The Fig Tree - Issue 2
with Featured Poet Rory Waterman
Welcome to the second issue of The Fig Tree. I have been delighted and encouraged by the positive responses to our first issue, which was, of course, in very large part down to the quality of the poems contained in it.
This issue has a Featured Poet who I first met as a guest at the Read To Write poetry group in Doncaster. Rory Waterman was born in Belfast, grew up mainly in Lincolnshire, and now lives not too far away from me in Nottingham. He has had three highly acclaimed collections published in the last 10 years and the fourth, Come Here To This Gate, is scheduled for publication shortly after this issue of The Fig Tree is released. The three poems published here are from that collection. He has also published books analysing the work of Wendy Cope, looking at the links between Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Charles Causley, and has looked at the often overlooked poets of the Second World War. The last of these provides my personal link to an upcoming Featured Poet, but that will be explained in a later issue.
This issue contains the first poem in The Fig Tree written by a poet, Mark Mansfield, who lives outside of the UK. I'm looking forward to more submissions from around the world and across the UK. This may extend to translated foreign language poems.
It also features a bespoke cover illustration by Paul Brough, an artist and illustrator who is part of our poetry group in Doncaster. If you know of any artists who would like to get involved in illustrating for the webzine, please tell them to give me a shout.
Once again, there have been some excellent submissions for this issue and the more observant among you will have noticed that more than one of a poet's submissions can be accepted. These will be published in different issues as I am sticking to the policy of three poems by a featured poet and one each from ten other poets. This may mean a delay before publication but it hopefully won't be too long.
I hope that you enjoy the poems I selected here, and, if you are a poet yourself, don't hesitate to submit your own work.
Finally, a shameless plug for my weekly blog, also on Substack. There I publish reviews of poetry collections, articles about poets (currently a five part blog about the Spanish poet Miguel Hernández) and any other poetry related subject that I feel strongly enough about to include. A recent blog entry was a review of the Selected Poems of issue 1's Featured Poet, Ian Parks, and I suspect that Rory Waterman's new collection will be covered at some point.
Thanks for reading
Tim Fellows, Editor
Contributors: Rory Waterman, Bob Beagrie, Becky Deans, Adam Strickson, Paul Brookes, Julian Turner, Ian Badcoe, Mark Mansfield, Jane Sharp, Eileen Thompson, Ian Harker and Paul Brough.
The Fig Tree Featured Poet – Rory Waterman
My Friends the Communists
i. Loughborough
Timmy pedals his trike about the lawn
with all his tiny might, tips in a bed
of roses. Mummy’s up before the lad
has registered the shock, and here it is,
but there she is. Excited, Leon yawns
and wags his tail – thump-thump – then rests his head
back across his paws. But where is dad?
Ah! Here he comes, with beers, buns, sausages.
He grinds the drum grill open, twists a knob,
and flamelets pucker. ‘You want one of these?’
He holds a can – I nod – then sits a while,
then passes it. ‘Congrats, mate, on the job.’
He means that. Deckchairs ripple in the breeze,
then mummy fills one, waves to Timmy, smiles.
ii. Berat
An old man sips pastis with Ismail Kadare
in… Paris, right? Some panelled brasserie.
‘Yes, all those things’, says Mirel. ‘The other man, this’ –
he prods, wobbles the frame, and steadies it –
‘he is my father. The picture was taken the day
they met again in 1993,
the first time in twelve years. My father missed
my childhood: he said we’d too little to eat,
someone informed, and then….’ He locks my gaze
which drags free, flits across his little shop
of sloughed off heirlooms: old coins, chairs, a chest,
uniforms, tobacco tins and trays
from some lost workshop, and – I pick it up –
the Enver bust I’ll buy my friends, in jest.
Rory Waterman
Envoi
I tried to open your gate. It was huge,
an oblong snug in the wall, covered in curls
and blisters of thick green paint, and creaked a bit
but wouldn’t budge from its cradle of alder trunks.
Ivy tendrils and leaves hid any view
beyond the slats and bars. I pulled them aside
and that is when I saw you, the ghost of you,
twenty or so, on a splendid little lawn,
laughing with an airman, and beautiful,
and not knowing I’d ever come this way,
that I’d ever exist, not wanting me to.
You’ve told me this, and who am I to argue?
I stepped back, unseen, leaving you in peace,
and called you, fifty-five years later: there’s no
time but the present, no other life for us
to cling to. You were out, and didn’t answer,
but called me back when I was about to go.
Rory Waterman
The Lincoln Imp
The Devil was bored in his burrow one day
and, wanting to watch a farce,
he swallowed an imp and blew him to England,
out through the Devil’s Arse
(that’s a cave, look it up), then he sat back and watched
while the imp surveyed all England’s North.
‘It’s quite knackered already’, he thought. ‘What to do?’
But he still gave it all he was worth.
First he chopped down some trees for a railway line
but made sure the line never came,
then he raced coast to coast ripping down a Red Wall,
then he touched all the moors with a flame,
then he cursed half the factories – those that were left –
in Billingham, Barnsley, Bolton,
and places like that, until they shut down,
then he made sure the Tories still won.
And he saw what he’d made and he saw it was good,
but he wanted to see somewhere pretty,
so a Devil-sent wind sped him down to the Minster
at Lincoln. ‘Now, wait here for me’,
he said to the wind as he hopped in a gutter
somewhere above the south aisle,
then he swung through a window, perched on a cross
and gazed down the nave for a while.
He couldn’t see any old men of the cloth
but the tills at the front were all ringing,
and tourists were frowning and pointing at stuff.
Then some kids in the choir started singing
so he covered his ears and whipped through a door
to the cloister, straight into a gran
who trudged through the caff there, teapot and cakes
in her blobby little hands,
so he cursed them to taste like old boot-soles and dishcloths
and made all the prices go up
well beyond reason, then snuck to her table
and widdled a bit in her cup.
Then he flew through the church – up the transept, the nave –
and swooped to the shop. It was frightening:
a thousand or more resin models of him
glared from shelves, so he left quick as lightning
and soared to a perch at the back of the church
to ponder a while on his own,
but an angel was trying to kip on the altar,
saw him, and turned him to stone.
And there he still stands, holding his leg
and grinning (an imp, when in thought,
will do that). Beelzebub took his loss well:
he went to the Minster shop, bought
a few hundred more, dressed like a Yank tourist,
then stopped for three cakes and a brew.
And the wind is still waiting there, robbing folk’s hats,
their scarves, their wits, and their screw.Rory Waterman
Rory Waterman’s collections, all published by Carcanet, are: Tonight the Summer’s Over (2013; PBS Recommendation, shortlisted for a Seamus Heaney Award); Sarajevo Roses (2017; shortlisted for Ledbury Forte Prize); and Sweet Nothings (2020). A fourth, Come Here to This Gate (2024), which contains these poems, will be published in April. He is on the English and Creative Writing faculty at NTU, and is currently leading an AHRC-funded project called 'Lincolnshire Folk Tales: Origins, Legacies, Connections, Futures': lincolnshirefolktalesproject.com/. His website is rorywaterman.com. He'd love you to buy his new book, ideally directly from Carcanet: Come Here To This Gate
'Envoi' has been published in the TLS, and 'The Lincoln Imp' has been broadcast on BBC Radio Nottingham.
The Fig Tree Selection – May 2024
This section features up to ten poems, with a maximum of one per poet per issue.
The extra hour of daylight
paid us a visit to show how close
it was to crawling, the way it
rolls, flops and belly-shuffles
across the floor, grinning
at the remarkable achievement
of dispersing shade, obviously
expecting applause.
It shouted and squealed
the day's incoherent news
at the top of its lungs,
promising bbqs, garden parties
by tearing off a sock
and flinging into next week.
It sucked on and gnawed,
with toothless abandon,
the liberated foot, that's yet
to learn a shoe’s rubbing
restrictions.
It relished a spot of nakedness
(who doesn’t?), and we remarked
on its muscular shoulders, how buff
it was, like a miniature Tarzan.
After a fit of giggling
while we danced and bounced
to The Boys of Bedlam, it fell
fast asleep on our sheep
skin rug.
Once sixty minutes
had past and it vanished
over the rooftops, the quiet
it left behind was sweet,
deep, so fleetingly fresh,
like the scent
of magnolia blossom.
Bob Beagrie
The Deep Benk
There wasn’t a choice.
Life handed him a coat of black
And down he went.
Crammed into corners,
The only noise, the drip of
Sweat slipping off his unshirted back.
Hot as hell, he hacked through life with an axe
Down that Deep Benk
To dig up black gold.
Older now, he
Coughs in the queue for the Post Office
Draws out every penny saved from his state pension.
On that Indian summer day, he takes a coach to Skeggy
Keen to be busy and amused
To put some money in the slots
When he gets to the beach
He wades into the waves
Dead gulls, shit, and chocolate condoms
Collecting around him.
He keeps walking until the water reaches his leather belt,
His lightly stained armpits
His Brylcreemed hair.
Then he’s gone
back into the deep and dark and wet.
Becky Deans
Evening study visit to the NUM, Barnsley.
April hailstones, hard as coal, white
as a vampire's complexion
because someone sucked the blood
from this place, and two tiles have shifted
letting in the water, and the metaphors.
A memorial – a family of bronze hardship
set off by a lawn cut back to silence.
Despite the phone calls, locked doors.
It's only when I disappear between walls
that I find a suited brother in an under-garage
who wears badges of shovels and picks
set off by his tie's red glow, because signs live on.
So we – me and the teenagers full of KFC –
are let in, even though deep mines are now
almost a rumour, granddad's slip of the tongue.
The hall is baroque, a Dream Topping confection,
the ceiling white as sudden loss, gold as church
and banners everywhere, sleeping tigers –
as powerful, as vulnerable – display
words under threat, like union and unity
and the women of St. Helen's, fists in the air
like silver maces, sure the Great Strike
would end in t-shirts of victory
and a Rubik's Cube next to the coiffured head
of ice-blue Thatcher – Empress of Damage –
come to gloat over those fissures in the paint
and the Soviet-like men of Castleford, proud
in their miners' helmets before MacGregor
surgically removed their scalps.
Then faded deaths in glass cabinets
because the batons broke more than hope.
So, students, these relics are called 'heritage'
though their stillness whispers a great anger
and I smelt the acid tang of betrayal
over there by the bookcase of minutes.
Adam Strickson
NUM - National Union of Mineworkers;
MacGregor - Sir Ian MacGregor was Chair of the National Coal Board during the 1984-85 strike.
Strange
I
It is a strange trick. Their distant sound on
The road but see their car lights up close.
Bright white headlamps at an angle so one
Pit security camera follows.
Denied TV, this is better. We can
Control our point of view from old mine
Managers office. Pit head gear one pans,
And from corner of our flat roofed room, mine
Stack is a silhouette. Golf course on edge
Bright till 11. High point. A walk down
Its long well-kept drive 3.30, see stretch
Of village’s orange lights spread around.
Necklaces, but broken. Turned out work lights
Here. No sound. Those dead men’s eyes, briefly bright.
II
Cars are all light a second through the lens.
One brightness that separates into two
Distinct blazes. We follow their drive then
See two become one again. Sometimes view
One car behind another, one becomes
Four. Cameras only see in shades black
And white. All will stop with demolition.
Control taken away. Never come back.
Sometimes local bobbies break for quick sup.
Tell of crimes committed by village crooks.
Wait our sharp inspector motoring up
Drive, and exit back way to make it look
Like we were on patrol the whole time. Keen
Bob says he’s nursing station kip. Stay mean.
Paul Brookes
Hove
After they left, the house was full of them;
the memory of their footfalls on the stairs,
the slow release of a floorboard from a foot,
as if it could remember them, their weight
remaining after they had filled it so long,
as it relaxed but wouldn't let them go.
Such visits leave their revenants, the bleak
echoes of the recently departed,
as if the metaphorical were real:
a presence seen on the stairs that's not there when
you turn again to check; the way you feel
it drifting away from you as you awake,
the little hauntings of our days, or thoughts
of what remains behind a door, a ghost
of feelings put away like lumber in
a room, the lurk of fear in darkness when
the guests are gone, all company dispersed
and you are left with your own thoughts, alone.
Of course I can still remember them, their words
and faces fresh but, too, they multiply
in every sound the house remembers by
until a host of susurrations fill
each chamber with the sound of birds,
migration, murmuration, staying still.
Julian Turner
Not looking forward to the end-times
These years you've got so small
I mean you were never tall, never massive
and imposing, and although when I was tiny
you must have seemed that way
I do not have the sort of memory
to reproduce in detail those days
but you could not have been a giant
I do not recall
and these years you've got so small.
You always were a competent man
I remember helping you fix the car
maybe we couldn't afford a garage in those days
but to me it was an adventure
opening the bonnet
undoing bolts
taking pieces out
speculating on the fault
being told hold it still, damnit!
while you tried to get the bolts back in
you always liked to be doing things
yourself: decorating, hanging shelves,
plumbing, you came to my first house
and extended the central heating
up to the first floor
while my wife and mother
chatted and made tea
and the blowtorch's roar
and come to think of it you were a giant
but these years you've got so small.
Ian Badcoe
Silky
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains.
—John Keats
Your heart aches, too, but all you know is time
which makes no sound itself. In fact, its song’s
the same as when most first let out that long
wail to the world, your very first word: “I’m.”
Something else may be heard though should you climb
familiar steps to an attic. Tossed
in a corner sits a painted box that belonged
to you— of toys, covered with dust and grime.
Prepare to greet your oldest, dearest friend
who waits as he has all these years gone by.
He watches as you lift him from the rest
and almost seems about to speak again,
as you press him gently to your chest—
and all time knows by heart wells in your eyes.
Mark Mansfield
When I Can Write a Poem in Greek
I will speak of the hot summers,
when I sleep in the afternoon,
I will speak of the cold winters,
when the smell of burning wood follows me,
I will speak of the autumn
when the farmers look so tired,
I will speak of the spring,
when God breathes life into everything;
And I will tell you how I feel
when I look into the starlit sky,
how I feel when I hear swallows
high in the eves; when I hug ancient trees.
I will explain why I am in love with Greece.
Meanwhile I will sit in the shadows,
the spears of the rays of the sun
reminding me of Achilles.
Jane Sharp
The Cypriots
As the days diminish
and I tuck my duvet closer every night,
I remember the Cypriots
who came each year as dance students
to our chilly northern college.
Homesick. Cold.
Weary of grey days and pining for the sun,
yet they danced like fallen angels.
Passionate. Intense.
Watching them I would forget to breathe.
Alya – her hair a black halo, eyes
locked on Christo’s – bodies
ignited by the rhythm, scorching
the dancefloor with their vitality.
Sharing it all: the fervour, the pain, the sorrow
of Cyprus – their island home.
Too long a hotbed of violence.
Divided. Scarred.
Its currency a coin with love seared
on one side and hate on the other.
But always the island drew them back -
its warmth in their blood.
Back to an island in remission,
where the search goes on, by river beds
and sea shores, for bodies to bring home.
Eileen Thompson
THE HOME OFFICE TABLE OF DROPS
ten seconds from the condemned cell
to pulling the lever
but Mr Pierrepoint
can do it in seven
two nooses sent from the Home Office
by special courier and kept
in a safe—one new, one used
which is preferred as giving
a more accurate stretched length.
They've been sizing you up
through the 'Judas hole'
you don't know is there
just like the door that will open behind you
like new evidence
barely time to notice
that the rope is painted white
and the knot is actually a chain
and that there's a mark on the trap
that they kick your feet to
while your hands are pinioned
and the hangman pulls the hood
out of his jacket pocket like a magician
Ian Harker
Contributors
Ian Badcoe is a nonbinary poet living in Sheffield, he is a strange hybrid of husband, father, gardener, walker, game developer and poet. He has been published in Streedcake, Corporeal, En*gendered, Selcouth Station, Riggwelter and Antiphon and is a regular at several Sheffield open mics. Web-site: https://www.ianbadcoe.uk/
Bob Beagrie (PhD) lives in Middlesbrough and has published numerous collections of poetry, most recently: Kō (Black Light Engine Room Press’ 2023), Eftwyrd (Smokestack Books 2023), The Last Almanac (Yaffle Press 2023), When We Wake We Think We’re Whalers from Eden (Stairwell Books 2021). His work has appeared in numerous international anthologies, journals and magazines and has been translated into Finnish, Urdu, Swedish, Dutch, Spanish, Estonian, Tamil, Gaelic and Karelian. He also writes short stories and plays.
Paul Brookes is a shop assistant. His chapbooks include As Folktaleteller, (ImpSpired, 2022), These Random Acts of Wildness, (Glass Head Press, 2023), Othernesses, (JCStudio Press, 2023) and Wolf Eye, (Red Ceilings Press, 2023). He edits The Wombwell Rainbow (interviews and challenges) and a new webzine, The Starbeck Orion, devoted to words and images.
Paul Brough is a Yorkshire based illustrator. You can see more of his artwork here
Becky Deans is a committed performer of poetry and prose, and has curated and hosted spoken word events at local arts festivals including Belper Goes Green and Duffield Arts Festival. Her first novella was published in 1998 and her poetry chapbook, un(in)formed, was published by Bearded Badger Publishing in April 2021.
Ian Harker is co-founder of Strix magazine and a director of Leeds Lit Fest. Shortlisted for the Troubadour and Bridport prizes, he was runner-up in the BBC Proms Poetry Competition and poet in residence at the Henry Moore Institute. He has two previous books with Templar Poetry. An Honorary Fellow of Leeds Trinity University, ‘A - Z of Superstitions’ is out now from Yaffle Press.
Mark Mansfield’s most recent collection is titled Greygolden (Chester River Press, 2021). His poems have appeared in Anthropocene, Bayou, The High Window, Iota, London Grip, Magma, Measure, Obsessed with Pipework, Orbis, Panoply, Skylight 47, and elsewhere. He has been a Pushcart Prize nominee. Currently, he lives in upstate New York.
Jane Sharp is a poet who lives in Barnsley. She has had her work published in The Dalesman, The Yorkshire Anthology, Dream Catcher, Voices for Change and various mags. She has written two novels and enjoys spoken word events.
Adam Strickson’s first collection, An Indian Rug Surprised by Snow, is published by Wrecking Ball Press. His second, Tear up the lace, with Graft. He is a PhD tutor at the University of Leeds, writer, artist and theatre director, currently involved with projects for Balbir Singh Dance and 6 million+.
Eileen Thompson is a retired teacher and ex-patriot Geordie living in East Yorkshire with her husband and two greyhounds. She reads and writes poetry in an attempt to make sense of the world and consumes large amounts of genre fiction in order to escape from it.
Julian Turner has had 4 collections published, the first three from Anvil Press Poetry and more recently, Desolate Market from Carcanet. His first, Crossing the Outskirts, and third, Planet-Struck, were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. He has recently retired from being a psychotherapist and is hoping to spend more time writing.
All contributors retain copyright of their work.
fabulous second issue - what a great collection of poetry, and I love the sequencing of it. Gorgeous art work, too - thank you!