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.
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 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
Breathe out, now, and speak.
Antony Dunn, Carcanet poet
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 it:
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.