You can’t burn your boats when you live inland

There is so much land in Northumberland. The sea
Taught me to sing
the river to hold my nose. When
it rains it rains glue.
Chatterton’s eyes were stuck to mountains.
He saw fires where other men saw firewood.
One step ahead in recognising signals.
And leapt into the fire.

I have recently returned from the North East – hence my absence from this blog – where I have been recording a documentary for Radio 4. It’s called The Poet of Sparty Lea: In Search of Barry MacSweeney. The quote above is taken from his poem ‘Brother Wolf’, republished in his posthumous Bloodaxe volume Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems.

Barry MacSweeney reading in the 1970s

Briefly then, MacSweeney was a Newcastle poet associated with the British avant-garde from the late 60s (when he published his first book at the age of 17 and was nominated for the Oxford Chair in Poetry) through to his premature death in 2000. His poems are sudden, terrifying and beautiful; darkly political, both extravagantly lyrical and harshly stripped back. He was a master of the long line, the breath beyond breath. I was present at his last ever reading, an extraordinary and moving event – I was 17 or 18 then. I have been a huge fan of his work ever since. In fact, I would say he is the presiding presence – if there is one – over my own poetry. In many ways, he would be an attractive figure to any teenage scribbler: a Romantic, haunted by the visions of doomed youth, like Rimbaud, Jim Morrison and Thomas Chatterton, the forger of mock-medieval poetry who committed suicide by arsenic poisoning at 17. Strange how these numbers keep coming round.

Although Barry lived all over the place, and drew his influences from many sources, he was always a poet of the North East… not an officially-prescribed “poet of place”, but a shamanic figure whose poetry is invested and infected with the landscape of Northumberland. In his stunning sequence, Pearl (1995/7), he returns to childhood memories of Sparty Lea – a remote hamlet an hour’s drive from Newcastle where his grandmother lived. These poems are lyrical invocations of an idealised landscape:

Up a height or down the dale in mist or shine
in heather or heifer-trampled marigold
the curlew-broken silence sang its volumes.
Leaning on the lichen on the Leadgate Road,
Pearl said: a-a-a-a-a-, pointing with perfectly poised
index finger towards the rusty coloured dry stone wall
which contrasted so strongly with her milky skin.

Barry remembers a childhood romance with a local girl he calls “Pearl”, whose palate is cleft: she cannot speak. The “a-a-a-a-a-” in the poem becomes an agonised utterance in the powerful theatre of Barry’s live readings.

Sparty Lea, Northumberland

The Pearl sequence is more than mere nostalgia for place. Much more. It is memory passed through the gauze of lived experience, the demons that taunted the poet’s psyche. The demons of drink that would eventually catch up with him, mouths rustling with knives. Innocence crushed. Spoilt beauty. A broken landscape, populated by ‘the turbo-mob, weird souls dreaming of car-reg / numbers and mobile phone codes’.

The documentary I’m presenting is in the form of a kind of pilgrimage, a journey of (re)discovery. From Newcastle, where we had visited the famous Morden Tower and Barry’s archive at the University, we drove out into the countryside to find Sparty Lea. It was as I imagined from the poems. I kept thinking of the language Barry used – the landscape became a fictional universe of curlews, brown trout, ‘the rim of the law’. Barry’s former partner, the poet SJ Litherland, had told of a return journey they had made to the area, to find the land enclosed… this experience is documented in the poem ‘Bare Feet in Marigolds’, where Barry reimagines Sparty Lea as ‘a barbed wire compound. / Wild freedom of Sparty Lea turned into a Nazi camp.’

From ‘Brother Wolf’:

Chatterton knew
you may not return to the source
when you’re
it and
died.
At Sparty Lea the trees don’t want Orpheus
to invoke any magic
they dance by themselves.

For Barry too, the source was ‘it’ – was him. Sparty Lea as a psychological landscape. “North”, as with Heaney in his 1975 collection, was not just a real place: it was a mental state.

I learned in Florence how to poison flowers
& sheath this quill in absolute commitment
to a language going north
without maps.