Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands

Sarah Wimbush

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781780376165
• eBook ISBN: 9781780376172
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

In Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands Sarah Wimbush journeys through myth and memory with poetry rooted in Yorkshire. From fireside tales of Romany Gypsies and Travellers, through pit villages and the haunt of The Miners' Strike, to the subliminal of the everyday – including poems about typists, pencil sharpeners and learning to drive in a Ford Capri. This highly accomplished debut collection explores what it means to belong, what it means to be on the margins. This is poetry written in praise of family and community and those qualities which make us human: love, language and, most of all, resilience. Sarah Wimbush is a Leeds poet who hails from Doncaster. She has published two pamphlets, Bloodlines (2020), winner of the Mslexia/PBS Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2019, which was also shortlisted in the Michael Marks Awards, and The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster (Smith|Doorstop, 2021), a winner of the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition in 2020. Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands is her first book-length collection.

9

I

10

11

House

The first time

I went into a house

there were so many rooms.

Each one so big.

Each one so high.

Each with a door.

And in the middle of them all,

planks leading up to a framed sky.

12

White Cottage

When you finally took a house, it was white.

That houseland house, that lane-end house;

walnut trees towering above the church,

a limewashed privy, the broken stool with a heart

carved through the middle. You drew squares

on the house with your fingertips

and in these spaces you would make new windows

and edge them with let-down curtains.

You fitted a kitchen with the chop and slice

of your hands, here, here, and here:

make-do cupboards; the side-of-the-road sink.

We ate boiled bacon there with cold potatoes

and quince. Sundays, you’d toast pikelets by the fire

and we’d disappear inside hide-and-seek afternoons.

We grew to understand marriage in that house;

its ingrained sweat, its banter,

the bullfrog trapped in the cellar. Silences.

Museum house. Haunted house.

Walnuts blackened in jam jars like mouse brains.

The sewing-machine docking its relentless hum.

Was it the wind that flipped your Royal Worcester

off the dresser? And your charm bracelet

jangling like horse-sorters’ reins

the day you filled the priest-hole with barrows of sand

and silenced that bastard frog.

You lost your flicker of threads: those owl eyes,

your tongue relaxing its waspy lilt. The woman

who kept a fire from New Year to Old Year’s Day,

who pulled her own teeth

who never possessed a watch

who didn’t exist on paper, and yet, could recite the name

of every pea field she’d ever worked through.

You, stood by the door, waiting

for the Gypsies to come and take you home.

13

Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands

Never be surprised what gorgios say. Never mention Daddy

juggled pennies on the back of a donkey.

Never explain that Liza married the son of a king,

or how Gentle Hugh received the Mons Star, posthumously.

Don’t point out the in-between places. Don’t speak

of your love for a deadwood fire, and pretty-wear,

and how...

Table of contents

• Description
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• I
• II
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright