I grew up in Norfolk, the easternmost county of England, and one of the most rural (I now live in its only city, Norwich). The one poem I know that catches something like my experience of that place and time — and its distinctive accent, rarely nailed by actors (“suffen or nuffen”, “I don’t fucken know”) — is “August Bank Holiday” by Jack Underwood, who also grew up mid-Norfolk in the Nineties:
One thing I can tell you
about the bleak, the flat, the squally cirrus
like a mind dragged above your head
is that silence doesn’t need to try
too hard out here. Rest of the world?
That way.
Norfolk is famously flat, which means you are constantly reminded that the rest of the world is so far away you can’t even see it on the horizon. So when I began to read poetry as as a teenager, one of the deep attractions of the first poets I found was how strongly they felt other landscapes I’d only glimpsed, on holiday or TV: the Middle England of Larkin and Betjeman, the Devon and Yorkshire of Hughes and Plath, the Northern Ireland of Heaney and Muldoon.
These days — as a literary critic living among what I still consider to be the bright lights of the metropolis — I have more of a taste for poetry written within a few miles of where I live. So it was an honour to be asked to introduce a new Norfolk anthology, published this month. Here’s what I said, followed by a few favourites from almost two hundred pages of poems. Don’t stand on one leg on a cliff at Cromer without it.
From Homer to Cromer: The Poetry of Norfolk
For many people, coming and going on holiday, the Norfolk coast, which rounds out the east of England with a lobe of eroding land, is the only part of the county they ever really get to know — and even then they will be looking away, out to sea. More of Norfolk’s border is exposed to the ocean than not, and this makes for a mood of collective isolation; an open loneliness intensified by the fact that no motorway has yet crossed its land border. “How did the Devil come? When first attack?” asks John Betjeman of innocent childhood holidays in Norfolk, and the obvious answer is: over the North Sea, with the cold wind and the snow buntings.
Poets, too, have flocked to the edges, for cliffs, dunes and saltmarshes, and that is where this book begins. But the poetry of the Norfolk coast is almost entirely a modern invention, arriving with the railways, expanding with the car. For the editors of this anthology — by far the most comprehensive and knowledgeable ever compiled — it is just a landing place: deep Norfolk lies beyond, along the waterways that lead to its boat-stirred Broads; its straggly villages and by-passed towns; its flint-walled city, Norwich, with its thin cathedral and compact castle; its grand churches — the stone legacy of the wool trade — rising above the fields; the wet Fens to the west and the dry Brecks to the south, both landscapes changed enormously by human settlement, despite the fact that there often seems to be nobody around. (All those people you can’t see, however, made the rhymes attributed here to “Anon”.)
When Edward Lear composed his limerick about the Old Person of Cromer who stood on one leg to read Homer, it was probably the first time in the history of English literature that the fishing town — and fashionable Victorian resort — had been rhymed with the Greek epic poet. John Taylor, at least, didn’t think to make the connection when he recounted being washed up there in 1622, despite casting himself as a hapless Odysseus, sucked into the whirlpool of Charybdis. But as Homer’s ghost whispered to the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, in a sonnet ironically titled “Epic”: “I made the Iliad from such / A local row”.
Modern poetry has specialised in making something out of nothing – and there is plenty of nothing in Norfolk, from the ruins of its great houses to the “ghost fields” left behind by the U.S. Air Force after the war. One of my favourite sections of the local paper is the farming news, which often features pictures of nothing: blocks, that is, of “productive arable land”, for sale by auction. “The inner spirit of the world”, wrote the poet T.E. Hulme, “is miles and miles of ploughed fields”. A poem puts history and imagination back into this speechless space, like Tariq in Moniza Alvi’s “Rural Scene”, who moves under “luminous Norfolk skies /… / as if he is walking a tiger”. Welcome.
When the sea comes in at Horsey Gap
Without any previous warning,
A swan shall build its rushy nest
On the roof of The Swan at Horning.
And a bald-headed crow, contented and merry,
Shall feast on the corpses that float by the ferry.
Anon.
Rural Scene
The luminous Norfolk skies,
the tractors, the gunshots,
the still ponds, the darting rabbits,
cow parsley by the field gates —
all are re-imagining themselves
because Tariq walks in his village,
part of the scene, yet conspicuous
as if he is walking a tiger.
Moniza Alvi (b. 1954)
On The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
This book is not about the rings of Saturn:
It starts in Norwich hospital and ends
Among exhausted Strangers treading patterns
From silken threads to try to make some sense
Of Suffolk churches sifted by the ocean
And silver herring heaped like no tomorrow
Grey photos set in prose without emotion
And Swinburne on the cliffs of ash and sorrow
Where living things take flight into the fabled
Like silkworms from their robes of soft black down
Inside the mind of W.G. Sebald
Who circles round the skull of Thomas Browne
His learned dust dispersed without a trace
Beyond the Norwich ring road, time and space
Ron Nevett (b. 1955)
Devotional for the Acle Straight
Farmland passes on the horizon, the soft steam of a sugar beet factory hangs above the flatland and seems to move at the pace of the coach. Orange curtains hang against the snow, the purple of the fields and the frozen puddles of water that I can imagine my dead dad’s ghost breaking with his walking stick.
Worldly things seem so brittle, so precarious: the television masts, the fleet of white hire vans surrounded by floodlights, the two-carriage train high on the bank. We pass single drivers going the other way, the coach driver catching one last look at them in his side mirrors.
Behind us, Great Yarmouth is lighting its lights against the coming tides.
Andrew McDonnell (b. 1977)
NOTES
Poems reproduced by kind permission of Moniza Alvi, Ron Nevett, and Andrew McDonnell.
You can buy a copy of Before the Dreadful Daylight Starts direct from the publisher here: https://waterlandbooks.co.uk/shop/
Thanks to local designer Nick Stone for sharing this special Norfolk-language edition of the front cover when I asked him for a hi-res image to illustrate this post:
Nick is also a member of the team for long-running Norfolk-based poetry magazine The Rialto, whose 100th issue — guest edited by Will Harris and Ella Frears — is available here: https://www.therialto.co.uk/pages/product/rialto-magazine-100/
It’s nice to be sending out this week’s post to 1,001 subscribers. Welcome, everyone.