Poem Of The Week: At The Navigation By Ian Pople

At The Navigation

The sun was tucked behind the visor
as I was driving back from work;
the road reached round from house

to house. A horse was grazing
an out-of-season cricket pitch.
They were leading sheep down

to the reservoir; hooves slipped
from bank to crumpled sky; fleecy heads
bobbed out towards the middle.

Parish boundaries widen
every year; another heart attack,
another priest who’s irreplaceable,

whose altar glides to silence.
And half a mile below the crinkly spine
of England, a couple leg their boat

and feel, from the neighbouring tunnel,
the pulse of a train tearing
towards the whole of Europe.

A sense of time’s slippage, of psycho-geographical (dis)connection and of loss animate Ian Pople’s fine poem in the widening of his narrator’s compass: the slipping of the sheep’s hooves and the continual renegotiation of boundaries of faith and diocese act to accompany a transience of tenure in the topography of metaphor.

The overlap of figures in this high Pennine landscape – the horse grazing on an ‘out-of-season’ cricket pitch; the altar gliding towards silence like the weakening pulse of the Church – invests the space in which the actors languidly process with a permanence whose human approximation is achieved only in effort of labour and land use, a thin pretence of the aeonic durability of the ‘crinkly spine / of England’.

The slipping of the Church and its ministers towards quietus mirrors the journey unfolding ‘half a mile below’, where a narrowboat glides in subterranean silence, its legger occupants performing an inverse cycle ride on the ‘road’ of the tunnel’s ceiling, as they navigate another kind of odyssey. There is a sense in which the players in this dripping moorland world are temporally unanchored, freed from the poet’s yoke of introspection, progressing out of sight, mind and time. The aural resonance of a train in an adjacent tunnel is the single token of the engaged present; its purpose and direction – pointed like an arrow towards Europe – is an ingress into another world, shattering the watery still.

Delivered in varying metrical lengths, Pople’s exquisitely worked tercets invite contemplation, open a seam of rare beauty in a land mottled by cloud shadows.

‘At the Navigation’ is taken from Spillway : New and Selected Poems – Ian Pople , published by Carcanet Poetry (2022), and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher. For more information click here