Poem Of The Week: Colden Valley By Ken Smith (1938-2003)

Colden Valley

North I’m convinced of it: childhood’s over,
in the narrow valleys in the mist the frost
is silver in the veins and edge of leaves,
and last year’s briars coppered into stone.

Then more stone dragged to quarter fields
in which the miserable lives of beasts in winter
whiten into breath. The valley pulls –
poor pasture, poorer footage, water falling.

And all its children gone through millyards
into stone they chiselled.Billy, Emma, Jack,
and gave their dates and shut the ground
in work and prayer. Or they are almost here,

their short days closing in an owl’s hoot,
crows labouring over woods, along the road
a footstep always just about to fall
and all their voices just about to start.

Photo by Illiya Vjestica on Unsplash

Few poets can hold time and landscape in one glass with the consummate skill of Ken Smith. His passage through the hinterland of Colden in the vertiginous wooded uplands and moors high above Hebden Bridge takes, in one imaginative stride, the suggestion of other hardships in the sodden ‘quarter fields’ of a grey winter.

For there is a natural equation between the ‘miserable beasts’ whose quagmire-bound hooves disable footage, and the children who precede them in the psycho-geography of local memory. Incarcerated, indentured to the forbidding walls of the ‘millyard’, their names are inscribed in stone, whispering into the present like ghosts, their voices whitening into breath, a manifestation ever injurious to a legacy of iniquity, as it should be.

The poet’s uncertain tone, in this poem of measured metrical pace, perfect metaphors of frozen and dripping farmland, shortening days and resonant echoes is studied: arriving at an assumption of the ‘North’ as though a stranger to its historical context, its idiosyncrasies, the narrator is moved to overturn any remaining doubt in the very palpability of his vision – the children are ‘almost here’, the past is always with us.

As attuned to the brutality of moorland terrain as Hughes, and as sensitive to injustices meted out to the labouring classes of history as Jeffrey Wainwright, Smith’s starkly beautiful poem draws the drama of landscape and its uses and misuses, of the obligations of work and of prayer, towards one condensed, and proleptic melting-point:

their short days closing in an owl’s hoot,
crows labouring over woods, along the road
a footstep always just about to fall
and all their voices just about to start.

'Colden Valley', is taken from Ken Smith - Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher.

www.bloodaxebooks.com