Poems by Julie Deakin

JULIA DEAKIN was born in Nuneaton and worked her way north via the Potteries, Manchester and York to Huddersfield. She has read on www.radiowildfire.com and is widely published. She won the 2006 Northern Exposure Prize and was a 2007 Poetry Business Competition winner.

‘Crafted, tender poems, written with passion and purpose,’ said Simon Armitage of her first collection, Without a Dog (Graft, 2008). Anne Stevenson ‘read it straight through at a single sitting’ enjoying its ‘mature wit and wisdom’. ‘Real linguistic inventiveness’ said Ian McMillan. ‘Bold, irreverent and wickedly funny,’ said Alison Brackenbury of The Half-Mile-High-Club.

These poems reflect her childhood in North Staffordshire.

On the map

Once it was a quiet road, a lane
whose sapling borders could be seen through
as you dawdled the half mile down to Wordley’s shop,
a Mars Bar in your mind’s eye,
sixpence and a 1919 penny in your hand.

Once but not every summer
the ice-cream van from Stoke,
its driver on a mission, would lumber up the hill,
park on the first bend and rev, raffishly,
Popeye the sailor man electrifying us.

Once but not every few years a siren,
real but unreal, would arrest our dreams
and have us window-staring through the dark
to where we guessed the road went.
You felt the whole village there too,

men wavering on steps, uncertain
whether to set off and know the worst
(somebody someone knew, no doubt) or stay
well out of it, that old longing for the kind of news
you could be named in safely
flaring like a wound.

Where I come from

was a smokeless zone, a village
without pavements.

Our house was a whitewashed bungalow –
the biggest sheet of paper you’ve ever seen –
which one day I decided to draw on.

I got a piece of coke and drew a house
with two storeys, the kind you read about
in stories about people who live in towns.

I added curtains to the windows, flowers
to the curtains, steps up to the front door
and a long coil of smoke, arcing
towards Stoke-on-Trent.

When Dad came round the corner
he went mad. Said it made the place
look like a slum.

I thought it was a good drawing.
A nicer house than ours.

Two girls, aged nine and ten

It was the blue in all those blacks and browns –
the sudden smoothness in the cross-hatched twigs
as if the hedge had all along had four blue eyes:
ingots of sky, sent down for us alone – that held us.
This was it, then: proof of fairies, heaven,
aliens and Father Christmas
all in one.

Two or three we'd just look at, but four or five
and all the ingenuity, the nerve and brilliance
of an intrigue hatched behind our backs
almost, would make us touch that downy cup
to feel its pewter roundness and then take
one keepsake, just one,
from the dream.

And when in other places we found more
and no one stopped us when we asked for needles,
cotton wool and boxes, or we showed them off
to visitors who praised our neatness and enthused
about the miracle of life, it was a miracle
nobody seemed to think
it was a crime.

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