• Contact
  • About
DONATE
NEWSLETTER SIGN UP
  • Login
East Anglia Bylines
  • HOME
  • News
    • Brexit
    • Health
    • Education
    • World
  • Politics
    • Local government
    • Justice
    • Activism
  • Politics Blog
  • Climate
    • Environment
  • Lifestyle
    • Community
    • Culture
    • History
    • Humour
    • Property
  • Business
    • Economics
    • Finance
    • Transport
    • Farming
  • ANGLIA
    • East Anglia
    • Bedfordshire
    • Cambridgeshire
    • Essex
    • Hertfordshire
    • Norfolk
    • Suffolk
  • Series
No Result
View All Result
  • HOME
  • News
    • Brexit
    • Health
    • Education
    • World
  • Politics
    • Local government
    • Justice
    • Activism
  • Politics Blog
  • Climate
    • Environment
  • Lifestyle
    • Community
    • Culture
    • History
    • Humour
    • Property
  • Business
    • Economics
    • Finance
    • Transport
    • Farming
  • ANGLIA
    • East Anglia
    • Bedfordshire
    • Cambridgeshire
    • Essex
    • Hertfordshire
    • Norfolk
    • Suffolk
  • Series
No Result
View All Result
East Anglia Bylines

National Poetry Day in East Anglia

To mark National Poetry Day we are publishing daily poems about East Anglia. We start with an essay by the Suffolk poet Blake Morrison.

Blake MorrisonbyBlake Morrison
October 6, 2021
in Anglia, Culture
Reading Time: 3 mins
A A
National poetry day

National poetry day

Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

October 7 is National Poetry Day. East Anglia has inspired many poets, especially in Norfolk and Suffolk. So, to mark the event, we will publish one poem a day for a week, covering all the counties of the region. As an introduction, we begin with a short essay by Blake Morrison, poet and Visiting Professor of Literature at the University of Suffolk.

Poetry and Suffolk

It took me a while to get used to the East Anglian landscape. Though Dunwich and Minsmere found their way into my debut poetry collection, Dark Glasses, within a year of my first seeing them, that was because I found them alien, not beautiful. I’d grown up in the Yorkshire Dales and my bedroom window looked out onto the moors. With its unhedged fields, reedbeds and shingle beaches, the landscape of east Suffolk seemed very flat in comparison, literally so. It was only when I began exploring it by bike that I realised it’s not so flat after all.

I also realised how varied it is, not a single landscape but a series  – marshes alternating with sandlings, wheat with heather, water-towers and lighthouses with the dome of Sizewell B. More recently, it’s the vulnerability of the coast, under siege from rising seas, that has begun to preoccupy me. Each year the land recedes a few more feet. It feels personal, an affront, a wound, perhaps because I’m conscious of my own erosion, as someone who’s no longer young.

So though I do now see the beauty of coastal Suffolk, it’s what Yeats would call a terrible beauty – dark, ominous, a landscape that makes you glad to be alive but carries the threat that you might not be for much longer. Whether it’s the graves of sailors lost at sea, the pagodas on Orford Ness (where atomic weapon experiments were once carried out), the Martello towers and anti-tank blocks laid out to ward off foreign invasion, or the stories of the Great Flood in 1953, you can’t miss the precariousness. I try to convey this in my long poem, ‘The Ballad of Shingle Street’, with its focus on a coast in retreat (‘the waves collapse, the flints resound,/the tide runs in and takes the ground’), and in an earlier poem, ‘On Sizewell Beach’, which recounts an episode when my infant daughter was nearly run over. The sense of menace is there in ‘Covehithe’ too.

Vulnerability, then, and a sense of omen. But also beauty, expansiveness, nature in all its power and glory.

I don’t spend all my time in Suffolk. But it’s where I’ve written most of my poems, some of them published, many not. It’s the emptiness that inspires me – the big skies and wide spaces. What a piece of luck it was to have landed there, nearly forty years ago. My life would have been much the poorer if I’d not.


Tags: Coastal erosionPoetry
Previous Post

Government chaos as ministers dither and cull of 120,000 pigs begins

Next Post

East among hardest hit this winter when poverty may mean eat or heat

Blake Morrison

Blake Morrison

Blake is an English poet and author and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has published in a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres. Since 2003, Blake has been Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London and a Visiting Professor of Literature at the University of Suffolk.

Related Posts

View of a series of pylons marching across a valley in England
Anglia

Hope sparks for end of pylon controversy

byEast Anglia Bylines
December 7, 2023
Looking across Norwich Market towards the Norman Norwich Castle.
Brexit

UK is always in our hearts, but it’s difficult to live there

byJenny Rhodes
November 24, 2023
Covehithe-Abbey ruin
Anglia

Our favourite stories: Covehithe: a poetic expression of coastal erosion

byBlake Morrison
November 19, 2023
Steve Barclay and Rishi Sunak during the cabinet reshuffle at 10 Downing Street
Anglia

Sewage minister’s scandal: wife is water company boss

byJenny Rhodes
November 16, 2023
Tom Hayward Mersea oysterman
Anglia

Marking the million: Brexit ‘wiped out’ family oyster business

byTom Haward
November 12, 2023
Next Post
Fuel poverty caused by Tory policy. Photo by Katrina_S on Pixabay (CC BY 2.0)

East among hardest hit this winter when poverty may mean eat or heat

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR CROWDFUNDER

Subscribe to our newsletters
CHOOSE YOUR NEWS
Follow us on social media
CHOOSE YOUR PLATFORMS
Download our app
ALL OF BYLINES IN ONE PLACE
Subscribe to our gazette
CONTRIBUTE TO OUR SUSTAINABILITY
Make a monthly or one-off donation
DONATE NOW
Help us with our hosting costs
SIGN UP TO SITEGROUND
We are always looking for citizen journalists
WRITE FOR US
Volunteer as an editor, in a technical role, or on social media
VOLUNTEER FOR US
Something else?
GET IN TOUCH
Previous slide
Next slide

LATEST

Library closed sign

Tory councillors lose the faith, as local councils collapse

December 11, 2023
Deer in rewilded woods

Our favourite stories: Rewilding: leaving nature alone

December 10, 2023
University of Essex students’ sitting on some steps with a banner saying "Human Rights Week". This is the annual ‘chalking of the steps’ event where they write the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in numerous languages, on the concrete steps of the University’s Colchester Campus.

Do you know your human rights?

December 10, 2023
Funeral for Arnt Olsen in Norway, 1932. The funeral guests are all gathered around the coffin, children at the front, all very soberly dressed, There are flower wreaths on the coffin.

Funerals are optional, dying is not

December 9, 2023
Liberal Democrats celebrating

A good week for the Liberals: the blue wall swing continues

December 9, 2023
Sunak at yet another 'Stop the Boats' press conference

Pecksniff: Is this the end for Sunak?

December 9, 2023

MOST READ

Two people approach passport control at the UK Border Control, Heathrow.

Who’s afraid of freedom of movement?

December 8, 2023
Sunak at yet another 'Stop the Boats' press conference

Pecksniff: Is this the end for Sunak?

December 9, 2023
Climate crisis. Houses on the cliff edge at Hemsby

“Sorry, you are on your own!” climate crisis hits Norfolk

December 3, 2023
People demonstrating against poverty. One banner says "Fight poverty, not the poor."

We can eliminate poverty: but we have decided not to

December 7, 2023

Tags

Activism Anglian Water Brexit Business Cartoons Climate Community Conservatives COP26 Crime Democracy Economics Economy Elections Environment EU Farming Government Health History International Women's Day Labour Law Letters Local elections 2023 Local government National Grid Net zero NHS Norwich Opinion Our place in Europe Pandemic Party politics Pecksniff Politics Poverty Sewage Social care Trade Ukraine VAWG Welfare Wildlife Women
East Anglia Bylines

We are a not-for-profit citizen journalism publication. Our aim is to publish well-written, fact-based articles and opinion pieces on subjects that are of interest to people in East Anglia and beyond.

East Anglia Bylines is a trading brand of Bylines Network Limited, which is a partner organisation to Byline Times.

Learn more about us

No Result
View All Result
  • About
  • Authors
  • Complaints
  • Contact
  • Donate
  • Letters
  • Privacy
  • Network Map
  • Network RSS Feeds
  • Submission Guidelines

© 2023 East Anglia Bylines. Powerful Citizen Journalism

No Result
View All Result
  • HOME
  • News
    • Brexit
    • Health
    • Education
    • World
  • Politics
    • Local government
    • Justice
    • Activism
  • Politics Blog
  • Climate
    • Environment
  • Lifestyle
    • Community
    • Culture
    • History
    • Humour
    • Property
  • Business
    • Economics
    • Finance
    • Transport
    • Farming
  • ANGLIA
    • East Anglia
    • Bedfordshire
    • Cambridgeshire
    • Essex
    • Hertfordshire
    • Norfolk
    • Suffolk
  • Series

Newsletter sign up

DONATE

© 2023 East Anglia Bylines. Powerful Citizen Journalism

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In