Barry Tebb

It is time after thirty years We had our Poetry Renaissance Rise, Children of Albion, rise! It is time after nightmares of sleep When we walked the streets of inner cities Our poems among

Would ‘any woman’ find me difficult to live with? My tastes are simple: space for several thousand books, The smoke from my pipe stuffed with aromatic Balkan Sobranie, A leftover from the Sixties, frequent

For Jeremy Reed Rejection doesn’t lead me to dejection But to inspiration via irritation Or at least to a bit of naughty new year wit- Oh isn’t it a shame my poetry’s not tame

(Goya, an old man in exile, looks at his self-portrait) A bull’s neck, still much needed, Deserving exile or the guillotine, ‘Because you are an artist we forgave you’, Thus his royal highness gave

How I loathe this land of my exile, Concrete upon concrete, Steel upon steel, Glass upon glass In massed battalions And no way back. My mind moves to a far-off place To a hill-top

Why our son, why? Every morning the same dark chorus wakes me And I wonder how I am still alive. “Balance the forces of life and death” Is the Kleinian recipe for survival. “It

‘Leeds welcomes you’ in flowers Garlanding the white stuccoed tower Of City Station: red on green As poetry’s demon seizes me, Upending all ordures of order. ‘Haworth Moor, Haworth Moor’ Echoes and re-echoes under

This is one spring you will not see. The fifty roses of your spray Smelt soft across that February day Where trees, heavy as only crematoria Can bear, sloped down the fallen banks To

I was a good father to my people, Their houses among the terraced hills Adored God every day, grape-clusters on the vines Made Christ’s blood richer in the goblet My father gave me: the

The Poetry School, The Poetry Book Society, The Poetry Business: So much poetry about you’d think I’d want to shout, “Hurray, hurray, Every day’s Poetry Day!” but I don’t and you don’t either- You

Shell-shocked from Korea A grenade that left him The platoon’s only survivor, Put him in Stanley Royd For thirty years. He tailored there And out on weekend leaves He made and mended Everybody’s clothes,

We were three weeks Into term, Sheila, When you came Through the classroom door; Forty-four children Bent over books, Copying Roethke’s ‘The Lost Son’. You wrote your First poem on the ‘Moses’ Of Michelangelo.

They have vanished, the pop men with their varnished crates Of Tizer and dandy, American ice-cream soda and one percent shandy. The clunk of frothy quarts dumped on donkey-stoned doorsteps Is heard no more,

A page of the ‘Kelmscott’ Chaucer Seen through out cottage window When the Pennines were blind with snow Flurrying round the stones. The fire was low when I began to blow That single flicker

I Eddie Linden Dear Eddie we’ve not met Except upon the written page And at your age the wonder Is that you write at all When so many have gone under Or been split

You were the one I wanted most to know So like yet unlike, like fire and snow, The casual voice, the sharp invective, The barbed wit, the lapsed Irish Protestant Who never gave a

You are my dream Of the East You are my life In the West Fused in one You begin my day And end each day With a silent smile When I die I will

I was never a film buff, give me Widmark and Wayne any day Saturday matinйes with Margaret Gardener still hold sway As my memory veers backwards this temperate Boxing Day- Westerns and war films

“Remember, you loved me, when we were young, one day” The words of the song in Tauber’s mellifluous tenor Haunt my nights and days, make me tremble when I hear Your voice on the

When I come from the Smoke to visit my son on the ward I see you everywhere: by the station, by the neon sign of ‘Squares’ By every shopping mall. Leeds seems to have

for Brenda Both had come with no gardener but the soul; I had myself expressed them in weariness, Like the last drop of milk from your tired breast. The red rose was no rose

Eggshell and Wedgwood Blue were just two Of the range on the colour cards Dulux Tailored to our taste in the fifties, Brentford nylons, Formica table tops and Fablon shelf-covering in original oak or

Mornings like this I awaken and wonder How I have moved so far, how I have moved so little And yet in essence stayed the same Always passionate for the unattainable For Joan Baez

Leeds this silent solemn Sunday Tempest Road is clear of all But wistful birds, parked cars And vagrant trees. The surgery and pharmacy are shuttered tight “Get your medication straight into your bag”, The

for Wendy Oliver, who knew him I am the sick animal you dream you are caring for In the long avenues of night I cannot find a name For the sickness except the despair

for Ken Kesey and his merry pranksters in a bus called ‘Further…’ Dear and here’s where the problem begins For who shall I address this letter to? Friends are few and very special, muses

Through the windows the sun’s light Turns to amber, the moon’s to jade; All night long I lie awake, wondering How much your stunned heart can take. That moment’s ‘sudden interminable splendour’, Our love

From the French of Andrй Frйnaud France was born there and it is from there she sings Of Joan of Ark and Varlin both. We must dig deep, o motherland, Beneath those heavy cobbles.

I You buy my freedom with your love. With every book you catalogue or stamp My imagination hacks a strand from the hawser That for three years has held it In the grubbing estuary

You always disrupt me; When I ring you for comfort You wing me, send my Pudding of a mind A-splatter on the wall. You chase me to bed even, Passionately, not-yourself-at-all, You bawl your

The years become you as Oxford becomes you, As you became Oxford through the protest years; From Magdalen’s grey gargoyles to its bridge in May, From the cement buttresses of Wellington Square To Balliol,

There was a hope for poetry in the sixties And for education and society, teachers free To do as they wanted: I could and did teach Poetry and art all day and little else

(To Paul Sykes, author of ‘Sweet Agony’) He demolished five doors at a sitting And topped it off with an outsize window One Christmas afternoon, when drunk; Sober he smiled like an angel, bowed,

Poems do not always satisfy the soul, The feel of cobbles underfoot is at this moment more Than all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the unending vistas Of the moor, an infinity of purity that excels

Sorry, I almost forgot, but I don’t think Its worth the effort to become a Carcanet poet With my mug-shot on art gloss paper In your catalogue as big as Mont Blanc Easier to

THE WALK TO THE PARADISE GARDENS 1 Bonfire Night beckoned us to the bridge By Saint Hilda’s where we started down Knostrop to chump but I trailed behind With Margaret when it was late

I am waiting for the sky to flower Like poems in a winter mind: And yet they come, maybe trailing along An urchin gang, sobbing and snotty-nosed.

As milled silver I was welcome In every gutter, tinkling over cobbles I rang the truth loudly on solid-oak counters And tills tolled for me clear as bells. Boldly I gave myself to many,

I thought of my ‘faculty of poetry’ As of the eye The bream or white-bait showed In its hysterical dance of death When the receding tide Left it asleep In a shallow pool on

For Barbara I step off the pavement Like a precipice Engage the darting sunshafts In a duel In the wall’s shadow I web My prints to pattern The moist stone virgins. The lawns are

Quarter to three: I wake again at the hour of his birth Thirty years ago and now he paces corridors of dark In nightmares of self-condemnation where random thoughts Besiege his fevered imagination –

Sorry, Writer in Residence on the Great North Run The last thing I’d ever do is listen to your spin “You risk losing potential allies in your war against the philistines, Astley, Armitage, Duffy,

I sat on a low stone wall Watching the blue blood of the azaleas Spatter on Haworth’s cobbles. A seamless transparency of rain Lowering over the turning trees My thoughts drifting to Claudel’s ‘Five

(May I lie in peace) Let there be grass and trees to blow And fold me in their shadow Branches to shake and leaves Turn brown, fall and lie fallow. Let there be moorlands

Memories bursting like tears or waves On some lonely Adriatic shore Beating again and again Threshings of green sea foam Flecked like the marble Leonardo Chipped for his ‘Moses’. And my tears came as

L’orage qui s’attarde, le lit dйfait Yves Bonnefoy Here am I, lying lacklustre in an unmade bed A Sunday in December while all Leeds lies in around me In the silent streets, frost on

O my beloved city, How many times have I deserted you For the sights and sounds of Babylon? How often and from how far Have I conjured your broad boulevards O Quartier Latin, crowded

Runs to no compass point But starts within the human heart Where travellers in twos may go As for a while it winds beside A man-made road then veers aside We met at a

The unsettled trees seem to share My tensions of body and mind: Unable to move before the shell of the wind, Yielding as much as their nature allows, They will break if pushed too

Barbarous insult to Yeats’ memory and Claudel’s Allen, thank God you are dead, you who breathed the air of Apollinaire, Ghost of Reverdy bear witness to the mendacity of his clamour, Hart Crane, rise

Composed of chalk dust, Pencil shavings and The sharp odour Of stale urine; It meets me now and then Creeping down a creosoted corridor Or waiting to be banged With the dust from piles

What ghosts haunt These streets of perpetual night? Riverbanks fractured with splinters of glass condominiums For nouveam riche merchant bankers Black-tied bouncers man clubland glitz casinos Novotel, Valley Park Motel, the Hilton: Hot tubs,

When Blunkett starts to talk like Enoch Powell I think of Harold Wilson’s statue in Huddersfield Station Caught striding forward, gripping his pipe in his pocket, Hair blowing in the wind. Could we but

I stood there in front of forty-five faces The first day of term, not especially fancying “Exercises in Mechanical Arithmetic” and so instead I read a poem from Kirkup in Japan, about Nijinsky, Hand-written

At ten she came to me, three years ago, There was ‘something between us’ even then; Watching her write like Eliot every day, Turn prose into haiku in ten minutes flat, Write a poem

AGAINST THE GRAIN “Oxford be silent, I this truth must write Leeds hath for rarities undone thee quite.” – William Dawson of Hackney, Nov.7th 1704 “The repressed becomes the poem” Louise Bogan 1 Well