Priest Skear

 


Photograph by Tomek Radej

Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice Winter 2010

Priest Skear is my seventh collection of poems. It appeared from Shoestring in May 2010. Taking as its starting point the drowning of twenty-three Chinese cocklepickers in Morecambe Bay in 2004, this extended sequence is an allegory of personal risk and of a social malaise which reaches from the day-to-day oppression of migrant workers to the Fourth Estate and to Parliament itself. The sea's terrors, horrifically foregrounded, become the lens through which the features of contemporary racism are refracted. 
 

Liardet imagines the drowning of the cocklepickers, layering his writing with refrains and echoes to create contemporary dreamsong ... to suggest submergence and struggle, the unrhymed couplets shifting and pulling with a compelling urgency. The details of this human battle with the sea are recorded with devastating effect. These are haunting and haunted poems...

Kathryn Simmonds and Jacob Sam-La Rose, Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Winter 2010 
 

Tim Liardet’s Priest Skear (in dimpled, rust-coloured livery) is in the best tradition: substantial in both content and design, centred on a fine twelve-part poem about the drowned Morecambe Bay cockle-pickers, its sections alternating between “They come up” and “They go down” like the tide itself. On either side of “Priest Skear” are complementary pieces – Liardet’s ease with the narrative, elegiac, lyrical, even satirical mode is matched by his rare assurance with line-breaks.

John Greening The Times Literary Supplement
 

Priest Skear is a memorable masterpiece, and deserves to go down in the annals of sea poems... Liardet proves himself as musically adept a handler of repetition as TS Eliot in Four Quartets as he reiterates motifs, crescendos and codas.  Priest Skear astounds with its athletic verbal virtuosity, coupled with alliterative gymnastic movements recalling Gerard Manley Hopkins; in Liardet's case these are closely tied in with the cohesion of the sequence and its mathematical precision and satirical musical play that Alexander Pope would have been proud of.

Patricia McCarthy, Agenda 
 

I think Tim Liardet is one of the most accomplished poets now writing in English in the UK. Indisputably, he is a poet of scrupulous standards. He is blessed with profound ambition, which singles him out from his peers.

Robert Minhinnick, New Welsh Review
 

A memory of near-drowning in childhood sets the terms for the unflinching intensity with which the sequence enters imaginatively into the victims' last moments. The poems are borne on an undercurrent of humane outrage at the fatally thoughtless exploitation of the migrant workers whose deaths are recorded and mourned in imagery of such stark factuality... The lines pull back to the collection's thematic centre in memorialising the lives lost to the ungovernable power of the sea, they sound from the heart of the passion and pathos that mark Liardet's achievement. 

Douglas Houston, Poetry Review 
 

Tim Liardet’s Priest Skear is based upon the events at Morecambe Bay in 2004, where twenty-three Chinese cocklepickers were drowned....when the results are moving and thought-provoking, as in this case, it underlines the importance of tackling those very subjects we might shy away from in poetry. Rather than throwing aside conceit and stylistics in order to access a deeper emotional engagement, Liardet writes beautifully crafted poems that are honest about their distance from the subject matter.  The central sequence is framed by poems of personal experience...the reality is presented vividly and at length and our culpability is inescapable.

Emily Hasler, The Warwick Review

 

S T I G M A T A

‘Today the Chinese gangmaster Lin Liang Ren begins a fourteen year
prison sentence on twenty one counts of manslaughter and related
charges for his part in the deaths of the twenty three cocklepickers who
drowned in Morecambe Bay, February 2004.’ The Guardian, 24 March 2006

 

Now all the blame they expect you to take

x-rays straight through you and finds nothing there;

it passes through the weft of your overcoat and vest

and finds only these bone buttons, dark inside your skin.

And the salt-mark of the sea has reached your waist;

and the salt-mark of the sea has reached your chest;

and the salt-mark of the sea has reached your chin.

 

The salt of the sea though it might be blood

also leaks from the punctures, from the holes in your hands.

When the Atlantic thunders, it thunders through you,

while your pilot flame is tearing, tearing at its wick.

First you cup it in your palms, duck your childish cheek,

then have your overcoat to shield it against the wind;

then try to relight it, relight it. One last match.

 

 

 

T H E   L I V I N G   A N D   T H E   D R O W N E D

 

Thank God, or chance, for the geyser of steam

that spurted from the boneshaker when it blew at last

and then ticked cool in the lay-by, laden as it was

with sneaked-in Chinese—a rocking lamp

casting them in and out of the dark.

 

A day from the cocklebeds, they were safe,

and news of that old van made it seem the dark hole

from which the story sprang, a torch

shone into a corner of my consciousness—

death’s cubbyhole crowded with beautiful faces.

 

I thought how their heads might have flopped

into sleep’s shedding of mistrust, rocked perhaps

by the motion of the van, then sprung awake

as the pistons locked up and shuddered them to a halt

to separate what happened from what did not.

 

A bucket of moons scarfed in yellow, red,

a-flare in darkness, what might have happened

the future inspecting their ghosts—Thank God

for the breakdown which kept them from joining

the tangled drowned washed up by first light.

 

Thank God for the tardy, the finally stopped.

Other cabins of smuggled people

and similarly overtaxed pistons were that minute

tackling the steep waves of Pentland Firth

or the troughs of Cape Wrath, up and down.

 

Only the poor, the well-steered and delivered

get themselves to the mortuary drawer on time.

 

 

 

T H E  G H O S T  O F  T H E  C H I N E S E  L A U N D R Y  O N  T H R E A D N E E D L E   

S T R E E T

 

And you Yick Wo, palm spread to the shape of the drag-handle,

stock still, one arm longer than the other.

Every time the press comes down it exhales

swabbed blusters of steam—goes up again for rest

and comes down gasping for air. Poor thing,

poor sad press, by now it is all but exhausted.

Like an old toothless monster done with marauding.

Once it dreamed it was the engine of the universe.

 

When the lid’s lifted—an aaaah—when it comes back down

its mouth-hinge emits a sort of stifled wail,

as if trying to remember some great symphony

its squeak is merely a stray snivel of.

You peel our trousers from it—creases so sharp

you could cut through all your fingertips at once

and have no fingertips but have trousers.

You fold our shirts like straitjackets, parcel them up;

our smalls this minute toil like babies in your tank.

 

Be true to yourself, never sleep on a quarrel, love God,

be blameless and upright and offer service

without condition, be prepared to work

unreasonable hours without complaint, take blisters

as sign of good and for gratitude expect

to lose your sons, your daughters and home, be smote

from head to toe with something distinctly nasty,

be left with the taste of ashes in your mouth.

Loyalty, even then, will be the tax you pay.

There’s invisible blood smeared across your lintels.

You do our dirty work and we’ll never forgive you.

 

 

 

“…S I N K I N G   W A T E R,   M A N Y   M A N Y   S I N K I N G   W A T E R”

for Guo Bin Long

 

Every tragedy has a final word to speak,

and every final word has its sound turned down

 

first simply quieter, then quieter still,

every final word mimed with no sound at all.

 

While water reached his knees, reached his thighs,

while water reached his thighs, reached his waist:

 

the water at the waist, at the sternum, at the neck;

the water at the neck, at the chin, at the mouth

 

as he yelled as loud as he could, as he yelled into the mouthpiece

of his state-of-the-art, touchscreen phone.

 

Tim Liardet
Priest Skear

 


Photograph by Tomek Radej

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice Winter 2010

Priest Skear is my seventh collection of poems. It appeared from Shoestring in May 2010. Taking as its starting point the drowning of twenty-three Chinese cocklepickers in Morecambe Bay in 2004, this extended sequence is an allegory of personal risk and of a social malaise which reaches from the day-to-day oppression of migrant workers to the Fourth Estate and to Parliament itself. The sea's terrors, horrifically foregrounded, become the lens through which the features of contemporary racism are refracted. 
 

Liardet imagines the drowning of the cocklepickers, layering his writing with refrains and echoes to create contemporary dreamsong ... to suggest submergence and struggle, the unrhymed couplets shifting and pulling with a compelling urgency. The details of this human battle with the sea are recorded with devastating effect. These are haunting and haunted poems...

Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Winter 2010 
 

Priest Skear is a memorable masterpiece, and deserves to go down in the annals of sea poems... Liardet proves himself as musically adept a handler of repetition as TS Eliot in Four Quartets as he reiterates motifs, crescendos and codas.  Priest Skear astounds with its athletic verbal virtuosity, coupled with alliterative gymnastic movements recalling Gerard Manley Hopkins; in Liardet's case these are closely tied in with the cohesion of the sequence and its mathematical precision and satirical musical play that Alexander Pope would have been proud of.

Patricia McCarthy, Agenda 
 

A memory of near-drowning in childhood sets the terms for the unflinching intensity with which the sequence enters imaginatively into the victims' last moments. The poems are borne on an undercurrent of humane outrage at the fatally thoughtless exploitation of the migrant workers whose deaths are recorded and mourned in imagery of such stark factuality... The lines pull back to the collection's thematic centre in memorialising the lives lost to the ungovernable power of the sea, they sound from the heart of the passion and pathos that mark Liardet's achievement. 
 

Douglas Houston, Poetry Review 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

S T I G M A T A

‘Today the Chinese gangmaster Lin Liang Ren begins a fourteen year
prison sentence on twenty one counts of manslaughter and related
charges for his part in the deaths of the twenty three cocklepickers who
drowned in Morecambe Bay, February 2004.’ The Guardian, 24 March 2006

 

Now all the blame they expect you to take

x-rays straight through you and finds nothing there;

it passes through the weft of your overcoat and vest

and finds only these bone buttons, dark inside your skin.

And the salt-mark of the sea has reached your waist;

and the salt-mark of the sea has reached your chest;

and the salt-mark of the sea has reached your chin.

 

The salt of the sea though it might be blood

also leaks from the punctures, from the holes in your hands.

When the Atlantic thunders, it thunders through you,

while your pilot flame is tearing, tearing at its wick.

First you cup it in your palms, duck your childish cheek,

then have your overcoat to shield it against the wind;

then try to relight it, relight it. One last match.

 

 

 

T H E   L I V I N G   A N D   T H E   D R O W N E D

 

Thank God, or chance, for the geyser of steam

that spurted from the boneshaker when it blew at last

and then ticked cool in the lay-by, laden as it was

with sneaked-in Chinese—a rocking lamp

casting them in and out of the dark.

 

A day from the cocklebeds, they were safe,

and news of that old van made it seem the dark hole

from which the story sprang, a torch

shone into a corner of my consciousness—

death’s cubbyhole crowded with beautiful faces.

 

I thought how their heads might have flopped

into sleep’s shedding of mistrust, rocked perhaps

by the motion of the van, then sprung awake

as the pistons locked up and shuddered them to a halt

to separate what happened from what did not.

 

A bucket of moons scarfed in yellow, red,

a-flare in darkness, what might have happened

the future inspecting their ghosts—Thank God

for the breakdown which kept them from joining

the tangled drowned washed up by first light.

 

Thank God for the tardy, the finally stopped.

Other cabins of smuggled people

and similarly overtaxed pistons were that minute

tackling the steep waves of Pentland Firth

or the troughs of Cape Wrath, up and down.

 

Only the poor, the well-steered and delivered

get themselves to the mortuary drawer on time.

 

 

 

T H E  G H O S T  O F  T H E  C H I N E S E  L A U N D R Y  O N  T H R E A D N E E D L E   

S T R E E T

 

And you Yick Wo, palm spread to the shape of the drag-handle,

stock still, one arm longer than the other.

Every time the press comes down it exhales

swabbed blusters of steam—goes up again for rest

and comes down gasping for air. Poor thing,

poor sad press, by now it is all but exhausted.

Like an old toothless monster done with marauding.

Once it dreamed it was the engine of the universe.

 

When the lid’s lifted—an aaaah—when it comes back down

its mouth-hinge emits a sort of stifled wail,

as if trying to remember some great symphony

its squeak is merely a stray snivel of.

You peel our trousers from it—creases so sharp

you could cut through all your fingertips at once

and have no fingertips but have trousers.

You fold our shirts like straitjackets, parcel them up;

our smalls this minute toil like babies in your tank.

 

Be true to yourself, never sleep on a quarrel, love God,

be blameless and upright and offer service

without condition, be prepared to work

unreasonable hours without complaint, take blisters

as sign of good and for gratitude expect

to lose your sons, your daughters and home, be smote

from head to toe with something distinctly nasty,

be left with the taste of ashes in your mouth.

Loyalty, even then, will be the tax you pay.

There’s invisible blood smeared across your lintels.

You do our dirty work and we’ll never forgive you.

 

 

 

“…S I N K I N G   W A T E R,   M A N Y   M A N Y   S I N K I N G   W A T E R”

for Guo Bin Long

 

Every tragedy has a final word to speak,

and every final word has its sound turned down

 

first simply quieter, then quieter still,

every final word mimed with no sound at all.

 

While water reached his knees, reached his thighs,

while water reached his thighs, reached his waist:

 

the water at the waist, at the sternum, at the neck;

the water at the neck, at the chin, at the mouth

 

as he yelled as loud as he could, as he yelled into the mouthpiece

of his state-of-the-art, touchscreen phone.