Poetry Review â The Dancers of Colbek: Stephen Claughton takes a close look at William Bedfordâs resonant and engaging new collection
The Dancers of Colbek
William Bedford
Two Rivers Press
ISBN 978-1-909747-57-9
ÂŁ9.99
William Bedfordâs new collection comes hot on the heels of his 2019 pamphlet, Chagallâs Circus (reviewed for London Grip by Carla Scarano in May last year). The central section contains poems based on the life of John Clare, which â as with Chagall â are in the voice of the subject himself, whereas the two outer sections follow Bedfordâs most recent full collections, The Fen Dancing (2014) and The Bread Horse (2015), in being mainly concerned with the poetâs childhood and family. The Bread Horse described the hardships endured by his forebears in industrial Sheffield in an appropriately hard-edged style. The Dancers of Colbek, on the other hand, represents a return to the softer, rural tone of The Fen Dancing. Indeed, a number of the poems (âWeddingsâ, âThe Railway Station at Stamfordâ and âThe Fontâ) have been carried over from the earlier book and another, âFishingâ, is based on the same childhood memory as an earlier poem, âRedsâ, recalling tiddlers and minnows, caught in the local river, being left to rot in a tub, but here itâs presented in a more direct, less literary way.
Unsurprisingly, given the subject matter, time is an important theme. The first section, âSlow Stopping Trainsâ, begins with a poem, âThe Journeyâ, about the poetâs grandmother making the dayâs journey âby stopping train and unfamiliar stationsâ to see her new-born grandson, only to die âweeks later, as the bluebells cameâ, having been:
to make your claim on an unknown future,
plant the seeds of our secret harvest.
A connection has been forged, even though it exists as a family memory rather than a personal one. Links with the people and places of his past are key to the first and last sections of the book.
There is a sense throughout that all time is eternally present. In âWagon & Horsesâ, a memory from Grantham in 1947 of hearing ârevellers in the yard, / soldiers home from war, girls on their armsâ sparks the idea that they âmight be back from Napoleonâs warsâ, âghosts of the mud of the Great Warâ, or âveterans of Dunkirkâs scoured dunesâ. The fact that the revellers are heard and not seen gives wide scope for the imagination. The poem ends:
And I hear dolls in the darkness talking,
whispering their news of dollsâ houses,
gossip like minnows and tiddlers
truer than the morningâs raw headlines.
In âThe Stoveâ, memories of a teacher reading stories to her class begin with what seems like the historic present, but by switching to the perfect tense (âThe stove has been taken awayâ) and back to the present (âwhere you sit in your old chair, / and the stove burns coke to a yellow glow, / warming your storytellerâs murmurâ) Bedford effectively turns the teacher into a ghost. Elsewhere ghosts abound (âyour ghost-walks were rareâ, âthe ghosts of summer cattle grazingâ, âCromwellâs ghostly riders clatter byâ, âIn leafless branches, ghosts weepâ, âthe poltergeist railing against heavenâ). Places are haunted both by real people (Tennyson or John Taverner) and by fictional characters (from Sons and Lovers or The Rainbow).
One thing that marks Bedford out is his seriousness. (I donât mean that he is humourless â there is a lot of wit in these poems.) âLaurel and Hardyâ, for instance, is dedicated to Keith Hutson and has a Hutson-like enumeration of more or less unlikely-sounding acts (âthen Derek Rosaire and his Wonder Horse, / Betty Kaye with her Pekinese Petsâ), but Bedford is concerned less with the turns themselves than with the grimmer realities of life in the 1950s:
I sat in rows of gold and garish decoration,
but there were fleas in my hair when we left,
and my mother said fleas gave you polio,
like Ralf Betts in our class who wore callipers
to protect his withering legs, but still danced
a slow shine shuffle for Stan and Oliver.
Similarly, âThe Railway Station in Stamfordâ (âThis was not Adlestrop, / and the girl waiting on the platform, / wearing a blue summer dress, / had never heard of Edward Thomasâ) might lead you to expect something anti-heroic along the lines of Dannie Abseâs âNot Adlestropâ, in which the girl seen on the train ignores the poet standing on the platform, until the train is safely in motion. Instead, Bedford picks up the epiphanic ending of Adlestrop itself and applies it universally:
Only the birds
reckon the same memories,
racketing above the station clock
as if Adlestrop should be remembered everywhere.
One of the most oblique poems in a book that is otherwise marked by its lucidity is âThe Floodsâ, which begins:
There have been winter floods before,
but your loss eddies round us,
like a shrimp netterâs dross,
caught up by fishermen on a freak tide
and ends:
There have been winter floods before,
but tiding on a wash of herring gulls,
your silence wakes to meet the sea,
as winter shores meet nothingâs blank stare.
The poemâs images of bleakness, including âan offering of meaning lighting stars / until dawnâs ache unravels meaningâs shamâ, makes this sound like Bedfordâs âDover Beachâ, facing life (and death) without faith. In âSomersbyâ, there is a Larkinesque church that âsquats like a grey toadâ, but the images here are darker than anything in Larkinâs âChurch Goingâ: âWhen we open the door, the gold hurts: // black pews and blacker heaven / hidden among yews and leaking stonesâ. He imagines:
the taut farmers and parish councillors,
angry women with their sullen lives.
Outside, in sun, the yews creak.
The sundial spreads its green corrosion.
Through frozen hedgerows, time leaks.
The central section, âThe Flittingâ, is a sequence of poems based on the life of John Clare in the voice of Clare himself. Itâs daring for one poet to ventriloquize another, but this isnât pastiche. Though Bedford makes use of Clareâs poetry (âI am but what I am no wopstraw [bumpkin] caresâ), the main sources are Clareâs prose writings, which included an unpublished autobiography (acknowledgements are made to Professors Jonathan Bate and Simon Kövesi, who have both written recently about Clare). The result is the sort of anecdotal poetry that Clare might have written had he lived two centuries later, though Bedford makes a feature of using Clareâs punctuation, spelling and dialect, with words helpfully glossed at the end of each poem, together with short notes, where necessary. It gains from not being laid on too thick, and gives rise to some felicities, such as Clareâs spelling of âhorizonâ as âorisonâ as in âprayerâ (âWorldâs Endâ), or âMaryâs watchet [light blue] eyes / watch me with sad surpriseâ (âTake Your Own Trundleâ). It seems that Clare was prone to delusions rather than being completely deranged, able â according to Bate â to give his fellow inmates lively and exact accounts of local trials, while at the same time being apt to think (or appear to think) that he was Byron, or Nelson, or a prizefighter. This last is captured in Bedfordâ poem, âThe Fancyâ, where âfancyâ is glossed as âbare-knuckle boxingâ, but must also be a pun on âfantasyâ. Fittingly, Clare himself is given the last word in âJohn Clareâs Willâ, a âfoundâ poem, adapted from the poetâs own (ignored) instructions for his gravestone.
Clareâs poetry harks back to the rural Northamptonshire where he grew up and the poems that begin Bedfordâs third section, âThe Moving Fieldâ, recount incidents from his own childhood in Lincolnshire. Unlike Clareâs countryside, which was changed by the enclosures, Bedfordâs had already been invaded by an American airbase. There are poems about his policeman father having to register the airmen and their families as aliens and about the poet dating a girl at the base, whose father takes exception to the book of Poundâs poems he has brought (ââTraitor!â flares from his mouth. âMad!ââ).
Bedford does not gloss over the racial attitudes of his fatherâs generation. He is also clear-eyed about change. âAll Saintsâ begins:
Theyâre closing the church down,
though the crocuses on the graves donât know that,
the crows circling the squat tower
implying that itâs solipsistic to imagine that societal changes are any more than that. Here the concerns are more practical:
The shopâs closing down. The pubâs still open,
but selling wine for American tourists,
a farm labourerâs stories the only souvenirs.
We donât know whoâll maintain the graveyard,
answer the touristsâ questions.
And when Bedford says of the church closure, âThey should have done it when the maypole went, / the end of praying and dancingâ, he lumps religion and folklore together in a lighter expression of unbelief than that in âThe Floodsâ or âSomersbyâ.
The last poem in the book, âThe Dancers of Colbekâ, is followed by a note describing its source â âHandlyng Synneâ, a long poem by Robert Mannyng of Brunne, in which the story:
â⊠purports to be a warning to people of what might happen to them if they dance in a
church graveyard. The original tale on which it is based, however, was probably a pagan
warning of the dangers of interfering with sacred or magical dancers.
âIn Mannyngâs version, the Christian priest who curses the dancers is the one who finally
suffers, both he and his daughter dying. The casually mentioned daughter gives the game
away.â
And in the âThe Dancers of Colbekâ itself, there is no doubt which side the poet is on:
Karolles, wrastlynges, or somour games
set me jiggling with first words,
the Dancers of Colbek leading the way.
Bedford makes the past fully present in this clear, resonant and thoroughly engaging book.
London Grip Poetry Review – William Bedford
February 28, 2020
Poetry Review â The Dancers of Colbek: Stephen Claughton takes a close look at William Bedfordâs resonant and engaging new collection
William Bedfordâs new collection comes hot on the heels of his 2019 pamphlet, Chagallâs Circus (reviewed for London Grip by Carla Scarano in May last year). The central section contains poems based on the life of John Clare, which â as with Chagall â are in the voice of the subject himself, whereas the two outer sections follow Bedfordâs most recent full collections, The Fen Dancing (2014) and The Bread Horse (2015), in being mainly concerned with the poetâs childhood and family. The Bread Horse described the hardships endured by his forebears in industrial Sheffield in an appropriately hard-edged style. The Dancers of Colbek, on the other hand, represents a return to the softer, rural tone of The Fen Dancing. Indeed, a number of the poems (âWeddingsâ, âThe Railway Station at Stamfordâ and âThe Fontâ) have been carried over from the earlier book and another, âFishingâ, is based on the same childhood memory as an earlier poem, âRedsâ, recalling tiddlers and minnows, caught in the local river, being left to rot in a tub, but here itâs presented in a more direct, less literary way.
Unsurprisingly, given the subject matter, time is an important theme. The first section, âSlow Stopping Trainsâ, begins with a poem, âThe Journeyâ, about the poetâs grandmother making the dayâs journey âby stopping train and unfamiliar stationsâ to see her new-born grandson, only to die âweeks later, as the bluebells cameâ, having been:
A connection has been forged, even though it exists as a family memory rather than a personal one. Links with the people and places of his past are key to the first and last sections of the book.
There is a sense throughout that all time is eternally present. In âWagon & Horsesâ, a memory from Grantham in 1947 of hearing ârevellers in the yard, / soldiers home from war, girls on their armsâ sparks the idea that they âmight be back from Napoleonâs warsâ, âghosts of the mud of the Great Warâ, or âveterans of Dunkirkâs scoured dunesâ. The fact that the revellers are heard and not seen gives wide scope for the imagination. The poem ends:
In âThe Stoveâ, memories of a teacher reading stories to her class begin with what seems like the historic present, but by switching to the perfect tense (âThe stove has been taken awayâ) and back to the present (âwhere you sit in your old chair, / and the stove burns coke to a yellow glow, / warming your storytellerâs murmurâ) Bedford effectively turns the teacher into a ghost. Elsewhere ghosts abound (âyour ghost-walks were rareâ, âthe ghosts of summer cattle grazingâ, âCromwellâs ghostly riders clatter byâ, âIn leafless branches, ghosts weepâ, âthe poltergeist railing against heavenâ). Places are haunted both by real people (Tennyson or John Taverner) and by fictional characters (from Sons and Lovers or The Rainbow).
One thing that marks Bedford out is his seriousness. (I donât mean that he is humourless â there is a lot of wit in these poems.) âLaurel and Hardyâ, for instance, is dedicated to Keith Hutson and has a Hutson-like enumeration of more or less unlikely-sounding acts (âthen Derek Rosaire and his Wonder Horse, / Betty Kaye with her Pekinese Petsâ), but Bedford is concerned less with the turns themselves than with the grimmer realities of life in the 1950s:
Similarly, âThe Railway Station in Stamfordâ (âThis was not Adlestrop, / and the girl waiting on the platform, / wearing a blue summer dress, / had never heard of Edward Thomasâ) might lead you to expect something anti-heroic along the lines of Dannie Abseâs âNot Adlestropâ, in which the girl seen on the train ignores the poet standing on the platform, until the train is safely in motion. Instead, Bedford picks up the epiphanic ending of Adlestrop itself and applies it universally:
One of the most oblique poems in a book that is otherwise marked by its lucidity is âThe Floodsâ, which begins:
and ends:
The poemâs images of bleakness, including âan offering of meaning lighting stars / until dawnâs ache unravels meaningâs shamâ, makes this sound like Bedfordâs âDover Beachâ, facing life (and death) without faith. In âSomersbyâ, there is a Larkinesque church that âsquats like a grey toadâ, but the images here are darker than anything in Larkinâs âChurch Goingâ: âWhen we open the door, the gold hurts: // black pews and blacker heaven / hidden among yews and leaking stonesâ. He imagines:
The central section, âThe Flittingâ, is a sequence of poems based on the life of John Clare in the voice of Clare himself. Itâs daring for one poet to ventriloquize another, but this isnât pastiche. Though Bedford makes use of Clareâs poetry (âI am but what I am no wopstraw [bumpkin] caresâ), the main sources are Clareâs prose writings, which included an unpublished autobiography (acknowledgements are made to Professors Jonathan Bate and Simon Kövesi, who have both written recently about Clare). The result is the sort of anecdotal poetry that Clare might have written had he lived two centuries later, though Bedford makes a feature of using Clareâs punctuation, spelling and dialect, with words helpfully glossed at the end of each poem, together with short notes, where necessary. It gains from not being laid on too thick, and gives rise to some felicities, such as Clareâs spelling of âhorizonâ as âorisonâ as in âprayerâ (âWorldâs Endâ), or âMaryâs watchet [light blue] eyes / watch me with sad surpriseâ (âTake Your Own Trundleâ). It seems that Clare was prone to delusions rather than being completely deranged, able â according to Bate â to give his fellow inmates lively and exact accounts of local trials, while at the same time being apt to think (or appear to think) that he was Byron, or Nelson, or a prizefighter. This last is captured in Bedfordâ poem, âThe Fancyâ, where âfancyâ is glossed as âbare-knuckle boxingâ, but must also be a pun on âfantasyâ. Fittingly, Clare himself is given the last word in âJohn Clareâs Willâ, a âfoundâ poem, adapted from the poetâs own (ignored) instructions for his gravestone.
Clareâs poetry harks back to the rural Northamptonshire where he grew up and the poems that begin Bedfordâs third section, âThe Moving Fieldâ, recount incidents from his own childhood in Lincolnshire. Unlike Clareâs countryside, which was changed by the enclosures, Bedfordâs had already been invaded by an American airbase. There are poems about his policeman father having to register the airmen and their families as aliens and about the poet dating a girl at the base, whose father takes exception to the book of Poundâs poems he has brought (ââTraitor!â flares from his mouth. âMad!ââ).
Bedford does not gloss over the racial attitudes of his fatherâs generation. He is also clear-eyed about change. âAll Saintsâ begins:
implying that itâs solipsistic to imagine that societal changes are any more than that. Here the concerns are more practical:
And when Bedford says of the church closure, âThey should have done it when the maypole went, / the end of praying and dancingâ, he lumps religion and folklore together in a lighter expression of unbelief than that in âThe Floodsâ or âSomersbyâ.
The last poem in the book, âThe Dancers of Colbekâ, is followed by a note describing its source â âHandlyng Synneâ, a long poem by Robert Mannyng of Brunne, in which the story:
And in the âThe Dancers of Colbekâ itself, there is no doubt which side the poet is on:
Bedford makes the past fully present in this clear, resonant and thoroughly engaging book.