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Poetry

A number of poets whose work is published by Carcanet were moved to express their feelings about the bombing of Manchester in their poetry. Their poems explore the impact on the places and people of the city.

Their writing exemplifies the power of poetry to respond and perhaps to provide solace in moments of destruction and crisis.

These pieces, written in the 4 years after the bombing, were all published in Carcanet’s 30th Anniversary Commonplace Book in 2000 reflecting the importance of the event in Carcanet’s history.

Bottles in the Bombed City

Carcanet poet Les Murray wrote this poem in response to the bombing. He describes the history of Manchester shaken by the impact of the bomb. Among references to places and people of the city he describes the ‘blue-green tiles of the Corn Exchange.’

They gave the city a stroke. Its memories
are cordoned off. They could collapse on you.

Water leaks into bricks of the workers' century
and every meaning is blurred. No word in Roget

now squares with another. If the word is Manchester
it may be Australia, where that means sheets and towels.

To give the city a stroke, they mixed a lorryload
of henbane and meadowsweet oil and countrified her.

Now Engels supports Marx, and the British Union
of beautiful ceramics is being shovelled up,

blue-green tiles of the Corn Exchange,
under gloss bricks of the Royal Midlands Hotel.

Unmelting ice everywhere, and loosened molecules.
When the stroke came, every bottle winked at its neighbour.

"Carcanet: a pigeon's eye view" by Alison Brackenbury

Carcanet poet Alison Brackenbury imagines the damage inside Carcanet’s office caused by the bomb following the explosion.

From my thick sill I saw the books.
The books were black. The books were green.
I saw the window burst by blast.
I flew in where the books had been.

Then, as I dozed, I saw the books.
The books were green. The books were black.
I saw the pages arch, then preen,
Whirr up like wings. The books flew back.

In that moment of frozen time, plate glass buckles before it blows.

Gillian Clarke. Carcanet Poet

The Bomb by Gillian Clarke

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Carcanet poet Gillian Clarke describes a pause before the bomb blast where ‘people stand stone still in the frozen city.' She recalls the city’s landmarks and shops, evoking a bustling morning and the chaos that followed.

On that June day, not one of the workmen labouring
in the hush of the Bridgewater Hall heard the explosion
that stopped the city in its tracks, before it hurt,
like news of grief suddenly reaching the heart.

Saturday, 15th of June, at 10 in the morning.
With her two thumbs a woman tests the fontanel
of a melon for ripeness. A girl tries on a dress.

A couple buy a cot in Mothercare.
In Smiths people flick through paperbacks.
In the Cathedral someone without hope
kneels down to say so, hoping to be heard.
In the Corn Exchange old things in the antique shops
survived the blitz in the corners of front rooms,
a clock still ticking after ninety years,
porcelain and mahogany that graced
grand houses in the heyday of the city.
The lovely theatre in the Royal Exchange
waits in the morning's pause for something to happen.
An ice cream parlour, a tobacconist, a bistro,
jewellers, boutiques, a Costume Hire Centre,
shops and stalls, offices, Carcanet Press,
where poetry's quiet, compressed in the book's pages
and phones and computers are taking the day off.

Then the bomb. The moment hangs in the air.
People stand stone still in the frozen city.
The woman with the melon rememebrs her child,
and rushes away without paying, the fruit held
like a precious bowl in her hands. In Mothercare
the couple lok at each other, and the foetus drifts
in its shallow sea like a sea lily tugging its stem.

Then chaos, before the two blue notes of terror.

In that moment of frozen time, plate glass
buckles before it blows. Brickwork bulges
and is slowly taken apart. Lego-Town
swept to smithereens by a child's petulance.

Glass hangs in the air, scarves, tee shirts,
flowers, newspapers, Kleenex, polythene bags,
migrating flocks of birds of paradise,
and real birds, city doves and sparrows
flung from the centre of violence, torn and bloody,
and paper rafts from shattered offices
set off like pretty ships across the sky.

On the palm of a ledge outside the publisher's window
in the Corn Exchange is a clutch of broken eggs,
fledglings blown away twig-limbed and goggle-eyed.
I imagine a poem of love from the publisher's desk
afloat like a bright balloon against the wire.

Breathe out, now, and speak.

Antony Dunn, Carcanet poet

"Bombing a Publisher" by Antony Dunn

Imagine, for days after the sirens,
book-ash falling like fingerprint dust, soft
tonnes of poems making a slow Pompeii
of Manchester, the air guilty with is:

a grey broadcast among aerials,
interfering with satellite dishes,
sly in the creases of morning papers,

printing its unwelcome news on shirt-fronts
and carry-out cappuccino, trodden
down hall-carpets, making itself at home;

filling sewers with shampooey fervour,
filtering into the water supply,
half-inching its way into lungs, leaking
into blood, heart, brain. Breath out, now, and speak.

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