walking the loose cross-stitch / of tracks that mesh this hillside
pushing through the seaweed / heavy cling of bracken
a jogger emerges from mist / disappears as if pulled under

 

I pull my low-brow cap / down against the rain
shoulder my dark bulk / over the hill and startle

 

a nervous woman walking / a nervous dog pulling
muscles tense as whips / tight under soft pelt
my nodded greeting falls / against a lycra-clad back.

 

a pair of sheep watch me / from here I can see the street
next to the street I live on / haul itself out the other side

 

The special guest for my final event under the “Grist Literary Salon” banner, organised alongside novelist Michael Stewart in Huddersfield town centre, was the poet Nick Allen. I loved his reading and I loved his poems. I bought his collection because he’s a fellow Leeds United fan. We’ve got to stick (march on) together.

I was also enticed by the title, local universes (Maytree Press, 2023). There was a degree of juxtaposition already present in the title, and I hoped this two-sidedness would permeate the collection.

My first read came when I was cooking a Christmas dinner. My second read came in the aftermath of Christmas and the early days of the New Year. Winter, darkness, fog and the lethargic movement of nature permeate this book. In fact, it’s perfect for this time of year – the threshold between winter and spring. Right now, the days are growing longer and the sun is brighter, but most of the trees are still sparse, the wind seems to howl randomly and, once or twice, fog still seems to lower down over everything. It’s a good way to look at what we’ve just been through – a rainy, dreary English winter – and what (we hope) is coming: a bright spring, a hot summer.

For me, the standout poem in here, and hence our poem of the month, is ‘Hill Fog’. This piece has crisp and specific images that make something so ordinary – a walk in the fog – seem visceral, treasured, almost idealised. Not only that, but this poem captures the small pockets of nature all over the country, and is vividly, romantically Yorkshire. It is shrouded in darkness and secrets like a Brontë novel. It is familiar and comforting to me, a Yorkshireman, who spent his childhood trapsing fields, moors, forests and clifftops.

The thing that makes this poem so beautiful is the way everything in the natural environment is so connected. Yes, there’s an overhanging air of anxiety in the ‘nervous woman’ and the ‘nervous dog’ – and which of those two has muscles that are ‘tense as whips’? There’s also an impermanence to this landscape, crafted through the verbs ‘emerges’ and ‘disappears’ – visibility is low, and Allen expertly shows the endless creation and destruction of this world as the speaker journeys through the fog. But everything in nature is one, here. The tracks are a ‘cross-stitch’ and they ‘mesh’ the hillside. The bracken ‘cling[s]’. It is raining, with equal vigour, on everything. Even ‘the street/next to the street I live on’ shows connectedness. Only the people are disconnected here, each on their own disparate journeys. Yet even they come together in this small pocket of visibility in the midst of thick hill fog – a jogger, a dog-walker, a lone rambler.

The fascinating thing, for me, has always been Nick’s use of the forward slash. I’ve used it in my own work (yes, inspired by Nick) but I could never truly fathom why Nick used it – and my own reasoning for its use did nothing to help me figure out Nick’s. It is an interrogation of form. It functions as a line break, while simultaneously forcing some kind of fluidity. It meshes the poem together in a similar manner to which the ‘cross-stitch / of tracks’ joins the landscape and the journey of these three people. This is a frequent feature of Inua Ellams’ poetry, too, and he helpfully states, in an interview with Dai George at Poetry London, ‘the slashes operate as line breaks, but also as quotation marks, commas, bullet points, breaths, caesura and scene changes’. So, despite the simplicity of ‘Hill Fog’, it can be read in so many different ways.

For me, there is also the small matter of the meaning of a forward slash. It means either ‘and’ or ‘or’. I spent a while trying to read this poem in a few different ways. First, I thought of the slash as meaning ‘and’, hence treating either side of the slash like columns, trying to see if maybe we had two poems in one. Only the ‘of’ in the poem’s first line ruin this possibility, and I cannot reconcile with it. I then decided to go with the meaning of ‘or’ – as in, pick one or the other. Choose your own adventure:

 

walking the loose cross-stitch
heavy cling of bracken
disappears as if pulled under

I pull my low-brow cap
shoulder my dark bulk

a nervous dog pulling
muscles tense as whips
against a lycra-clad back.

from here I can see the street
haul itself out the other side

Perhaps I have bastardised Allen’s poem here. Maybe he wanted the slash to mean a line break, or a breath, or a comma. But this poem’s malleability, its built-in juxtaposition, was too seductive for me to ignore.

I think Nick’s work has intense value to the aspiring poet. A young writer could do far worse than read and re-read Nick Allen’s poetry. I’ve shared him with GCSE students and university students alike, and both latched onto his voice – its beauty, its accessibility, and its simultaneous complexity – with equal fervour. In fact, a sixteen-year-old GCSE student and aspiring poet stared at this for a third of our hour-long lessons, seeing various different effects of Allen’s use of the backslash. I introduced her to this poem, and she re-read it in her own way. So credit has to go to her, too. I showed her poetry in a form she had never seen, and she showed me how much promise young writers have. We need writers now, more than ever.

Nick Allen’s local universes is a wonder, and I am excited to share ‘Hill Fog’ with you.