Voting for Spring

Paul Mills

• Publisher: Smith|Doorstop Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781906613167
• eBook ISBN: 9781906613587
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Central to the title poem of Voting for Spring is the long human struggle for survival against ice and cold. The poem makes contact with our present climate crisis, as well as suggesting a dimension which is more personal.

Voting for Spring

Paul Mills

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgement is due to the editors of Smith's Knoll, The Slab, Magma, Poetry and Audience, The Word, Stand, The North, Not In So Many Words, where some of these poems first appeared. One group of poems came to be written in response to a number of short films from the Yorkshire Film Archive, and earlier versions of these poems were recorded as voice-overs to accompany edited footage. I wish to express my thanks to Sue Howard and her colleagues from the YFA for their time, patience and help. 'The Heat Age' was published in an anthology of poems commissioned by the Arts Council, Feeling The Pressure, on the subject of global warming. The title poem was influenced by Chris Stringer's book Homo Britannicus which tells the story of early human settlement in Britain. My thanks too to the editors and readers of the Ripon Gazette, where several poems in this collection first started life. The idea of writing poems regularly for a local newspaper was that a lot of people given the chance will be able to enjoy contemporary poetry.

Also by Paul Mills:

North Carriageway (Carcanet, 1976)
Third Person (Carcanet, 1978)
Half Moon Bay (Carcanet, 1993)
Dinosaur Point (Smith/Doorstop, 2000)

Contents

Dedication
Acknowledgements
Contents

Brimham Rocks in January
General Swim
Windy Market
Winter Comes Nearer
Quiet Please
Angel Festival
Snow-ploughs pulled by horses
The Egg Harvest
A Garrison Town Sports Day, April 1916
Women in a Munitions Factory
Clearing Snow on the Moors Railway, 1947
My Parents
First Light
The Viaduct
North and South
Travellers
Etc
High Dependency Ward
Blue Football
Algiers
Caligula's Rules for Government
Backstage, King Lear
Woman with a Jackdaw
Diana and Actaeon
Monet in Bradford
Saturday Bells
Rubbish
Beachcomber
The Hackfall Dragon
The Wild Hunt
Wonderful Life
Educación
21/2001
Climbers at Winspit
What We Love
Lone Star Rider
The Heat Age
The Fires of Spring
Voting For Spring
Natural History
The Apple Press

Biography

Brimham Rocks in January

Three hundred million years, no Atlantic –

Scotland, America, one mountain coastline.

Britain began with this outcrop.

Silt washed down in deltas of rivers.

Then a hundred thousand years of ice age

whipping across the glacier that shut Nidderdale

storm-blasted the rocks into shapes we know.

Shark mouths, numb slabs,

the shock of cold still in them.

From tropic towards arctic, how far these rocks have travelled.

We walk past where a climber, topping out,

leaves his little trace of blood and skin.

Twigs shake in the almost freezing glaze.

Living up here's too bleak in any season.

We need to wrap ourselves in cities.

Some rocks have holes where the wind still tunnels.

Gaps between rocks

shape the sky that shapes them.

Each is a place where we can get a hold

on the speechless past,

be there and still come back.

General swim

Morning's first swimmers curl their toes

at the edge of a huge green cube, ice-still,

but getting in, it's lukewarm.

Voices are one molten shout, lasting

all day in the wriggling green-tiled water.

Floating grins, bubble-blowing lips, legs

with a sudden kick in them. A big pink starfish

hangs suspended in the shape of a child,

bobs up like a cork as far as the air. A tiny thing

called Harriet with luminous arm-bands

has drifted out of the shallow end.

On my back,

I watch the sliding plaster ceiling, texture

of cellulite or old custard, nothing to support it.

A scream, echo-prolonged, pierces my eyeball

with somebody's joy. Kids with fists like grenades

slam the surface. This is the crawl.

Shoulders grow heavier over the years.

Bodies of the young lengthen like shadows.

And now in mid afternoon, late August,

the sun finds a space between trees through a window,

shines direct on water, covers a wall with ripples

of dazzle, a high-speed light-storm of shimmering.

Outside, people enter a brightness,

a shivery feeling between clothes and skin.

There's a strange colour in the air,

in their gaze as they move, a damp glistening,

each an ounce or two lighter, a splash happier.

Windy Market

In the on-and-off storm sunlight,

torn-up clouds mean a coming blast,

of terrified wind over the fields

where low roofs brighten.

Exposed to a battering sky, this little square,

unprotected by its walls of shops and banks,

is full of metal shrieks today, falling tubes

of scaffolding, torn loose plastic and

canvas sails, as the whole market hangs

on its bungee straps, stall connected to stall.

The weather is useless to sellers of Chinese-style

handbags, fine bone china mugs, luxury

All-Season feather duvets,

a T-shirt with a flaming skull.

Here once street lamps glowed with sewer gas,

wives were sold at auction, convicts leaving for

Botany Bay felt their nervous bones rattle

in irons somewhere by the taxi stand;

somebody whispered a name he loves,

the brand-wound still hot.

Now, in the new century, in this wind

while the sky dark...

Table of contents

• Voting for Spring