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Robert Hampson's collection of poems, under the title Seaport, is a discontinuous history of crises in the social development of Liverpool. Written over an extensive period during the seventies and early eighties, it remained unpublished until 1995, as part III, 'The Rialto', had not been completed. Hampson was finally persuaded to allow publication of this 'interim' edition in three parts (I, II and IV), plus an appendix containing two fragments of the elusive part III. 

       Seaport is a poem of place; but unlike Roy Fisher's fictive 'City' or Allen Fisher's South London of 'unfelt forces', Liverpool's maritime location renders it a place of passage and transition, through which thousands of travellers, sailors, slaves, and immigrants have passed since the late 17th century. This seaport is now a palimpsest, which bears the contradictory traces of power and poverty, privilege and displacement. Inscribed into both texts, poem and city, are the signs not only of the wealth of those who had profited by the growth of the cotton industry and slave trades, but also of the struggle for survival of the inhabitants who lived and died there, and the cargoes of dispossessed human beings who had passed through.

browned ink
& pencil scrawl

a palimpsest of
brick & tile
& stone

the partially-
effaced
traces
of previous statements.

the fabric
of these lives.

The various transformations of Liverpool from fishing village to major seaport have resulted in the urban decline which now stands as a symbol of capitalism and commodification, the embodiment of the social failure which is the consequence of commercial 'success'. For Hampson there has been 'no misery/ that cannot be rendered/ marketable'. By 1850, as well as profiting from the importation of timber from America and the export of cotton, 'the city that once had five-sixths of the slave-trade/ now had/ two thirds of the British emigrant trade.' This narrative is now inseparable from the topography of the city itself, its housing, docks, city centre, landmarks such as the Merchants' Exchange, where the statuary bears the 'emblems of Nelson's victories:/ the limbs and manacles/ of slaves/ in the marketplace', and the 'Old Church' of St Nicholas where, in the basement 'bodies of the drowned/ were exhibited until claimed'.

           Hampson weaves a dense intertexual web which invokes the voices of those connected in some way with Liverpool and the sea, from Daniel Defoe and Herman Melville to John Lennon. For example, Joseph Conrad's definition of the term 'landfall' outlines the process whereby landmarks are recognized by sailors when approaching a destination. In the poem 'perch rock' the reader must navigate her way towards the string of signifiers by which this particular seaport is to be identified. The channel carved through the open field of words on the page replicates the narrow straits through which ships passed to enter the port.

perch rock stands
                         to starboard

the close
        vestibular           landline
                         runs
                           from  the point blocks
                                                                              of flats

to the graceful lines
                       of dark-brick
                                       terraced houses.

The rape of the landscape, when in 1710 the first wet-dock allowed the 'high masted ships' to 'penetrate the city' is similarly illustrated in the rupture of the linear form of the poem 'the docks', and later dockland developments described in 'docks (2)' finally the essential connection of river and city is sundered as 'deep penetration/ gives way to a lineal system/ and seven mile line of docks, severs city from shore'.

          Part I is an amalgam of statistical and historical data, clippings from newspapers, advertisements, broadsheets and reports, and among them quotations from the diaries and letters of Hawthorn, US consul from 1853-57, for whom:

'the people are as numerous
 as maggots in cheese'

The poet's voice is subsumed within the intertextual fabric, while the notion of seaport as constructed out of the lives and vicissitudes of those who lived and passed through her is fused with that of poem as a montage of words and phrases, documentary records and data, a scrapbook of the recorded moments in the histories of people and place. The words of Herman Melville are quoted, as he decribes the sailors' method of picking to pieces "odds and ends of old rigging called 'junk'", and twisting them into new and usable twine known as 'spun yarn'. Melville draws a parallel between that procedure and the strategy by which 'most books are manufactured'.

      Hampson weaves this metaphor into 'the chart', the opening poem of part II, which he dedicates to Melville. In an exploration of 'the depths and latitudes of language', a correspondence is implied between the poetic process, the quest for 'precise expression/ through the carefully-adjusted tensions/ of ambiguities', and the hazardous voyage in pursuit of the whale. The open form and multiple significations of 'the chart', which juxtaposes the vocabularies of physics, linguistics, maritime tradition, and cartography, is in contrast to the tighter form and rhythm and the masculine language employed in the description of the docks themselves in the piece which follows it, 'spunyarn':

China Walls of masonry; a succession of
granite-rimmed docks,
completely enclosed, but linked
like the great lakes
or like a chain of immense fortresses

This final section of Seaport, Part IV, charts the period from the sixties to the present, with allusions to the popular music which came out of Liverpool, to Howling Wolf, Little Richard, and the Beatles' injunction to 'open up your eyes/ tell me/ what you see'. For a moment the poet's voice is subjective, 'how hip we were: in Matthew St/ in shades', as a narrative born of the poet's subjectivity forms another strand in the poetic weave. Hampson's preoccupation with time, place and history is foregrounded in the first poem of this final group, 'growth rings', which brings together the notion of radio carbon dating (a method of verifying historicity) with that of the writing (or righting?) of history. This final sequence speaks of recent racial violence, police intimidation, riots, economic and social decay. In the ironically titled 'a better tomorrow' are listed the statistics of expendability, as unemployment, determined by decisions taken in distant power centres 'London, Detroit, Paris, Tokyo, Zurich', transform what had once been an active commercial centre and seaport into 'a city of the dead'.

        'July 1981' is a fragmented account of the race riots which took place in that month, interspersed with reports of the police brutality which typified them and the intimidation of young blacks, which continued after the riots had ended. In the place which had prospered as a result of the slave trade, the topography is once again transformed as buildings which had served as the symbols of that success are destroyed by black rioters:

the Racquets Club
(Upper Parliament St)
wood-panelling, uniformed barstaff
white sports-clothed families
where judges stayed over

burned: July 5, 1981.

This multi-dimensional and multi-faceted text is an extraordinary concatenation of significations. It is a thought-provoking piece, not only because of its social dimension, or of its concerns with poetry as production. There is a constant interaction here between the notions of time and space. The poem is situated in a chronologically documented social history (time), and in the mapping of the physical site (place) of Liverpool. The nexus between these two is an impulse towards a deconstruction and re-reading of historical texts. Seaport is concerned with the corruption and devastation wrought by capital, and the multiplicity of contradictory meanings contained in the discourses of recorded, and seemingly factual, history. It is a self-reflexive work, set in a textual field of histories, data, scientific knowledges and literature and in a language which speaks of the politics of desire and the eroticism of power which rapes the very landscape in the name of capital and consumerism, dehumanizing millions as it does so. Moreover, the inclusion of the incomplete Part III, 'The Rialto' as an appendix (incidentally, the only section of the poem that strikes a note of optimism) serves to emphasize this poet's concern with the notion of time as a continuing present, in which both past events and actions continue to take effect. Since the 'history' of Liverpool, and consequently both Liverpool the place and Seaport the text, are still in process, there can be no appropriate moment for closure to occur.