Poem Of The Week: Crane Moor Wall By Kay Buckley

Crane Moor Wall

Pennine spine, stone racked and hand packed.
Bloomed lichen jade that whitens worn stones.
Furred seeds of black moss in crevice bones.

Thigh high ridge, a field mace of stone lace.
Scraped by the dry dents of a bruised land.
Flanked by knee-crags too bowed to stand.

Hovelled and chiselled, shovelled into place.
Hemmed in, regular rectangles up ended.
Patched in, against squares down bended.

Black finger spaces, cracked and hacked.
Bridged and ridged in roughened stones.
Battled nettles left against these moor bones.

Kay Buckley

One of the many beauties of Kay Buckley’s poetry is her honesty to purpose and her obvious willingness to absorb the work of others in building her own figurative landscape. In ‘Crane Moor Wall’, as so often elsewhere in her sparse but glittering oeuvre, the narcotic she calls home demands no less than a familiarity with, if not complete control of, different forms and styles in the interests of authentic representation.

And if, here, we hear the voices of Hopkins and Hughes in the syntactical interstices, it is because Buckley has cast her net wide enough to find the right words, and the right arrangements of words, to describe a South Yorkshire terrain that is both a robust material phenomenon and a Geiger counter for something greater than emotional attachment, at once a ‘bruised land’ and an irresistible abstraction.

The relentless rhymes and half-rhymes, the blunt rhythms and the consonantal vigour of the poem’s language, rise to meet the harsh moorland they recount, and in so doing, hallow the terrain, for the scene is brutally sublime in its depiction, as wind-drained and monochrome as Hughes’ Pennine uplands.

It is fitting that Buckley’s Crane Moor should resemble an ossuary of the imagination: the whitened bones and joints of broken rocks and walls are a fragmented skeleton, an aeonic ‘graveyard’ whose presence underscores an unbreakable connection between the landscape and those who shape it, if only transiently.

‘Crane Moor Wall’ is taken from The Place is You (2022), published by Peter and Kathleen Whittaker.