{"id":4699,"date":"2016-05-09T12:23:33","date_gmt":"2016-05-09T12:23:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/?p=4699"},"modified":"2023-06-27T12:03:09","modified_gmt":"2023-06-27T12:03:09","slug":"a-vision-for-the-topographical-future-of-east-anglia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/2016\/05\/09\/a-vision-for-the-topographical-future-of-east-anglia\/","title":{"rendered":"A VISION FOR THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FUTURE OF EAST ANGLIA by Matt Haw"},"content":{"rendered":"

A VISION FOR THE TOPOGRAPHICAL FUTURE OF EAST ANGLIA\u00a0\u00a0 by Matt Haw
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

In khaki raiment, the neo
\ncenturion patrols the levee.
\nJade North Sea lapping
\nover the flood defences.
\nOut in the glimmering,
\namphibious trawlers sift<\/p>\n

for bivalves. Below,
\nthe salt marsh goes on
\nfor miles of sea grass
\n& sampha. Boudica punts
\nher palette raft back to
\nthe stilt houses. A Celtic<\/p>\n

knot of eels in a bucket
\nfor breakfast. She is
\nbrown & freckled with
\nliving out in the brackish
\nsun, how she lives since
\nthe re-wilding of the east.<\/p>\n

When the tide sits low,
\ndunes island like basking
\nseals. On still days, water
\nclears, you can look down
\non bungalows submerged
\nchurches. They<\/em> don’t<\/p>\n

trouble her, beside a few
\ninsults spat by trawler men.
\nShe rules an omega-three
\nrich regency, eating eel &
\ncrabs fat with burrowing
\nfor corpses in the silt.<\/p>\n

Michael and I had a moment of mild mutual surprise: I said I\u2019d blog about this poem and he said he\u2019d mentioned it in his draft newsletter. Turns out we are both fans of Russell Hoban\u2019s Riddley Walker<\/em>. Not that I thought of the novel when I first read the poem. I was drawn in by the terse yet intimate storytelling tone, by the detail and mystery. The title could belong to a monograph and the poem\u2019s like a collapsed monograph, much of its content supplied by the reader. The sea has entered East Anglia; that is clear. The land\/seascape\u2019s calm, but how deep does that calm go?<\/p>\n

The first two lines do a lot in nine words. Neo centurion, raiment, levee \u2013 the rescued words are as new\/old as the land\/seascape. Levee brings back the New Orleans floods. The neo centurion is on patrol \u2013 security is needed.<\/p>\n

Then we are lulled into a salt marsh pastoral. There\u2019s a raft made from a palette (floated up from Felixstowe?), a lovely \u201cCeltic knot\u201d of eels, \u201camphibious\u201d trawlers (innovation is still possible), stilt houses (who else has fantasised about living in one of those when doing the Bronze Age at school?). Boudica lives in a world we half feel we know, part Swallows and Amazons, part history \u2013 the remains of a stilt village have just been found in Cambridgeshire. The drowned bungalows she looks down on are a future take on today\u2019s Dunwich. The sun is \u201cbrackish\u201d (nice word), suggesting that climate change has gone further than risen waters.<\/p>\n

Where is everyone? The land\/seascape\u2019s sparsely populated. We don\u2019t discover until the last line that Boudica survives by cannibalism at one remove. How long have the corpses been there, does the silt preserve them? What happened? Who are \u201cthey\u201d at the end of the fourth verse? Is Boudica living an idyll or living in fear? She carries a brave but tragic name\u2026 We learn about her more as presence than character, the future\u2019s resilient, sun-freckled ghost.<\/p>\n

The poem\u2019s success lies partly in the way it accommodates various possibilities and leave us to make what we want of them. Abrupt line-breaks give something of the dispassionate flatness syllabics would have, and yank the reader down the verses. There\u2019s assonance and alliteration (eg Celtic\/knot\/bucket\/breakfast). The first and, separately, last line-ends of most verses echo each other (neo\/below\/..\/low\/few).<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a dry humour underlying it all too, as if the poet\u2019s saying, see how weird everything could be… and is. I think he had fun writing the poem. I hope you enjoy it. Please add comments, alternative interpretations, insights, literary references etc below.<\/p>\n

Fiona Moore
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Photo credit: Cambridge Archaeological Unit<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.cam.ac.uk\/research\/news\/bronze-age-stilt-houses-unearthed-in-east-anglian-fens<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael and I had a moment of mild mutual surprise: I said I\u2019d blog about this poem and he said he\u2019d mentioned it in his draft newsletter. Turns out we are both fans of Russell Hoban\u2019s Riddley Walker…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":4700,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4699"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6106,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4699\/revisions\/6106"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}