“In November 1643 eight hundred Royalist cavalry and foot soldiers led by Sir Francis Mackworth attempted to seize the small West Riding town of Heptonstall from the occupying Parliamentary forces. Although they were driven back after a bloody night battle, several weeks later the Royalists returned in greater numbers, sacking the town, burning the houses and taking the livestock. The wool trade was destroyed for a generation. Plague followed. A few years ago, Michael Crowley turned the story of this small, bloody battle in the English Civil War into a community play. The Battle of Heptonstall takes some of the characters from the play – real and imagined – and lets them tell their own version of events. It is an examination of ideology, class and Englishness, from the Putney Debates to Brexit, a book about propaganda and division, authority and dissent, reaction and resistance, then and now.”
Available from Smoksetack Books
Reading at the Leper Chapel, Ripon, Ripon Poetry Festival 2021.
“Between 1787 and 1850 over 160,000 convicts were sent from Britain to penal colonies in Australia. First Fleet tells the story of the first eleven ships that sailed from Portsmouth on a 15,000-mile voyage to establish the first British penal settlement at Sydney Cove. Drawing on the surviving journals of some of the men and women on board the prison convoy, these poems inhabit the imaginary voices of convicts, crew, marines and Aboriginal people to give intimate voice – lyrical, poignant and unsentimental – to the poverty they left behind and the terrible ‘starvation years’ they faced when they reached Australia. This is a book about history and landscape, imprisonment and, environment.” Andy Croft, Smokestack Books
Healing
Jane Fitzgerald receives twenty-five lashes for disobedience, March 1789.
I only talked with William. We like to talk with each other;
our corner in the shade. But Bloodworth the brick-master,
the henhouse sneak, has folk flogged now, easy as a major.
William went to plead but mister Tench said
I have written the sentence down. William said,
count every second stroke Jane.
I couldn’t count after five. I pressed my face
into the tree like it was my mother’s skirts,
Bloodworth shouting dammed bitch from the crowd.
I saw my daughters in Bristol.
The girls taller, waist-high to their father at the gate
their faces clean, hair shining, their mouths shut bravely tight.
When it stops my eldest holds my hand. We walk to my hut.
Women are separate from the men now.
We have our own fires and places.
But William, he nurses me.
His narrow fingers, soft as water make me sleep.
I dread the flies that’s all – footsteps along my wounds,
the shiver of their eggs.
William is no soldier. His uniform hangs off his shoulders,
he is young, taunted and ordered by all others.
But he brings me the healing leaves,
sets down his musket, reaches for me.
I will sew his torn sleeves
Three poems available at Clear Poetry
Song Lyrics
