Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands
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Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands

Sarah Wimbush

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eBook - ePub

Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands

Sarah Wimbush

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About This Book

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.

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Information

Publisher
Bloodaxe Books
Year
2022
ISBN
9781780376172
Topic
Literature
Subtopic
European Poetry
Index
Literature
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