Poetry review – FABRICS, FANCIES & FENS: Caroline Maldonado considers a diverse but consistently accessible collection by Gerald Killingworth
Fabrics, Fancies & Fens
Gerald Killingworth
Tears in the Fence
ISBN 978-1-900020-14-5
£9.95
Tears in the Fence, the journal established in 1984 and edited by David Caddy, is known for its eclectic content, its internationalism and its embracing of contemporary modernist and post-modernist poetry, so it was a pleasure to receive this pamphlet of 41 pages, one of TITF’s occasional book publications.
Gerald Killingworth’s biographical details tell us that he has written fantasy novels, novels for children, as well as plays, all reflecting his interest in Elizabethan literature, and in this short collection he gives full range to his imaginative narrative voice to explore themes of place, memory and history. Included here are stories from the near past, of family members, local people – all rooted in a strong sense of place, recounted with familiarity and an intimate knowledge of their speech patterns. He also explores the magic of a ‘deep past’, often rooted in the Dorset landscape where he now lives, always underpinned by the belief: ‘True magic isn’t ready-made/ we need to conjure it, defying all sorts of gloom’ (“Poundbury Wassail”).
The collection is structured into three sections, indicated by its title: Fabrics, Fancies & Fens. Killingworth has introduced the first of these with a note about the texture of objects, how ‘From this sense of fabric, I allowed my imagination to wander as it wished’ and the first poem “Sambridges” sets the tone of the section. The title is noted as a comical mispronunciation of ‘sandwiches’, and the first two stanzas revel in the Proustian texture of a bread ‘That was soft, smelt like comfort,/sprang back when you pressed it,/made squidgy pellets’.
But the reality is that ‘this sandwich is as much grated turnip as flour’ and it opens a door not into a nostalgic dream but into war:
It's to tide you over
said Atkins who did the handing out –
to fill the gap between breakfast and dying
Then they went over the top
trench sandwiches at the ready,
rations falling as they did –
two dry slices opening like lips,
gaping,
a tongue of foul corned beef protruding,
the cheese and jam
already indistinguishable from the muck they fell in.
This shifting between sensuality and lyricism, humour and darkness, echoes through the collection. The following poem “Jack’s Drum” offers the soft texture of the drumskin before describing the ‘silent sounds’ of the slaughtered calf that made it and ‘each half beat,/calf beat,/heart beat/pulsing through/pa-dum-pa-dum-pa-dum’. Other poems in the section lead us via a cosy domestic past into darker territory:
Beside the meat-safe
home for Sunday left-overs,
sat the Slab
cold perch for butter, a rare jelly cooling.
It came from Gran was all they knew,
this marble fragment,
half a chiffonier top,
dropped and snapped, they guessed, in some grand house…
(“Nan’s Pantry”)
These details eventually take us step by step from the marble fragment to another slab, that of a grave’s headstone.
Before reading from his poems at a recent Tears in the Fence festival, Killingworth introduced himself as ‘an unapologetic’ Morris dancer. In so doing, he may have acknowledged that this activity could seem unfashionable, or even alien, particularly to the majority urban dwellers/readers of contemporary England. Nevertheless, it also brings to this collection a timely theme when the meaning of being English and its relationship to place is debated in a heated political context.
In the book’s second section Fancies – where the imagination takes flight – the traditional role of dance as a link between past and present, the folklore of a rural community, is approached through the poet’s personal lens, and the sense of joy expressed through some of these poems adds to the enjoyment of reading them, such as in the lyrical celebration of earth, in “May morning, Cerne Abbas” and in “Solstice Night, The Earth House”:
In comes we,
crowding into their space, their time,
the flint men,
their scents of oak, earth and woodsmoke
suggesting liminalities…’
…We shake, rattle and stamp,
sing as if Spring depends on us.
I love the self-deprecating yet passionate tone of these and other lines in the collection. Through these activities of dance and celebration, the poet seeks an inter-penetration of the time periods, not as an abstract idea but as a physical experience, so that ‘The inner vision clears –/such strangeness beckons’ (“That moment…”) and in “An Archaeologist Explains his Excavation of a Section of the Dorset Cursus”: ‘Each finds their own vision’. In another poem, “An Etruscan Tomb outside Orvieto”, the unexplained appearance in front of an Etruscan Bronze Age tomb of ’two perfect plums,/precisely where daylight ends and history begins’ provides the poet with a vision on a more modest scale.
Fancies ends with two elegies, and an Epitaph that reads like a poetic mini-manifesto:
The poetry
is our deathbed confessions,
form sacrificed
in the urgent need
to tell people clearly
how much we love them.
That urgent need is realised here but without any obvious sacrifice of form. Killingworth’s is a conversational, accessible voice throughout, the form is not strict but is musical, with near rhymes and much use of assonance, alliteration and wordplay. The etymology of words is investigated as deeply as the earth, poetic references from Yeats, Shakespeare and TS Eliot hover in the hinterland of Killingworth’s language; tanka and modernist techniques also appear, with the insertion of ‘found’ information and concrete poetry between lyrical lines, which all contributes to the liveliness of the language and offers different perspectives to the reader.
The final section Fenlandia takes us away from the (mainly) West country location of the first two, into the watery Fens, opening with an intimate, unsentimental character study of a “Fenland Eel-Catcher” who, the notes tell us is ‘one of the few living Fenmen who can weave the beautifully-made eel traps’. The note that he is also ‘possibly a distant relative’, brings the hint of a metaphorical association between eel-catcher and poet, crafted trap and poem.
In “Straw Bear” we are brought back to the performance of dance, with the now familiar intimations of death underlying the jollity. This time it is ‘molly dancing’: a traditional East Anglian dance, performed by men around ‘a corn dolly of nightmare’, clothed in straw. Although ‘The man inside sweats patiently to death’ as he dances, tethered to the plough, the poet doesn’t judge:
The point is he’s theirs,
the townsfolk,
as we are theirs today,
bearing witness,
celebrants of an outmoded faith,
a yearly rhythm half forgot.
It is a dance rooted in a specific place but it reminds me of celebratory dance I’ve witnessed in Southern Italy and elsewhere, and that the desire to keep these elemental human experiences alive is not limited by geography.
This short collection ends with the most directly personal poem, questioning the relationship between place of birth and identity in “Where the Heart is”:
So, should I, a river-village boy,
sense a peaty ichor in my veins,
sigh at the great sweeps of spuddy earth,
the double helping of sky?
Instead, I hanker after gentle hills,
flinty, perhaps, barrow-capped,
and coombes where cottages nestle rather than sink.
Pardon this bastard child
this apostate
who mouths a different tongue.
Heart and body are not always one.
Folklore and dance, archaeology and etymology are all taken by Killingworth, poet/witness/celebrant, to explore the deeper meanings of time and place, through their darkness as well as their joy, always with the primacy of the imagination and the reminder: ‘True magic isn’t ready-made, we need to conjure it’.
Oct 6 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Gerald Killingworth
Poetry review – FABRICS, FANCIES & FENS: Caroline Maldonado considers a diverse but consistently accessible collection by Gerald Killingworth
Tears in the Fence, the journal established in 1984 and edited by David Caddy, is known for its eclectic content, its internationalism and its embracing of contemporary modernist and post-modernist poetry, so it was a pleasure to receive this pamphlet of 41 pages, one of TITF’s occasional book publications.
Gerald Killingworth’s biographical details tell us that he has written fantasy novels, novels for children, as well as plays, all reflecting his interest in Elizabethan literature, and in this short collection he gives full range to his imaginative narrative voice to explore themes of place, memory and history. Included here are stories from the near past, of family members, local people – all rooted in a strong sense of place, recounted with familiarity and an intimate knowledge of their speech patterns. He also explores the magic of a ‘deep past’, often rooted in the Dorset landscape where he now lives, always underpinned by the belief: ‘True magic isn’t ready-made/ we need to conjure it, defying all sorts of gloom’ (“Poundbury Wassail”).
The collection is structured into three sections, indicated by its title: Fabrics, Fancies & Fens. Killingworth has introduced the first of these with a note about the texture of objects, how ‘From this sense of fabric, I allowed my imagination to wander as it wished’ and the first poem “Sambridges” sets the tone of the section. The title is noted as a comical mispronunciation of ‘sandwiches’, and the first two stanzas revel in the Proustian texture of a bread ‘That was soft, smelt like comfort,/sprang back when you pressed it,/made squidgy pellets’.
But the reality is that ‘this sandwich is as much grated turnip as flour’ and it opens a door not into a nostalgic dream but into war:
This shifting between sensuality and lyricism, humour and darkness, echoes through the collection. The following poem “Jack’s Drum” offers the soft texture of the drumskin before describing the ‘silent sounds’ of the slaughtered calf that made it and ‘each half beat,/calf beat,/heart beat/pulsing through/pa-dum-pa-dum-pa-dum’. Other poems in the section lead us via a cosy domestic past into darker territory:
Beside the meat-safe home for Sunday left-overs, sat the Slab cold perch for butter, a rare jelly cooling. It came from Gran was all they knew, this marble fragment, half a chiffonier top, dropped and snapped, they guessed, in some grand house… (“Nan’s Pantry”)These details eventually take us step by step from the marble fragment to another slab, that of a grave’s headstone.
Before reading from his poems at a recent Tears in the Fence festival, Killingworth introduced himself as ‘an unapologetic’ Morris dancer. In so doing, he may have acknowledged that this activity could seem unfashionable, or even alien, particularly to the majority urban dwellers/readers of contemporary England. Nevertheless, it also brings to this collection a timely theme when the meaning of being English and its relationship to place is debated in a heated political context.
In the book’s second section Fancies – where the imagination takes flight – the traditional role of dance as a link between past and present, the folklore of a rural community, is approached through the poet’s personal lens, and the sense of joy expressed through some of these poems adds to the enjoyment of reading them, such as in the lyrical celebration of earth, in “May morning, Cerne Abbas” and in “Solstice Night, The Earth House”:
I love the self-deprecating yet passionate tone of these and other lines in the collection. Through these activities of dance and celebration, the poet seeks an inter-penetration of the time periods, not as an abstract idea but as a physical experience, so that ‘The inner vision clears –/such strangeness beckons’ (“That moment…”) and in “An Archaeologist Explains his Excavation of a Section of the Dorset Cursus”: ‘Each finds their own vision’. In another poem, “An Etruscan Tomb outside Orvieto”, the unexplained appearance in front of an Etruscan Bronze Age tomb of ’two perfect plums,/precisely where daylight ends and history begins’ provides the poet with a vision on a more modest scale.
Fancies ends with two elegies, and an Epitaph that reads like a poetic mini-manifesto:
That urgent need is realised here but without any obvious sacrifice of form. Killingworth’s is a conversational, accessible voice throughout, the form is not strict but is musical, with near rhymes and much use of assonance, alliteration and wordplay. The etymology of words is investigated as deeply as the earth, poetic references from Yeats, Shakespeare and TS Eliot hover in the hinterland of Killingworth’s language; tanka and modernist techniques also appear, with the insertion of ‘found’ information and concrete poetry between lyrical lines, which all contributes to the liveliness of the language and offers different perspectives to the reader.
The final section Fenlandia takes us away from the (mainly) West country location of the first two, into the watery Fens, opening with an intimate, unsentimental character study of a “Fenland Eel-Catcher” who, the notes tell us is ‘one of the few living Fenmen who can weave the beautifully-made eel traps’. The note that he is also ‘possibly a distant relative’, brings the hint of a metaphorical association between eel-catcher and poet, crafted trap and poem.
In “Straw Bear” we are brought back to the performance of dance, with the now familiar intimations of death underlying the jollity. This time it is ‘molly dancing’: a traditional East Anglian dance, performed by men around ‘a corn dolly of nightmare’, clothed in straw. Although ‘The man inside sweats patiently to death’ as he dances, tethered to the plough, the poet doesn’t judge:
It is a dance rooted in a specific place but it reminds me of celebratory dance I’ve witnessed in Southern Italy and elsewhere, and that the desire to keep these elemental human experiences alive is not limited by geography.
This short collection ends with the most directly personal poem, questioning the relationship between place of birth and identity in “Where the Heart is”:
Folklore and dance, archaeology and etymology are all taken by Killingworth, poet/witness/celebrant, to explore the deeper meanings of time and place, through their darkness as well as their joy, always with the primacy of the imagination and the reminder: ‘True magic isn’t ready-made, we need to conjure it’.