Eccleshall Poets

The Eccleshall Poets are all members of Eccleshall Poetry Group, which meets at Eccleshall Library, on the 1st and 3rd Wednesday of each month.

Our Honorary President is the much acclaimed poet, Carol Ann Duffy, and though we haven’t yet managed to lure her into attending a meeting, we live in hope that one day she will fit in tea and biscuits with us, when on a visit to her family in Stafford.

The Library service has encouraged and supported us from day one with our own special corner at Eccleshall branch and always a superb selection of poetry books from ancient to modern!
Our meetings take the form of sharing and reading out loud our personal choice of poetry and prose illustrating a chosen theme from our programme.

The special joy for all of us is the sharing. When researching a particular theme whether ‘Sport’, ‘Love and Romance’, ‘Middle Eastern Poetry’ or ‘Painted Ladies’ the fun is finding something new by a favourite poet such as Kipling or Hardy, or something completely new by a totally unknown writer.

If course, we all have our special favourites both of poets and poems, and whenever we can, we slip them in to a number of different themes.

We have run poetry workshops at Lonsdale School, Eccleshall and have been pleasantly surprised at the talent of local children.

Another of our ventures has been the link with Drake Hall Prison, which for several years has involved members Jean Beasley, Dianne Maxfield, Ann Scantlebury and Thelma Whitfield. Together with the ladies of Drake Hall they go under the title of ‘Phenomenal Women’ and in 2006 the group published an anthology of poetry and prose, which was launched at an exhibition of Art, Pottery, Textiles, and Flower Arranging by Drake Hall Prison, at Eccleshall Library. Many local dignitaries attended the preview opening night and proceeds of sales from the exhibition were donated, at the wish of our Drake Hall friends, to a local children’s charity BDF Newlife.

Eccleshall Poets have themselves already published three anthologies in their own right, their fourth,’The Place We Bide In’, inspired by Stafford Library’s Watershed Project, is available, price £2.00, at Eccleshall Library.

For more information contact
Dianne Maxfield
Mobile:- 07765643170
Email:- dimaxuk@aol.com

Just brief sample of Eccleshall Poets work from their latest Anthology ‘The Place We Bide In’, which goes a little of the way to illustrate the depth of how just four of the group interpreted the title.

The Solitary Traveller

I sit alone in some café or train
And watch as you live your existence through
I hug my sweet secret all to myself
I am a stranger and not one of you.

I watch to learn the systems that you use
For shopping, bus tickets and crossing roads.
One day I‘ll master them and I will be
Disguised among you, breaker of your codes.

Then I’ll go home and sit among my friends,
Smile, watch, nursing my newly acquired skill,
But silent, not betraying what I know,
For even here, I am a stranger still.

Wherever I live, how much I deserve,
I am apart and can only observe.

Margaret Saunders

HOME

A refuge or a prison?
A pleasure and a pride;
A certain dream, a fantasy,
A place where you reside.

In corrugated cardboard or
In crenellated Keep:
Myriad are the places where
We lay ourselves for sleep.

For home is a familiar place
Wherein you seek Retreat.
Giving pause to toil incarnate,
His stress and strains deplete:
And where in altered consciousness
Yourself in dreams you meet!

Sergeant

A Potteries Childhood

When I’m away and cannot sleep
I make my way around the house,
Each lock, each door a special sound
Can in my mind a memory rouse.

The front door has a tricky catch
Then gives a satisfying ‘click
Not easy in the pouring rain
With satchel and a hockey stick.

The hall has Campbell-Minton tiles
Soft soap keeps them bright and new
A ‘phone installed when I was born
Four-Five-Six-One in alcove view.

The kitchen door enfolds warmth
A blacklead Prallite grate provides
A table made for families
A box where Tim the terrier bides.

The larder door gives out a clang
A brass doorknob, three steps within
To stillage, meatsafe, shelves galore
Waterglassed eggs and flour bin.

The western sun streams in to show
The barrel full of Joules Stone Ales
My older brother lets me bring
In tankards as he friends regales.

The dining-room has leaded lights
The chimney smokes with south-wind soot
Our meals are formal at weekends
With chicken, roast and tins of fruit.

There’s politics and cricket talked
Who has died and who’s been born
“Has the Sentinel arrived ?”
And “who’s for church on Sunday morn ?”

The sitting room, now called the Lounge
Uncut moquette and curtains bright
A hearthrug made in READYCUT
A wireless in brown BAKELITE.

Upstairs a daunting chill prevails
Cold linen, lino, swift striptease
The bathroom holds no welcome, so
Quick in and out before I freeze.

We led an even-tempered life
No luxury but good plain fare
In our road no-one came or left
Just like GIBRALTAR they were there.

Always there was someone in
To hug you when from school you came
“What’s Homework ?” “Oh it’s Geometry”.
No latchkey children in this home.

It seems a million years ago
And a million miles, but I can say
Is recalled with greater clarity
Than that which happened yesterday.

Jean Beasley

Trentham Balloon at Sunset

so much we’ve lost from the gardens, woodlands there
when eloquent, sun-shades trips came
from calm and ordered early youth:
days spent at Trentham seemed forever fair

the ruins known, we mourned the palace lost
long before, by short-sightedness of all concerned
the gardens we ourselves would see, and in decline
steam railway and our swimpool closed; what a cost

to regional pleasures, often of the simplest sort...
seemed dereliction impossible to reverse
now comes resurrection - but of a hard
nosed, cash-nexus, style of thought

and never mention of the darkest ducal days
when far off Sutherland was tribute to
the accountants’ myopic schemes
come World of Sheep , the crofter pays...

did our cosy local hamlets come to feel
the fear that the word Clearance havoc played
out in the northland moors and hills
or was ducal-led existence in homely Staffordshire unreal?

now we all must know that Trentham is a business, straight
shareholders alone are to be impressed
and tourists, come to see the best of retrenched glories,
know that they must pay the fullest price when at the gate

we are still left - for now - the best of pleasures free
to walk the lake, the woods... beyond the monkeys’ realm
to climb the hill, drink in the peerless view
from ducal statue, ’cross the lake, our county’s peakland face to see!

and even better still, to share, in spirit with the well heeled travellers, high
in a Trentham balloon; drifting in a clear blue, day’s end, sunlit sky
we all can be arrested, looking heavenward, if only for a moment
let all our unfettered spirits truly fly.

Chris Brookes ( as published in ‘The Sentinel’, S-O-T 2007)

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