"In this atmospheric anthology of specially commissioned poems, seven poets celebrate the South Downs. The poets tramp the chalk lines of downland in journeys that connect an ancient landscape to contemporary lives and longings.

The poems by Lydia Fulleylove and Kate Miller again cross the gulf between our worls and our experience by bringing the former’s eternity into the realm of the ephemeral. Seasons, weathers, and years merely ‘shuffle’ by; the rocky ground being only a chalk-brittle, ‘the thin lid of brown earth.’ All this serves to bring an immediacy to the poets’ words and the surroundings they depict. Instead of a vast landscape that defeats words, thepoets nake the land intimate andand human, a comforting presence in the midst of constant change laid out by time ."

Rufus Cuthbert, The London Magazine, 2017.

The Chalk Dragon

whose wings are fledgling
sketched in as if for flight

whose short tail sprung
makes out himself

not the jaunt of a chalk horse
but a trace of chalk
a scraped white line of thought

he contemplates ascent
watches clouds
like chalk rubbings in the sky

the discs of a dragon’s tail
in a tapering curve of vapour
which the wind smudges

he brushes scrabbly grass
wild thyme and white snail shells

he rides the ridges like green waves
he leaves himself behind

a sleep or sense print
which sheep now press against and hollow out

Lydia Fulleylove

Through the window

between the white wood bars

which split light into squares,

the flawed Georgian glass

giving such a crazed

sometimes shifting view

of what was beyond

that you were never sure

of what you really saw, 

even though this window

was the upper half

of the front door,

the glass so delicate

after all those years

that once a guest

struggling with the lock

put her wrist right through

severing the nerves,

her hand never the same –

through this window-door,

you could see, despite

its shivering caught light,

the twisted stump

of the sycamore

and, beyond that, just

make out the tulip tree

which always seemed to you

a tree of legend

where unicorns might hide,

and once you thought you saw

a white head, a horn

and butter yellow leaves

petalling its flanks

before it shrank back

into the hollow trunk

between two frail struts

by which the tulip tree

still held onto life.

Lydia Fulleylove

Limerstone Down

across the marsh

towards the down

the crack and snap

of frozen grass

the slant path up

the blackthorn coombe

in lichen-light

a kestrel starts

a raven krarks

scrub lit by frost

the dance of feet

on chalk, mud, flint

I look up – out

from self – from thought

Lydia Fulleylove

Just before dawn the crutches upheaved 

from their propping place against the bed and lurched down the crazy carpeting of the stairs.  By the light of the vanishing moon they could make out the way the wind had dealt with the clouds overnight.  They teetered across the pennyroyal, plantain and dry grass where they had often been slung, past the spot where they had once crashed, jamming an armpit and jarring a hip. They launched sideways through the hedge, slid down a bank and slipped into the wood by way of a badger tunnel.  Dead branches criss-crossed the earth.  They thrashed and hesitated, thrashed and hesitated, plastic-stoppered feet deep in dead leaves.  Mice skittered, wrapping up the night. The far side of the wood already showed lines of light invited in from the sky. They ratcheted up their height to the tallest notch and scanned the terrain for a path. Their fiercely-fingered handholds retained a thin sense of thumb-burn, wrist-strain, their cuffs took a moment to adjust to the empty clasp of the air, before they swivelled to glimpse a cat-track trotting towards a small clearing and a stream glimmering into a pool.   They had never before seen such inviting fluidity, not even on the day when they lay discarded on a bank of purslane, while the crutch-hopper’s good foot was dipped into the salt-sweet water of the estuary.   Now the sun was up.  Sly licks of light settled on their slim, steely spines.  They edged closer to the pool. A woodpigeon shuttered its wings and something squeaked.  In the ringing hollowness of the crutches’ hearts, a sound stuttered: cryc, crycce, kruk, kruke…  They did not choose to romanticize themselves, but the word staff occurred.  Here in the wood, aslant, two silver staffs.  

Lydia Fulleylove

cryc, crycce Old English: a crutch, a crook, a staff
kruk, kruke German: a crutch, a crook, a staff

This was a community project working with Writing for Well Being groups and creating found poems from ferry travellers’ observations, led by poet Robyn Bolam and myself and working with photographer Mark Lanigan, and songwriter/musicians JC Grimshaw and Dominic Prag and writer Philip Hoare. 

Many of these were published in our anthology : At Sea

Here is an ‘eye journey’ which I wrote in response to Mark Lanigan’s wonderful photograph above.

Cloud-Fish

a cloud trying to be a fish

drifting among wisps of cloud-weeds

a strip of saltmarsh,

a glimpse of silvery mud

a ferry flushed with sunset

below a sky-fish-cloud

In two chapters, The Writing Snake and The Story of The Albany Writers, I describe my experience of the transforming power of the arts in prison projects and in cross arts writing weekends for young people.