1.1

North

Imagine it not as a point to reach – for all ways
are equal to the compass – nor as a place,
since there is always north of north – go far enough
you’ll find yourself back where you began –
but as the sense of moving forwards, going up,
going heavenwards, through the cold
and through the clouds, the ultimate ascent towards
whatever keeps you up, be it fame or love

or hunger to know what’s around the corner,
up the street or at the border: what matters

most is keeping north, and keeping north inside.

By John Challis About the poet: My North

1.2

Journey North

Skyline waving like a banner
tugging folds and wrinkles straight,
vaulting bridges, shadowed valleys
plunge into the tunnel’s maw and then –
A bight out of the land, a crescent shore
of splintered shoals and rocks
gnawed by the breakers, rank on rank –
a hunch-backed cottage clenched against the cold

and in a scratched out garden by the beach,
raising their faces to the silent sky

a blaze of sunflowers.

By Ian Stuart About the poet: My North

1.3

Drystone walling

There are those who say the art can’t be taught;
you’re born with it or not, like second sight
or a twin clutching your heel. I doubt that’s true
for I have seen walls where no wall should be
halfway up Whernside or sinking into peat;
and I think these are just apprentice work,
twilight zones where craft and maker meet,
uneven lines straggling towards the sea.

A well-made wall still makes me think of you
and how we fit together through the night,

the herring fleet brought safely into port.

By Duncan Chambers About the poet: My North

1.4

Backbone

The contrast from here between hillside
and motorway bearing people and goods
into the arms of cities: Sheffield and
Manchester lit up like charms, silver spilled
from a broken necklace, vowels elided
or flattened by wind off the Pennines.
In Liverpool, Newcastle rivers are veins,
dark and solemn and wide as the gap

between effort and loss. Winter nights and
wind and music over those rivers, cold

or warm or dizzy and restless as blood.

By Joe Caldwell About the poet: My North

1.5

Bold Street, Liverpool

The one smart street, the way back home if I was going past the Rialto,
long before the riots… the times we went for tea in Reeces in the Lyceum –
where that other city surfaced, the one I could half see if I didn’t look too directly:
city of frock-coated merchants, and shipping lists, and the smell in the air of tobacco
and dark Barbados sugar and sweating flesh; city wondering where all the money
went, why the bombs fell, what made everything fall apart; the graceful room friezed
with nymphs like a Wedgewood urn, the Scouse waitresses, me so young I was too
shy to go to a cafe on my own, the half enchantment, half horror of so much past

crowded into one place, dwarfing my own life into comic meaninglessness.
Oh I’d loved Bold Street, street with ideas of being a street in Chelsea

or Kensington, but never managing, or wanting to get up and make the leap.

By Mary Woodward About the poet: My North

1.6

Ghost crossing Commended Poem

Making an enemy of the wind, a crow
backtracks on its own trajectory against
the slender iron of the Transporter Bridge
a pair of shoulders over the Tees, slacked
from its clot of shoreside forges, as if it’s all
forgetfulness and soul, the clocktower with three
faces, the fourth bricked over, a penny over
the one eye, to stop workers watching it,

a last red brick tooth in the maw of the old
Forty Foot Lane foundry, with a look of pain

from the steeled air, stolen, we take it in.

By Harry Man About the poet: My North

1.7

North Pennines

Layers of green flesh
over the white rock bones
of the fells we are climbing –
battle-worn below storms,
the sheep held in by stones,
grey roads gritty,
our old tongue stirring
in forced absence recalled.

The message of the wind,
safety in rare sunlight,

body and spirit of the land.

By Sally Evanz About the poet: My North

1.8

Ekphrasis

(Corbridge 1967)

Below seven arches of spanning bridge
six friesian kye graze on flooded banks
or lie in the shade of a sycamore
(though it doesn’t look like rain).
Grandad’s brushstrokes are still distinct
in the pale ridges of lapping water
and the white tufted tips of cow tails.
Less than a mile from here my dad was born,

on land once held by Jacobite lords.
Took seventy years to circle back, replant

roots in heavy clay. Home ground reclaimed.

By Charley Reay About the poet: My North

1.9

Notes made on Hadrian’s Wall

Sly light and silence. The sky unfolds.
When the lark spools, an old yearning is washed clean.
I stand on the wall to squint its distant line. Wall as dormant god,
wall as watcher, wall as shadow spine, wall as lost ribbon in the wind.
I mean nothing, almost sucked towards the sycamore’s crown.
The fort is drowned and the women further under.
At Harrow’s Scar, spleenwort crawls
through mottled stone.

Does the hairpin hold a seed or a star?
Both are trinkets pressed into a palm.

At dusk        swallows twitch        through empty rooms.

By Catherine Ayres About the poet: My North

1.10

Yr Hen Ogledd

Scratch the surface, score it deep,
skrapple, scrapu, scramo, crafu:
Craven’s limestone cracks and creaks,
becks bubble, Brythonic, from beneath
where watter forces fell before,
churning Cumbric and Beornis
all across the cymun weal,
then loaming all with latter layers.

Lairs of legend hide my roots;
arid nooks spring slender shoots.

The Old North hiraeths to me (t)here.

By Anthony Heald About the poet: My North