea of what they’re in for.

Irene, now Head of Curatorial and Public Practice at the BALTIC, Gateshead, was until lately Head of Exhibitions at Nottingham Contemporary; while Hammad is Lead Curator at the Herbert Gallery, Coventry, Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Foundation, and Principal Research Fellow at the University of the Arts (Central St Martin’s as was), London. You have been warned.

Notable amongst Irene’s recent group shows have been ‘Still I Rise – Feminism, Gender Resistance, and Photography from the Civil Rights Movement to the Reagan Era’. And Hammad is known, you may be intrigued to learn, ‘for collaborative, research-driven and exhibition-led inquiry’ so quite the Renaissance Man. His recent successes include ‘Speech Acts: Reflection-Imagination-Repetition and Structures of Meaning / Architectures of Perception’. There was also ‘Excessive Enthusiasm: Ha Bik Chuen and the Archives of Practice’. And I’m sorry I missed his ‘Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space’. You get the picture, or perhaps not as the case may be.

Getting down to brass tacks – for which I believe the town was once renowned – Irene and Hammad said with one voice ‘how thrilled they were to present the second iteration (and how we love that ‘iteration’) of BAS9 in Wolverhampton’, where the focus was to be ‘on an intersectional approach to living with difference’. Their approach would ‘foreground (and here I find myself reaching by reflex for the red pen – Old Beaky would have reached for something else) the contemporary resonance of the Black Lives Matter protests with the historic context of Enoch Powell infamous (notorious?) and divisive “rivers of blood speech”.’ Oh dear: but on we go.

Taken over all, BAS9 ‘explores [of course it does] themes of healing, care and reparative history; tactics for togetherness; and imagining new futures,’ and I can’t wait for the mug of cocoa and a digestive biscuit afterwards, for which I’ve already chipped in my two and six. It ‘showcases [I shall run out of red ink soon] the multidisciplinary work of 47 artists, reflecting a precarious moment in British history, which has brought politics of identity and nation, concerns of social, racial and environmental justice, and questions of agency (??) to the centre of public consciousness.’ Yes, My Dears, so it does, and calm down, as the great Sir Michael might have said: for my part I would remind you this was once, and perhaps still is, supposed to be an art exhibition, not a public meeting in the Islington Oddfellows Hall. Where’s that cocoa, for goodness sake? But there’s no stopping yet.

In Wolverhampton, it seems, the focus was on ‘how we live with and give voice to difference, showcasing [Damn and blast: I’ve now stubbed the nib] only those 34 of the 47 whose work, steely eyed, forensically investigates identity from an intersectional perspective (ouch). By exploring, map and compass at the ready, coexisting identities such as class, [count to ten] ethnicity [slowly] gender [up to 20] and sexuality [now 30], works will be presented in critical dialogue with Wolverhampton’s cultural history shaped by the diverse populations that have arrived since the War.’ Of course they will: but I’m too old for all this. I it is who really must calm down.

This article first appeared in The Jackdaw, an independent review of the visual arts, which has been called ‘the Private Eye of the arts world’. To subscribe, please click here.

David Lee

DAVID LEE is the editor of The Jackdaw, an independent journal of the visual arts

Posted on June 5, 2022June 6, 2022 by Derek Turner

The political landscape

Green Albion – Restoring Our Green and Pleasant Land

Various authors, Conservative Environment Network, 2022, 101 pages, free download

DEREK TURNER welcomes a practical contribution to often overheated eco-arguments

Environmental protection is conventionally seen as a ‘leftwing’ concern, because its most voluble advocates are often equally vociferous on what are dismissively called ‘woke’ preoccupations, from asylum-seekers to transsexuals, or EU membership to Scottish independence. Yet there has always been a conservative kind of environmentalism – famously represented by the late Duke of Edinburgh, and his son – although at times in postwar history it has faded from view, sidelined by administrations prioritizing the economy over the environment.

If modern Greens often gravitate in leftwing directions, it is at least partly because from the 1950s on, mainstream conservatism developed a brusque, complacent and unimaginative streak, which held that business, ‘freedom’ and ‘growth’ mattered more than the natural world. Influential opinion-formers and politicians chortled at ‘tree-huggers’, and sometimes even said environmental damage was just Darwinism in action. An effect of this almost Randian reductionism was essentially to abandon a hugely important area of concern (and large swathes of university-educated and younger voters) to the ideological left – which whatever its other shortcomings could see that the environment was not only precious, but priceless.

This was ironic, because during the twentieth century socialist countries had a shameful ecological record. Soviet and Maoist economic, industrial and social practices laid waste their respective ecosystems, whilst in America supposedly retrograde conservatives took some difficult long term decisions, often against the wishes of big business backers. Theodore Roosevelt established the United Forest Service, five national parks, and fifty-one bird reserves. Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed both the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, while Ronald Reagan designated more than ten million acres as wilderness. Whatever their other limitations may have been, these could at least see that conservation and conservatism are adjacent conceptually as well as alphabetically.

The natural world, with its blind instinct, harshness, hierarchy, and territoriality is not an obviously congenial area of interest for ‘progressives’ or ‘radicals’, who are usually more concerned with abstract moral values, and believers in human plasticity. Nature is neither egalitarian nor kindly, and examples from what was tellingly called the ‘Animal Kingdom’ lead logically towards a Hobbesian interpretation of the world. Early environmentalists and organic agriculture advocates were more often ‘right’ than ‘left’, seeing animals and landscapes as contributors to, and symbols of, national characters. Into the 2000s, there was a strand of English conservatism which supported hunting as rooted in national history and human nature, epitomised by writers like Robin Page, R W F Poole and Roger Scruton, and the huge, if ultimately unsuccessful, campaigning of the Countryside Alliance. The fact that in most modern Western countries environmental politics have become a kind of leftist reserve says much about the ‘culture war’ fighting capabilities of the West’s conservative parties.

In Britain, there are precedents for the Johnson government’s notable interest in environmental issues from energy policy via gene-edited crops (to reduce fertiliser and pesticide use) to rewilding. David Cameron’s Green stances earned him considerable scorn within his own party and from some in the Conservative press, but like Johnson he was borrowing from old ruralist Tory tradition, and more recent small-c conservative thinkers like Edward Goldsmith, who founded The Ecologist, and was instrumental in the founding of the Green Party. There were political precursors too. Macmillan’s, Eden’s and Major’s governments passed noise abatement and clean air legislation, while Churchill’s created several new National Parks (following the Labour government’s creation of the first, in 1951).

Although Thatcherite neo-liberal policies entailed a hefty environmental price tag – encouragement of conspicuous consumption, the opening up of ecosystems to rapacious corporations, road building, relaxation of planning laws – sometimes they also meant improved environmental protection, as the new private company executives became suddenly accountable to public opinion. Mrs Thatcher took a perhaps surprising interest in global warming, acid rain and pollution. Her aversion to the British coal industry was based at least partly on her knowledge of coal’s environmental impact. In 2012, former Friends of the Earth leader Jonathan Porritt noted marvellingly, ‘Thatcher…did more than anyone in the last sixty years to put green issues on the national agenda.’

In 1989, she told the UN General Assembly, ‘The environmental challenge that confronts the whole world demands an equivalent response from the whole world. Every country will be affected and no one can opt out… No single generation has a freehold on the earth.’

These were resonant words from a politician not even the most callow Objectivist could accuse of fuzzy sentimentality, or anti-business sentiment, or ‘big government’ instincts. There were contradictions in her outlook, but something in her sensed that governments have an historic and moral responsibility to protect the landscapes and wildlife which help define the character of the nation they govern. She saw that the Green movement, for all its faults, was addressing real problems. She could also see that the Greens would benefit greatly by the involvement of more down-to-earth ‘Blues’ to represent the legitimate interests of agriculture, industry and landowners, and balance frigid universalism with local attachments, and the ideal with the achievable.

Thatcher’s words are emblazoned along the masthead of the Conservative Environment Network’s (CEN) website, because of their insightfulness, but also because her name is likely to disarm anthropogenic climate-change sceptics, who are drawn almost exclusively from the political Right, from libertarian conservatives to populists in the Farage, Trump and Bolsanaro mould.

Environmental problems can seem intractable, the literature is frequently tedious, and ‘activists’ often smugly jejune. Considerable credit ought therefore to be extended to the politicians who have taken the trouble to contribute to this compendium, which nods at national nostalgia (Blake, Wordsworth, Larkin et al) but also offers practical suggestions on a range of interrelated issues. It is about time that Britain’s long-suffering landscapes were afforded less exploitative kinds of treatment – ‘undevelopment opportunities’, to allow it (and us) to recover.

There are contributions by eleven MPs and one peer on wetlands, peatlands, woodlands, maritime habitats, rivers, and some of the possibilities for UK agriculture in the post-Common Agricultural Policy landscape. The essays are topped by a Foreword by the Minister for Farming, Victoria Prentis, and tailed by an Afterword by Ben Goldsmith, Chair of the CEN, representing the public-spirited family which has done so much in recent years to force responsible environmentalism onto a sometimes reluctant party (Ben’s brother, Zac, is Minister of State for the Pacific and International Environment). It offers an ambitious and thoughtful vision for a renewed environment – even if we suspect much of it may never be realised, amid Brexit, Covid and global insecurity, on top of the usual political vicissitudes.

The Minister hails ‘the biggest changes to farming and land management in 50 years,’ using environmental land management schemes (ELMs) to make agriculture more efficient and improve food security, while increasing biodiversity and protecting existing habitats. Stroud MP Siobhan Baillie speaks of incorporating ‘natural capital’ into Treasury thinking, to restore 100,000 hectares of wetlands as carbon sinks, floodwater repositories, and refuges for rare species – and even as a means of improving mental health. Robert Largan calls for the rewetting of lowland peat where possible, new kinds of crops that can be grown on wetter soils, the banning of peat-based fertilisers, and the prohibition of disposable barbecues, often the cause of devastating moorland fires.

Michael Fabricant wants millions more trees to be planted, plus natural regeneration, and better protection from imported diseases by home-growing saplings – with special provisions for threatened temperate rainforest, and an updating of the Forestry Commission’s century-old charter. Hastings and Rye MP Sally-Ann Hart seeks to encourage coastal (especially saltmarsh) and undersea carbon sequestration, ban bottom trawling in Marine Protected Areas, and action on maritime pollution to increase underwater vegetation and boost fish stocks.

Andrew Selous gives a ‘Christian stewardship’ perspective, setting out ideas to improve management of statutory nature reserves as well as Church and National Trust properties, and improving biodiversity through a new land designation of ‘wildbelt’. He also calls for less intensive farming methods to improve soil and reduce flooding, with reduced grazing and tilling pressures, and using fewer chemicals. Craig Williams, whose Montgomeryshire constituency is threaded by the Severn, envisages an holistic riparian management strategy to cover tributaries and whole watersheds, with better waste management, bankside tree planting and channel restoration to reduce pollution, boost wildlife and reduce flooding.

Anthony Mangnall and Jerome Mayhew draw urgent attention to the financial pressures faced by farmers, but discern possible benefits from Brexit. While welcoming organic methods, they acknowledge these are not applicable to all farmland, and generally mean more expensive food. Rewilding, engaging and useful though it is, is not easily compatible with large scale food production, and needs to be tempered with a ‘land sharing’ approach (which Ben Goldsmith terms ‘wilder farming’). Ideally, their contributions would have been balanced by one making the case for rewilding, but they make valuable suggestions, such as less use of high-carbon chemical fertilisers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and chemical runoff into waterways, and market mechanisms to ensure attempts to contain carbon at home do not lead inadvertently to increased emissions abroad.

Jonathan Djanogly calls arrestingly for expediting cellular meat production – meat grown in laboratories from muscle tissue harvested from living animals. Cellular meat of course entails no animal deaths, far less land use and pollution, and far fewer hormones or other chemicals. This would not replace conventional livestock farming, but could open up huge new markets, especially in Asia, where burgeoning middle classes are demanding ever more meat that at the moment is not always available, or only at great environmental cost.

Baroness Jenkin is concerned with minimising UK food waste – the UK wastes more food than anywhere else in Europe – through better supermarket practices, redistribution of still–edible food to the neediest, more food waste collections by councils (that can then be used to make energy), and – a Thatcherian touch – thriftier household management to simultaneously benefit the planet, and save families money. The government’s ambitious (and hugely controversial) energy policy is scanted in this volume, but Pauline Latham demands an end to the burning of biomass, now known to be not renewable as once thought, in order to lessen air pollution and land use, as well as the carbon released by the removal and burning of trees. Ruth Edwards takes up the bosky theme, with a call for global as well as domestic action on deforestation, building on existing government commitments to bar imports of products like palm oil and soya produced on recently deforested land.

This book overflows with ingenious ideas which, if realised even in part, would go a considerable way towards meeting the objectives of the likes of Extinction Rebellion, without endangering the economy. But there are curious omissions. While it was only to be expected that the huge and complex area of energy policy would need to be treated separately, it is strange to have little or nothing about such matters as plastic pollution, factory farming of animals, the wasteful profligacy of the electronics and fashion industries, eco-building technology, planning laws, or the proper management of parks and verges for wild flowers. One would also have liked some detail on the thinking behind the crop gene-editing legislation presently going through Parliament, and about post-CAP farm finances, especially of smaller farms.

And what about overpopulation? The United Kingdom is already one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, and the Office for National Statistics predicts that the present population, of around 68 million, will increase to some 77 million by 2050, largely attributable to immigration. Whatever mitigations may be in place, or whatever fixes may be found, the truth is that more people equals less nature. The government is taking little or no interest in this subject, partly because busy with other matters, but also, one suspects, out of unwillingness. Yet if they do not start to soon, lovers of the British countryside, whether romantic rewilders, pragmatic farmers, well-meaning MPs or weekend walkers, may all ultimately find that their efforts, ideas and inmost emotions are rendered redundant by sheer pressure of people. ‘Greenness’ and ‘pleasance’, and sense of place, can only be located within quietude and space.

It is to be hoped that this admirable caucus will increase our sense of obligation to them by taking up these subjects in subsequent publications.

The booklet can be downloaded from https://www.cen.uk.com/green-albion

Derek Turner

brazen-head.org

Posted on June 3, 2022June 3, 2022 by Alexander Adams

John Wyndham, genius and prophet

The Wyndham Collection

John Wyndham, three vols. (Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos, The Chrysalids), Folio Society, 2022, 704 pps, £125

ALEXANDER ADAMS finds 1950s classics have troublingly modern messages

The publication of a clothbound boxset containing the classic novels Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos and The Chrysalids by John Wyndham (1903-1969) by the Folio Society, prompts the question, ‘How much is Wyndham a man of his time?’ In this review, we will look at the novels, these illustrated editions and how much 1950s England influenced these stories.

Wyndham had a difficult childhood. His parents were involved in a high-profile divorce case, at a time when divorces were rare, and must have been aware of the consequent press coverage. The family moved around the country, and the young Wyndham attended a number of schools, including the famously progressive Bedales School. He had a number of different professions before deciding to pursue fiction writing. While he had some success as a writer of science fiction and pastiching American detective stories during the inter-war era, he did not seem to have found his metier. Although he did not know it at the time, his background and writing had set him up for spectacular success in the post-war period.

It was the catalyst of the war which seemed to bring Wyndham new introspection and a wider view of human nature. He was attached to a corps which saw heavy fighting in the advances through western Germany. Seeing the effects of wartime barbarity first hand – and the related crimes, atrocities, despair and vengeance – gave his vivid thoughts immediacy. Seeing exceptional events occurring in ordinary towns and houses, and the tide of history demolishing the certainties that complacent lives generate, meant the clichés of science fiction and crime noire (however clever) no longer seemed adequate.

The result of this transformed – or perhaps condensed – outlook led to Day of the Triffids (1951), the first book in this set. It is set in an alternative 1951, where a bio-engineered plant has become cultivated across the world for its rich oil. This ‘triffid’ plant can eat meat, stings animals, and can walk. Possessing a rudimentary form of intelligence, this plant is kept under control by docking the stings in ornamental individual plants or by penning undocked crop plants. In this alternative timeline, weaponised satellites orbit the Earth. A shower of meteors arrives, or an accident triggers weapons satellites; whichever it is, the result is that lights in the night sky blind almost the entire human population. Survivors have to struggle against gang warfare, disease, starvation and the threat of the triffids, which come to dominate the land.

In Triffids, Wyndham’s interests and skills form a glorious combination in his most successful and popular book. His progressive schooling and multiple careers gave him insight into the problems of farming and food supply; his wartime experiences sharpened his imagery of social breakdown and casual brutality. Wyndham’s sci-fi-writing origins allowed him to think through the plot; his experience of writing detective thrillers gave his prose a clipped asperity and punchy impact. He wrote strong characters and a compelling plot, yet Triffids is actually more of a novel-of-ideas than it seems. The excitement of the plot, believability of the characters and emotional appeal of the situations combined to make Triffids an ideas book that gets readers to think about issues organically, as we see characters deliberating options or forced to live out the consequences of their circumstances. Added to which, the astonishing imagery and haunting atmosphere make Triffids one of the best novels of the century. It far transcends science fiction, thrillers, dystopias and sociologically oriented examinations of the human condition and – I would say – functions as literature of the highest level. For the issues-driven, it includes discussion of environmentalism, disarmament, geo-politics, ethics and self-sufficiency. It has elements of thriller, romance, dystopia and social commentary, blended in a manner that is seamless.

Well, almost. There is a single chapter that is devoted to the backstory of the development of the triffids, which, while necessary, is rather dry on first reading. It is an obligatory exposition dump. On subsequent readings, it answers some of thoughts of readers now familiar with the titular antagonists of humanity. This chapter is the creakiest in terms of prose. Palanguez, the South American intermediary who smuggles triffid seeds from their point of origin in USSR laboratories, has a ‘sleek, dark head’ and addresses his interlocutor as ‘señor’. Wyndham’s pulp-fiction apprenticeship shows through a little. We have to sit through a bit of global politics, which is something that mars Wyndham’s follow-up novel The Kraken Wakes (1953 – not included in this set). However, if you can make it through chapter 2, the rest of Triffids is a terrific read – gripping, memorable, moving, thought-provoking. The contemporary film version was a wretched traducement, as was an embarrassingly updated 2009 television mini-series. A television version, co-produced by BBC Television in 1981, is excellent and well worth seeking out.

© Patrick Leger from The Folio Society’s *The Wyndham Collection – The Midwich Cuckoos*

Wisely, for its new edition, Folio Society commissioned illustrations by Patrick Leger that are firmly in the 1950s style. The limited colours, bold blocking and strong line work all point back to the classic illustrations of comics and pulp fiction from the 1920s-1950s era. The speckling and deliberately loose registration imitate the printing of the time. Leger brings a cinematic eye to scenes, viewing protagonist Bill and young Susan from an aerial viewpoint. My favourite is the view of Bill in his hospital bed, with a swatch of sunlight illuminating his sheets. Folio Society, because it markets directly, rather than through bookshops, does not have to put text on its cover to inform browsers. This gives Folio Society designers a freer hand than otherwise. (Producing volumes for a boxset also allows book covers to remain text free.) Leger has illustrated all three books, including the covers.

Like Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) is infused with Cold War anxiety. Midwich, a village in southern England (based on Midhurst, Sussex), is suddenly isolated by an inexplicable forcefield and the residents rendered unconscious. When the barrier is lifted and people revive, they soon discover that all the women are pregnant. The human-seeming babies turn out to be uncanny cuckoos, planted into the wombs of women by aliens. Once born, the cuckoo children develop fast, act in a disciplined collaborative way and have powers of telepathy and limited mind control. This makes them an inscrutable and dangerous enemy. The hosts find themselves being held hostage by the parasite children, who threaten to grow strong enough to destroy the community that (warily and fearfully) cares for them.

Wisely, Wyndham does not dilute his story by introducing the aliens as other than prime movers. He has no interest in aliens. The science-fiction premise is merely a device to allow Wyndham to explore how communities (and civilisations) respond to the knowledge that they have in their midst forces that wish to supplant them and that are ruthless. From inter-species rivalry, Wyndham has moved to in-species rivalry. Of course, what must have been obvious to more observant readers of the time, was how this was an allegory for Communist infiltration of the West. The Midwich cuckoo-children, like Communists, form a tightly knit group working in concert to overturn the current order and advance to the next level of development, using any means necessary to overcome opposition. What seems so troublingly prescient, is how this scenario could act as a parable of multiculturalism. When a foreign group cannot be integrated, conflict for resources and status arises. If the organised minority overcomes the disorganised majority – as Mosca’s Law tells us – the numerical inferiority of the foreigners is no bar to them consolidating themselves and even coming to rule the hosts. So, while Midwich may seem dated sci-fi tosh set in a rural England of the past – Brian Aldiss will be forever remembered as the writer who damned Wyndham’s novels as ‘cosy catastrophes’ – it is actually a novel of ideas that is vitally relevant in a multicultural society facing a crossroads.

Likewise, The Chrysalids (1957) gives us another brilliant novel with exciting action, suspense and vividly drawn characters in a unique world, and one with a deeply troubling ethical conundrum. Chrysalids is a coming-of-age story set in a post-nuclear-war rural community in Canada, where millenarian Christianity holds sway. The society is obsessed by genetic stability, considering it a moral issue, which they police by destroying produce and animals if they genetically deviate from the norm, and exiling abnormal children. David, the protagonist, becomes aware that he has the power of telepathy. Living in fear that his psychic deviancy will come to light and lead to his expulsion, David forms a bond with the few other children of his age who also have this rare power. Eventually discovered, David and his friends have to flee into the wilderness to escape torture and (potentially) sacrifice.

Perhaps inadvertently on the author’s part, Chrysalids presents us with a question that is even more pointed than the one in Midwich: How far would you go to preserve your values and culture? What would you do if your children joined an extremist political group, or converted to a radical religion? Would you exile (even kill) relatives or your own children, knowing that if you did not, their values would supplant your own? I cannot think of any novels of ideas that are more pertinent today. Engaging with the novel’s issues honestly will result in readers doing some painful self-assessment about his/her limitations and the robustness of his/her values.

Wyndham, like every author, wrote in and of his time. In Triffids, a character drains the petrol from a car’s reserve tank. I don’t think I have ever travelled in a car with a reserve tank, although the concept is decipherable enough from the name. Perhaps the youngest of readers might need a reminder of what a corkscrew is; the idea of vacuum-packed cigarettes is rather neat, although today’s cellophane wrappers perform an inferior but cheaper alternative.

The language and social mores are of their time – which is a strong recommendation to readers of today – and this is particularly so in Triffids. When Wyndham presents the debates between pragmatists and Christians about whether or not sighted men should have multiple blind wives (who could give birth to seeing children), we encounter a slice of 1950s Britain, the last time Christian traditionalism had social hegemony. Today, I suppose many people would consider the matter merely one of avoiding partner jealousy rather than the breaching of a moral commandment.

The illustrations have a strong period flavour, with clothes, interiors and vehicles in Triffids and Midwich being contemporary with the period within which they were written. The retro quality of the illustration style suits the texts. If I had to venture one minor reservation about the illustrations in the Folio Society Wyndham boxset, it is that Leger tends to place us close to the actions, with main figures reaching the page edges. That means we are immersed in an event depicted, rather than viewing a scene at a distance. We are inside a motif, rather than outside a picture. This has some advantages – immediacy, engagement, impact, energy – but also reduces detached artistry, complex composition and contemplative reserve. On balance, it is well that Leger remains stylistically consistent within each volume and across the set.

Designers have taken care to co-ordinate the cover colours with the front and end-papers. The production quality is high and the margins and bindings make reading easy. This boxset with pictorial slipcase and hardback books with cloth spines (a reissue of the editions originally published in 2010) is a handsome set, and an ideal way to enjoy key novels of one of the greatest post-war British novelists.

The Folio Society’s The Wyndham Collection, three-volume set, with three novels by John Wyndham, illustrated by Patrick Leger, is available exclusively from: https://www.foliosociety.com/uk/the-wyndham-collection.html

Alexander Adams

ALEXANDER ADAMS is an artist, art critic, novelist and poet. His most recent book is Artivism: The Battle for Museums in the Era of Postmodernism (Societas/Imprint Academic, 2022)

Posted on June 2, 2022May 31, 2022 by Derek Turner

Seas within seas

Bucentaur at the Molo, Ascension Day, by Giovanni Antonio Canal (Canaletto)

History of the Adriatic: A Sea and its Civilization

Egidio Ivetic, Cambridge: Polity, 2022, hb., 352 pps, £25

DEREK TURNER wallows in warm world-historical waters

The Mediterranean flows always through European awareness, Homer’s ‘wine-dark-sea’ and the Romans’ Mare Nostrum becoming ‘Our Sea’ too by ancient immersion. But within the world-historical susurrations of those waves can be heard the sounds of smaller waters, whole seas within seas. University of Padua historian Egidio Ivetic draws attentions to the oddly-overlooked Adriatic, a more intimate body of aqua but one with its own identity and importance, which he calls ‘the Mediterranean of the Mediterranean.’

As well as academic insights, Ivetic has personal connections around these shores, criss-crossed the Adriatic frequently while working on ships, and evinces unflagging interest in everything from sixth-century BC amphorae to twenty-first century ephemera. His book is not lushly impressionistic in the style of many northern European writers, but it is deeply affectionate, and his subject intrinsically poetic. It is not free from ‘academese’, but it is vastly informative, helping fill a surprisingly blank space in the expanding area of thalassography – the history of seas, as opposed to history in or on seas.

The Adriatic was historically considered a discrete region of the Mediterranean, a third branch that was neither the Levant (east) nor the Ponent (west). It was where the Latin West encountered the Orthodox East and later Islam, and where numerous empires had their farthest frontiers – the Carolingian, the Byzantine, the Holy Roman, the Hapsburg, the Ottoman, and the Napoleonic. It was strategic too to the Spanish crown, and always a corridor of concern to Popes, especially after the fall of Constantinople allowed the Turks to subjugate much of the Balkans. The area was both recognizably European and exotically Near Eastern; Saracens captured Bari as early as 847, into the 1920s camel caravans travelled as far west as Sarajevo, and Al Jazeera broadcasts in Bosnian-Croat-Serb. Albania, Croatia, Italy, Montenegro and Slovenia are the latest manifestations of infinitely older identities, rooted in both reality and romance. Bosnia-Herzegovina is also Adriatic although it does not have a coastline, because whatever transpired on the sea always made ripples far inland.

Reliable counter-clockwise currents, and the narrowness of the gulf, impelled Archaic then Classical Greeks northwards along the eastern shores then all the way back down the western ones, founding colonies and making myths as they came, alternately encountering transhumant pastoralists or sophisticated Etruscans, Gauls, and Italics.

Many Greek colonies became fought-for Roman provinces and towns – Hannibal prevailed at Cannae (Barletta), and Caesar’s Rubicon flows north of Rimini – then Avar, Frank, Hun and Ostrogoth conquests – and eventually celebrated market- and meeting-places. The twin-sailed bragozzi of fishermen timelessly ploughed the liquid plain between passing triremes, dromons, galleys, cogs and galleons and countless other craft of ambassadors, bishops, corsairs, crusaders, dukes, kings, mercenaries, merchants and pilgrims – constant interchanges often exploding in conflict.

Ancona, Apulia, Brindisi, Calabria, Dalmatia, Epirus, Istria, Picenum, Ragusa, Ravenna, San Marino, Trieste, Urbino, Venice… The names sound down centuries, magnetizing today’s tourists as they magnetized Greeks, Tudor Englishmen (Twelfth Night was set in Illyria), or eighteenth-century Grand Tourists. Later wanderers too were entranced – James Joyce, who decamped to Trieste in 1904, Gabriele D’Annunzio, the flamboyant future Fascist who took Fiume in 1919, or Lawrence Durrell, who joyfully swapped 1930s Bournemouth for balmier Corfu (where Alcinous hosted Odysseus).

Not all who live around the Adriatic have been sailorly, but Venice by herself made up for any regional maritime deficit. Centuries of daring, enterprise and ruthlessness are symbolized by the annual ceremony of ‘Marriage to the Sea’, when the city’s mayor is rowed out into the lagoon to do what Doges did – drop a consecrated ring into the water while intoning ‘Desponsamus te, mare, in signum veri perpetuique domini’ (‘We wed thee, sea, as a sign of true and everlasting domination’). Venice’s Arsenal was probably the largest manufacturing facility in the pre-industrial world, experimenting with secret weapons and turning out ships on something resembling an assembly-line. When Napoleon’s troops took the Most Serene Republic in 1797, it was the shocking end of over 1,100 years of independent existence, but perpetuated the modern legend of the unique ‘Mistress of the Adriatic,’ the enigmatic, imperilled dream-city of commerce and Carnival.

Over the ensuing two centuries, the Adriatic was gradually “transformed from place to geography”, increasingly lined by new nation-states with ‘rational’ constitutions and industries, plied by steamships and overflown by aircraft, studied by scientists, and treated thematically by historians. The old empires imploded, buffeted by ethnic and liberal rebellions, then 1914-18, but leaving vestiges of vassalages that ultimately made Yugoslavia unviable, and still envenom regional relations.

Since the 1990s, bureaucrats have presented the fabled Adriatic as bathetic ‘Euroregion,’ an allegedly integrable socioeconomic zone suited to mass tourism and ‘multicultural’ connections, which perspective brings problems of its own. Ivetic applauds attempts at cooperation, but knows the Homo Adriaticus foreseen by certain fond theorists has yet to be born.For now, at least, he concludes shrewdly, ‘the Adriatic is first and foremost history.’

This review first appeared in issue 31 of Bournbrook Magazine (www.bournbrookmag.com) and is reproduced with permission

Derek Turner

brazen-head.org