Moving On
In the Haymarket a bus station has been transformed
from cattle crush to airport lounge. I no longer miss
Marlborough Crescent, open to weather. From there, I’d rush
for the trolley bus to school while the abattoir let
blood flow unchecked along the gutter, stinking through fumes
as drivers climbed in their cabs and, one by one, engines
vibrated, buses pulled into stands. I’d leap across,
never connecting that red stream with the death it meant
or managing to link this to cattle sometimes glimpsed.
Our city made blood, tanks and ships. It still stood on coal.
Near to where we waited in the cold, suits with laptops
raise glasses in the lobby of a high-rise hotel.
Phones vibrate silently; clean shoes press the shining floor.
Automatic doors open, close by a subdued road.
Multi-glazed rooms gaze across the river. It must be
better; no more leading to slaughter. Downstream they dredged
the Tyne at Wallsend for the deepest vessel ever
to sail there – fifty feet of it underwater – so
they could load the last remains of shipbuilding up
for Dabhol. Blood down the gutter: water under the bridge.
Robyn Bolam is originally from the Tyne Valley, Northumberland. Newcastle upon Tyne isn’t the only location her poetry maps, as it explores its central theme of “roots” but it remains an important home, or “hyem”, and is one of those sources revisited and re-envisioned in her eponymous recent collection. What I like about this poem, and others in Hyem, is the detached observation that laces the commemorative affection, and keeps the genre’s nostalgic tendency under control.
It’s a quality of balance that underlies the tangible, physical, archaeological layering in Moving On. The city of the 60s and its 21st-century transformation are fused in a single imaginative space, in which two speakers, the schoolgirl and the adult, assert different points of view.
The bus station has relocated to the Haymarket from Marlborough Crescent, and the new “airport lounge” replaces the remembered “cattle crush”, but memory impinges on current perception via a mental process familiar to most adults but no less fascinating and complex. Do we ever fully see the new thing if its early image is already deeply engrained in our younger minds? Such double exposures are often, of course, poetic homeland.
The speaker, while remembering, appears to respond to contemporary pressures, in which “the market” and personal development may collude, towards “moving on”. The superior comforts and shininess of the new are duly appreciated. They’re also registered as having less emotional weight than the industrial-imperial past. Neither old or new is thoughtlessly romanticised. The poem seems founded on an honest act of reportage, in which emotion is deliberately muted.
The new phase of post-industrial development seems to extinguish the past with the sensory force of absolute reality, but the poet senses connections. One of them is carried in the idea of vibration. In the first stanza, the vibration tangible and audible: “ … one by one, engines / vibrated, buses pulled into stands.” In the second, “phones vibrate silently”, as if the mechanisation represented by the internal combustion engine had continued to advance, but become slick and subterranean. Scepticism, hinted at by the ironical title, emerges clearly in the summing up, and that resisting, jolting rhythm of: “It must be / better; no more leading to slaughter.”
Innocence and ignorance are gently interrogated by raised consciousness. The speaker’s young self would thoughtlessly “leap across” the blood-filled gutter, unable to connect it with the butchery of the abattoir and the glimpsed cattle. Blood has seemed to the child simply another product. “Our city made blood, tanks and ships. It still stood on coal.” Two voices, I think, speak on either side of that caesura, one the child’s, the second, the adult’s, for whom time’s passing registers in the “still” that implies “though not any more”.
Again, there is continuity as well as revision. The adult speaker understands the source of the blood and has therefore learned from the child to suspect the apparently clean, glassy renovations. Though political criticism is covert, it’s present as irony. The poem knows that the “leading to slaughter” carries on, and metaphorical blood may be spilled under euphemisms of progress, “suit” words like redundancy, restructuring and sustainability. Shit becomes bullshit in the corporate city, and locating it, understanding its cause and opposing it remain almost impossible for the individual kept perpetually moving by the city’s many wheels.
The two halves of the poem form a visual representation of division-plus-parity, with the final, laconically sad images (“Blood down the gutter: water under the bridge”) carrying the past and its images inexorably away, but retaining the inference of cruel and unfinished decimation. The Tyne at Wallsend, we learn from a significantly timed afterthought, has yielded up the remains of the “deepest vessel ever to sail there” (the Osprey, I think?) for final despatch to India. The devastation of the region’s shipbuilding industry is registered as traumatic loss. But Moving On is also a blending of two cities and eras into a more nuanced space where the walker/reader can cross bridges, retrace steps, pause, and question how deep the differences really lie.
Poems by Robyn Bolam, including Moving On, feature in The Land of Three Rivers, Neil Astley’s magnificent new anthology of verse from and about the North East of England. I should declare an interest, having a short poem of my own included, but add that Moving On, like all the works chosen here, tapped me on the shoulder first: I picked it after I’d finished Hyem and before I’d opened the anthology. Both Hyem and The Land of Three Rivers are pure belta.
