Читать книгу Sanctuary - Martyn Halsall - Страница 16

Poets’ Corner

Nicholson stands sentry, head and shoulders

above us as we enter, overlooking those

who do not glance up to spot him in recess,

as hacked black, out of coal; cold stare and muttonchops.

Lower, his companion’s laid out in briefer words

than those he gathered in dialect: Robert Anderson,

the Cumbrian Bard, profiled in white marble.

Three footsteps in, floor flutters as the door opens,

a fan of light illuminates the slab

honouring Susanna Blamire, a ‘poet of humour …

who caught the authentic voice of Cumberland’.

Together these compose Poets’ Corner, a thin anthology,

more like theology where absence signals presence.

No Wordsworth, tidied away in Cockermouth,

Grasmere, Rydal. No Coleridge – missing, as usual.

No Southey, with his withered laurel of laureateship;

Tennyson and Ruskin dismissed among rejection slips.

Perhaps poets and too much certainty don’t get on?

Or perhaps, like Duffy, their language is ‘secular prayer’,

echoes and side-glances; tentative, wary of entrance?