The landscape of social media is a noisy place! Sometimes the poets who shout little about their work are often difficult to discover! Hence, at Ars Notoria, the team has no hesitation in celebrating Peter Cowlam’s poem. Frequently his poems have a subterranean political message lurking under the great word-choice and music. Crossovers for novelists to be excellent poets and vice versa are not commonly successful endeavours. But as a successful novelist, Peter seems to do it with grace. During my promotional work for the others, Steven O’Brien once told me that at The London Magazine we look for the lyrical quality of prose in a short story. He meant a poet in a writer, not speaking prominently in any story-telling. Well, Peter Cowlam proves with these poems that while he has won accolades for his novels, he can deliver the music for our ears naturally in his poems; and that it must have come from that lyrical quality of prose O’Brien insists on.
Yogesh Patel MBE
Yogesh Patel MBE
Cold Manna
We could not fathom its orthography, when flakes from an ice-bound alphabet fell in broken sentences, and settled into disarticulated watermarks.
The temperature dropped, the wind too. All that’s now recorded is a fragment in sentence case, where no morphology or gathering drift marks any page or pavement we can read.
Chronologically Speaking
A new theory of time, where one only is the unifying ‘law’.
‘Action’, ‘events’, the record of a passage or a sequence, are terms banished when applied to written accounts.
‘Time’ is curvilinear, beginning randomly wherever you start to internalise or reflect,
and runs in every direction.
Triumphal
It happened once and began a repeat pattern, when thinkers left their mountaintops, and students fled their colleges. Even the hermits abandoned the communes. Stranger than that, ladders were left for the stylites. News went round from a ruddy-faced farmhand, who had seen us walk in train from the Senate’s chalk-white building as far as the forum. Under a shower of red petals and blue promissory notes I raised my hand, about to speak.
Peter Cowlam
Peter Cowlam has won the Quagga Prize for Literary Fiction twice, most recently in 2018 for his novel New King Palmers, which is at the intersection of old, crumbling empires and new, digital agglomerates.
Cowlam is also a freelance editor and the author of plays and poetry. His first novel was published in 1998, by CentreHouse Press. His second novel, New Suit for King Diamond, published in 2002, was nominated for the Booker Prize. His brief stint as a commissioning editor saw two issues of The Finger, a journal of politics, literature and culture. His fiction, poems and reviews are published in a wide range of print and online journals.
My Grandfather’s nickname was The Gallower (pit pony). First day down the pit at 14, working miles out under the North Sea in a 22inch seam with a wheeled tub tied to his leg. Lost part of an ear in a tunnel collapse. I used to help him with his allotment and he taught me gardening. He was as hard as nails. Made my Aunt (his daughter) cry.
My grandfather on his first day down the pit, with his father
The Gallower
Nana at the dolly bashing it with vim
steam in the kitchen stewing beef in the range fire banked, warming
the stoneware hot water bottles
ready for the night
Black lead and scrubbing soap stone on the front step coal in the ‘hole delivered once a month.
A miner’s due
Geraniums on the windowsill
Scarlet red flowering or lemon scented white plastic cups speared with
cuttings for next year
Blackclocks on the floor
Nana hates the little buggers scuttling across the carpet but they don’t squash, they crack and when chucked on the embers they sizzle and pop
The whole house revolves around
the fire in that grate
Grandad’s meat and gravy warming in the cast oven heated by the coal that same black gold
that he spent a lifetime digging out
deep from under
the North Sea
Same meal every day, meat and gravy,
dipped with brown bread
served on a stool by his chair
that chair,
no-one else allowed sitting there
Then a pipe after the meal walnut plug tobacco, cut with a penknife from the chunk
rolled in hands blue scarred the miners tattoo and smoked with big blue wisps
washed down,
with a glass of Old Navy Rum
If I was sat near as a child he’d reach to a jar on the mantelpiece and I’d get one of his treats ‘Here you are ‘buggerlugs, a black bullet to suck.
This’ll keep it shut for five minutes’.
He’ll be home soon, hour or so but for now he’s down the allotment sucking on his pipe
Granddad growing rhubarb
by the compost heap
dibbing cabbages and leeks, each leek with a bottomless jam jar rammed in the soil for watering and feeding
direct to the roots
the only way to grow prize vegetables
Tomatoes on benches in the greenhouse
armpit shoots rubbed off every time he passes
pinched out with a grime engraved finger and thumb
That greenhouse a greenhouse like no other
a collection of coloured old doors and glass
blue green red paint peeling yet, to me, as a child
a cathedral
the stained glass windows
as evocative as
those in Durham
or the rose window at York Minster
When I wanted to be alone I’d visit the allotment
take the key from under the brick
and sit on the bench in the greenhouse basking in the heat
of what I thought was the tropics imbibing the scents of his labour
My Grandad
A proud man,
conscious of his place
a pitman through circumstance not from choice.
Proud of the graft he’d given to the pit
proud of that record
9th May, 1930
six thousand, seven hundred and fifty eight tonnes mined
in one day from Horden pit a record that stood for thirty years in a pit eventually closed
by a grocers daughter
He never missed a shift even after on one occasion buried under a roof collapse
dug out by his marra’s
missing part an ear and with a wound to his leg that suppurated for twenty years after
Deaf from the constant noise of the pit that left him separated from us all
but still defiant,
his pride
took a blow when
a few years before he expected
the pit made him redundant and from that day
he never walked by that street again
So, after the work down the garden a slow stroll home via the comrades club
for six or seven pints
and some crack about leeks
and how it’s bloody obvious that digging in straw
helps the ‘taters
If talk comes round to the pit
Granddad up and leaves
carrier bag full of greens
for nana and the kids
When I was young, the door never had a key, nor even a lock.
ten years after the grocers daughters betrayal, mine was closed, my visit
revealed a lock
a burglar alarm and grills on the windows
A community destroyed
and a confused old man
The things that linger most to me
of the both of them
are the smells they left behind
Walnut plug tobacco and fresh picked tomatoes
Nana’s piny smelling of flour and baking
rock buns and stotty cakes
The smoke from the fire fresh greens and stewing meat rice pudding with carnation milk
thick skin on top with a touch of nutmeg
and scented geraniums
Gorden Liddle
Gordon Liddle was born 1956, Horden, County Durham, United Kingdom Married, lives and works at his Derbyshire studio. BA Hons, Sheffield Psalter Lane Art College Gordon has had numerous positions and travelled extensively through the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Yemen, Lebanon, Bahrain, Africa and Europe, with particular interests in religion, democracy, politics, economics, MMT, and culture. The results of these studies form the basis of the series of works now under way. Numerous works bought by private collectors #Madonna Victorian Mood Bought by Andrew Cavendish the 11th Duke of Devonshire is owned by the Chatsworth Collection. ‘Celestial Teapot’ was exhibited at La Galleria Pall Mall in London for one week in 2013, 4 days at Art Basel in 2014. Currently working on Gaia, The Sixth Extinction Series, of paintings, woodcuts and hopefully etchings soon. Also writing two books and a book of poems and rants. Gordon is on Twitter @sutongirotcip and his website is pictorignotus.com
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