Anderton Lift
Trent and Mersey Canal & Weaver Navigation
Lifts make me nervous at the best of times, so when
I peer from my twice suspended vantage point
to the Weaver navigation far below
I'm buoyed by anxiety potently mixed with the thrill
of fulfilling a long-held ambition - to experience
one of the seven wonders of the waterways.
Thief-like I'd stolen into the massive shade-murked
cave of iron girders, rams, greased cogs
and clanging guillotine gates aboard Centurion
with my crew. We rest, tethered, in our floating tank -
it's counterbalanced by another, a return
to the system a Victorian engineer designed
except computers monitor every move
and shift, hydraulic rams now fill with oil
and steam is long forgotten. Our gentle fall's
too short, just time to note the lift's vaulted
spans built in search of that earlier age's
grail. Refloated, we inch our way to the river;
it lazily re-forms itself as it idles by
groups of sightseers cheerfully mooching
round purpose built and neatly tended verges.
A friend sends a multi-media message
to my phone - it's our descent, he took the pic
off the lift's own website and it arrives
as we leave behind this fabulous engine's maw
cruising, quite dwarfed, beside soda works
to the rural, sun-lifted, long-suffering Weaver beyond.
Page(s) 20
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