Reviews
Not the usual grasses singing
A journey around the Isle of Sheppey
Ros Barber
Four Shores
Medway Swale Estuary Partnership
Medway & Swale Estuary Centre
Alexander Centre
15-17 Preston Street
Faversham
Kent
ME13 8NY
£9.95
ISBN 0-9550467-0-x
'Four Shores was conceived by lead artist Stephen Turner for a sequence of walks on the Isle of Sheppey. The project team included the poet Ros Barber, architect Simon Barker, film-maker Abbe Leigh Fletcher and project manager Frances Lord.
Each artist contributed to a series of works that explore the distinctive and changing features of a unique cultural landscape, investigating issues that define the relationship of people with place; with the accumulated layers of meaning that texture the surface of the land across the generations and with our often uneasy relationship with nature.’
Ros Barber says she wanted this book ‘to be a story, or journey, harking back to the narrative traditions of poetry, whilst being contemporary and accessible. Eventually I fell into rhyming couplets, and the work just took off with its own momentum.’
There are four central narratives in this journey around the Isle of Sheppey:
Sheerness to Barton Point, Minster Beach to Warden Bay, Leysdown to Shellness and Shellness to Harty. It is indeed a history of Sheppey - Barber’s poems emanating not only from the history of the place, but also from the conflicting stories of the Isle which she re-tells in her inimitable way. She imbues her findings with the poet’s gift of giving probability to myth and, as is Barber’s want, delighting us with striking imagery: ‘The sea slows, and grows an island. Sheppey/ comes out of suspension, clod by clod, heavy // as a
dropped jaw.’ Later, in Paradise Lost, she gives us an alternative to the evolutionary version of the birth of this Isle but which is equally cutting. ‘When Eden was done with.............he prized the Garden off the rock with his nails / and chucked it off a cliff onto the beach / of an island in North Kent, where only sheep // would even sniff at it.’
As well as other periods of the island’s history, she brings alive the times of Sexburga, Queen of Kent, ‘Mother of the Saxon kings of England’, who founded Minster Abbey in 664AD; and raiding Vikings who with, ‘axes, spears and swords, invaded the sleep / of Heordtu and Seapig; the isles of cattle and sheep.’
The poet gives prominence to the less romantic aspects of Sheppey: the cement works, container ships, nudist beach, sunken explosives ship, the day-trippers’ Leysdown where ‘Everything’s cheap./ Chips a quid, tea fifty pee’. The Harty Ferry Inn - once a regular meeting place for criminals from London’s East End is also given space, ‘We wasn’t ...the Krays’ just two ‘fellas / who’ve shared a flowery dell together.’, then we’re told the tale of ‘George’s Kipper Night’, the time when ‘London /has to do without its breakfast once a year.’ for George ‘builds a bonfire bigger than the pub / and orders in a lorryload of kippers’ which are cooked for everyone - well, ‘Almost everyone.’
Barber paints the Isle of Sheppey in all its colours, highlighting its quirkiness, its vitality, its beauty as well as its unloveliness; an intriguing picture which makes us want to discover the Isle for ourselves. But, the poet advises, if you venture there, ‘Don’t Walk
‘Not without knowing the cliffs are sheer/ and can’t be climbed; that beaches disappear // when the sea runs in. Not without a fear / of mud; the rumours spread by locals here // of visiting walkers trapped by the tide,/ stuck up to their thighs; that some have died.’
Page(s) 42-43
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The