In this episode, I talk to Abbi Flint about Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s poem ‘Little Peach’ and her own poem ‘Cow Low Bowl (650 - 700 AD)’.

Abbi talks about the connections between her work as an archaeologist and her creative processes as a poet. She explores the idea of fragments - whether they be finds or fragmentary and non-linear details - as a way in to thinking about associations between her various practices. She talks about the creative skills that Burnett displays in her fashioning of a poetic voice that can embody other-than-human elements. She then goes on to discuss at length Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s project that evolved into her collection Twelve Words for Moss, and how ‘Little Peach’ fits into the overall design of the book. Abbi highlights the sensory qualities and playfulness of the language in Burnett’s poem, the wonder. Abbi also mentions Clare Shaw's peat bog poems as a way of understanding Burnett's work too. Abbi then goes on to explore the sound and sense of her own poem ‘Cow Low Bowl’ (650 - 700 AD)'. She draws on her development as a writer, pinpointing the Continuing Bonds project (see below) as a starting point for drawing together archeology and poetry. She then goes on to talk about how she gained creative inspiration from the Thomas Bateman antiquarian collection held at Western Park Museum in Sheffield in another cross-disciplinary project she was involved in. She talks about the layered approach she makes in 'Cow Low Bowl' - bringing together different texts and images to create this work. She draws on the tactile quality of the bowl as a way into thinking about the object. She talks about writing into the space that 'we will never know', and the archeological imagination. She goes on to discuss the possibility of a first complete collection of creative work, and what texts might be included in the book.

Abbi Flint is a researcher and poet, who works across archaeology, history and the environmental humanities. Her poems have been published in a range of online and print journals, including Under the Radar, Spelt, Atrium, Reliquiae, Popshot Quarterly, The Ekphrastic Review, Ink, Sweat and Tears, and Interpreters House.

Abbi mentions two projects, led by Professor Melanie Giles (University of Manchester), that she contributed poems to Vestiges and Peat: Past, Present and Future. The webpage for Vestiges contains a link to a recording of Abbi reading Cow Low Bowl, and a link to the pdf of the full Vestiges anthology.

More about the Continuing Bonds project, led by Professor Karina Croucher (University of Bradford), here: https://continuingbonds.live/teaching-materials/

The MossWorlds Project, led by Dr Anke Bernau, Dr Ingrid Hanson and Dr Aurora Fredriksen (University of Manchester), has a website here: https://mossworlds.co.uk/about-mossworlds/

The science poetry/art journal Consilience can be found here: https://www.consilience-journal.com/about

Abbi mentions a portrait of Thomas Bateman and his son sitting alongside the Cow Low Bowl. You can find a version of the image here.

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett's poem, 'Little Peach', was published in the Willowherb Review and also in her book Twelve Words for Moss. You can hear her read 'Little Peach' here.

Cowl Low Bowl (650-700 AD)

Low bowl, sky bowl dish that ran away with the moon underground, understone puddled mud above thirsty old bones that took the sky to bed in cloth and ash, iron and brass Sure bowl, palm bowl cupped by a hand that tipped sky to cold lips cold as a tod-fox tooth blue as a calm sea, tender as tilted hips that swallowed the moon

Whole bowl, restless bowl holds the horizon between soil and where air fell to dust this blue is a window between death and another death brought to light by the spade

In this episode, I talk to Robert Hamberger about John Clare’s poem 'The Field Mouse’s Nest' and his own poem 'Herb Robert'.

In our conversation, Robert talks about how his art teacher introduced to him to the works of Sylvia Plath and John Clare (among others). He discusses the 'everyday' language he uses in his poetry and how (through this 'political act') he doesn’t want to exclude his readers. He goes on to explore the idea of the sonnet - how can you find your voice inside the given ‘rules’ of the fourteen-line poem - the rhyme scheme, the weight of tradition: ‘a lovely challenge’. Robert then elaborates on Clare’s background - his prodigious output of poetry (even when he was incarcerated) and from this reflects on how important it is to separate writing from publishing (to see them as two separate activities). Robert then discusses 'The Field Mouse's Nest'. He explores punctuated and unpunctuated versions of this sonnet, and Clare's use of dialect, reading from Seamus Heaney's essay ‘John Clare’s Prog’. He touches on the idea of Clare as an ecopoet.

He then goes on to illuminate the evolution of his memoir A Length of Road: Finding Myself in the Footsteps of John Clare from 1995 onward - and how the poem 'Herb Robert' fits into the larger scheme of the book. He talks about 'Herb Robert' as a queer poem, and from this insight, shows how the relationship between himself and Clare - and his understanding of himself developed as he drafted and redrafted the work. He then goes on to talk at length about the hold the sonnet has had on him over his writing life, and how this poem, in particular, fitted in as one of his 'form-testing' poems.

You can read John Clare's Northborough Sonnets (mentioned in the podcast) in this edition from Carcanet Press. Seamus Heaney's essay on John Clare comes from his collection of essays The Redress of Poetry (Faber, 2002). Here is a version of 'The Field Mouse's Nest' from the Poetry Archive (with 'cesspools' instead of 'sexpools' in the final line).

Robert Hamberger has been shortlisted and highly commended for Forward prizes, appearing in the Forward Book of Poetry 2020. He won The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2023 and has been awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship. His poetry has featured as the Guardian Poem of the Week and in British, American, Irish and Japanese anthologies. He has published six poetry pamphlets and four full-length collections. Blue Wallpaper (Waterloo Press) was shortlisted for the 2020 Polari Prize. His prose memoir with poems A Length of Road: finding myself in the footsteps of John Clare was published by John Murray in 2021. His fifth collection Nude Against A Rock from Waterloo Press was published in October 2024.

You can find Robert Hamberger's website here.

You can follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

Herb Robert

What flavour of man is this, whose tips unpeel into flowers? His arrows blossom. Five petals top each blood-line that dips and lifts through the breeze. I've seen him hide by the creaky bridge where lattice-water dabbles a trout's tail while bubbles rise. His leaves mimic ferns, his colour campion. How can he be less than he is? He lives his name. Two bulbs branch from every stem, until I catch him taking over the wood-side. A hundred buds swarm their messages on the air. If I eat his breath will it heal me? Stroke him across my temples quietly, quietly.

In this episode, poet Katharine Towers discusses Elizabeth Bishop’s poems ‘Sandpiper’ and ‘Jerónimo’s House’ and her own poem ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s Sad Epitaph.’

In the interview, Katharine explains how she went from being a prose writer to a poet in part from reading Elizabeth Bishop’s poems. She examines the qualities of Bishop’s writing through an extended reading of ‘Sandpiper’, focusing in particular on line lengths, repetitions and rhymes. Katharine highlights the three things that Bishop strived for in her work — accuracy, spontaneity and mystery which she goes on to reflect on in both 'Sandpiper' and 'Jerónimo's House'. With regards to ‘Jeronimo’s House’, Katharine delves into her own interest in solitude when looking at this piece. She considers the idea that Jerónimo’s house is a ‘love nest’: unpicking this notion through various ways of reading this phrase. She explores the idea that Bishop (or her subjects) are often looking for a refuge or somewhere to hide away.

Katharine then goes on to illuminate her own poem ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s Sad Epitaph’. She talks about how she was inspired by Bishop’s comment to Robert Lowell about being the loneliest person who ever lived. Katharine sees this work as being a part of a sequence of first-person poems in the voice of various 'alone' women - and the ways in which aloneness was important to them. She reflects on the poem’s slant, the language of the work, the perspective (and possible feelings) of the narrator.

There are various editions of Elizabeth Bishop’s Collected Poems - the one I have is Complete Poems (Chatto, 1991). You can read ‘Sandpiper’ here.

As well as the Bishop poems highlighted we also touch on ‘The Moose’, ‘The End of March’, ‘The Bight’ and ‘The Fish’ in our conversation.

Katharine Towers has published three collections with Picador, most recently Oak which was a Poetry Book of the Month in The Guardian. The Floating Man (2010) won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and The Remedies (2016) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and was a Poetry Book of the Month in The Observer. A fourth collection is forthcoming from Picador in 2026. A pamphlet 'let him bring a shrubbe' exploring the life and work of the twentieth-century English composer Gerald Finzi was published by The Maker’s Press in 2023. In 2019 HappenStance Press published another pamphlet The Violin Forest.

You can also follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

'Elizabeth Bishop’s Sad Epitaph' by Katharine Towers In my fairy palace I am as lonely as I could wish. The ivy has grown up and over, and cosily inside there’s just little me reading or sitting. I could be on the moon or I could be in a Hans Christian Andersen story or I could be a girl getting over a love affair. The first room has two beds, so one will always be empty. The second room has two chairs, so I can see where I will sit tomorrow. The third room has two notebooks, so there will always be blank pages. At night I listen to flamenco on the radio. As I snap my fingers and click my heels I feel tremendously Spanish, or I feel a sultry empty weary joy. Covering the windows are the ivy’s mathematical hands. Daylight pokes through when it can, making of the worn-out floorboards a map of bright dots.

In this episode, poet Mark Pullinger discusses Shinkichi Takahashi’s poem ‘Sparrow in Winter’ (translated by Lucien Stryk) and two of Mark’s poems: ‘Magus' and ‘Untitled’. In the interview, we talk about Mark’s introduction to Zen poetry - and Zen haiku in particular - through his discovery of Shinkichi Takahashi’s work. We examine the multifaceted qualities of Takahashi’s poem ‘Sparrow in Winter’, which adopts simple language to create nuanced and complex associations around consciousness, the void, how the narrator and sparrow ‘mesh' with each other. We then go on to explore Mark’s approaches to writing through focusing on ‘Magus’ and ‘Untitled’. Mark talks in some depth - drawing on the specifics of these two pieces - about how his poetry has evolved over the past decade since the publication of his thesis.

You can find Takahashi’s poem ‘Sparrow in Winter’ in his collection Triumph of the Sparrow: Zen Poems by Shinkichi Takahashi - translated by Lucien Stryk (Grove Press, 1986). I picked up a digital copy of the book.

Mark Pullinger lives in the Dearne Valley, walking distance to RSPB Old Moor and its satellite sites, where he walks with his wife daily. The philosophy outlined in this interview was conceived for his PhD thesis, The Speaking World, available on Loughborough University’s Institutional Repository. He has recently completed a poetry collection on Kafka and the natural world, making a style shift from his thesis, but still expressing the same worldview. The Speaking World is available at https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/thesis/The_speaking_world

You can also follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

Sparrow in Winter by Shinkichi Takahashi translated by Lucien Stryk Breastdown fluttering in the breeze, The sparrow’s full of air holes. Let the winds of winter blow, Let them crack a wing, two, The sparrow doesn’t care. The air streams through him, free, easy, Scattering feathers, bending legs. He hops calmly, from branch to empty branch In an absolutely spaceless world. I’d catch, skewer, broil you, But my every shot misses: you’re impossible. All at once there’s the sound Of breaking glass, and houses begin To crumple. Rising quickly, An atomic submarine nudges past your belly.

Untitled by Mark Pullinger Polar bear smells life kills spreading through her her cubs extending skies earth’s breath expanding sun’s reign

Magus by Mark Pullinger In a distant desert a lone speck crosses the horizon mumbling, “the desert has dignity moving through it”. Sand drifts across humps, clinging, rolling on.

Heat, like breath, rises, waves reaching skies. Camel’s eyes large distant suns.

In this episode, poet Fay Musselwhite discusses David Jones’s book-length poem In Parenthesis and her own sequence ‘Memoir of a Working River’ from her collection Contraflow.

In the interview, we talk about how Fay came to Jones’s poem - a book that follows soldiers' long trajectory toward the Somme battlefield, but has so much more within it than the subject of war itself. For Fay, it’s ‘the fact that one’s part of the earth,’ and that Jones focuses on ‘class, land and nature’ that makes this such an inspiring and important work for her. We discuss the abundant details, images, hauntings contained in the work - and how war plays out like some violent codified ‘sport’ inflicted on these young men. Fay then goes on to explore the difficulties she encountered trying to write her ‘big river poem’ and how she found ways to embody the Rivelin as it runs through the western Sheffield by giving the river itself a voice and, for a while, the body of a young man. Fay explains why she wanted to make the river a human because she wanted to explore the world of those youthful Rivelin mill-workers. We reflect on the music of her poetry and how important it is to Fay’s project as a poet. The extract that Fay read’s from In Parenthesis covers pp. 165 - 168 from her copy of the book (Faber, 1978).

There's a recording of an extract of the poem on the Poetry Archive website. It includes an introduction by David Jones himself, and actors playing the many voices in the work. It gives you a good sense of the polyphony in the poem. You can listen to the audio here.

You can read more about, and buy a copy of Fay’s very fine collection Contraflow (Longbarrow Press, 2016) here.

You can also follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

From 'Memoir of a Working River’

6

Woken by some beast’s nudge then stunned at the incredible stillness of sky, slips in to bathe where the mill-dam overflow cascades slithers out freshened, rises and shivers watches the mud where new droplets nuzzle.

Donkeys trudge by, pressing on, faces low as if the cinder track hears their moan. Follows their swagger-loads sees motion onward driven by the momentum of raw and wrought iron.

Wavers as they near the spark-shed shy of its screaming grind and gritty guffaws but the torture rack, humped on its back in full watery swing, pricks his learning’s gap. Keen to find why the wheel must turn braves the factory door

steps in and into a gusting blur tastes its metal, feels particulates snag in sweat takes a moment to see where he is.

In geometry against nature’s grace humans are caught in a web each slumped over oak, held by spindle and belt to a stone that spits hot grit.

His feet itch.

He swerves a man dragging iron rods and trying to make his free hand speak.

On the river-run some images stick: flashes of crimson through blackened fur shreds on that donkey’s neck, the clench of combat riddled through men’s backs.

Lying on a weir to rinse metal squeals from his hair on the air a tang enthrals the inner juices —

he paces it downstream, tracks the prey to a tufted cove, a pail propped in rocks a man doubled over racked in rasp-spasms. When coughing releases its grip he sits near the man, asks how life is.

Sunk in the chest, not quite sitting up, the man shares his snap and between pneumatic seizure tells how he offers blunt steel to grit till it’s flayed by resistance to its leanest edge how each day he enters the valley more of it enters him.

The man says he’s seen eighteen summers a grinder for three, and nails in a voice hollow-loud what binds the wheel’s turn to that cheese and bread.

Twice the man says — The mus’ave a name. 
Only once — Come wi’ me, if tha needs a crust.