Abstract
Reclamations is an urban pastoral sequence of poems set in the Lower Lea Valley – an open green space within the bounds of the city, a geographic and social edgeland between town and country. The wreckage and remnants of war and urban infrastructure such as sewage works, filter beds, impounded and culverted rivers act as settings. The recycling of waste, absorption of floodwaters and presence of pits and burial grounds – vital features of the marshes for which they are devalued or shunned – figure in the poems, not as dead spaces or discarded processes, but as integral to ongoing renewal, of history alive and remade in the present. The people who populate the poems are also marginalised – ex-soldiers, redundant workers, displaced Travellers, migrants, asylum seekers – but it is traces of their presence left in the landscape and in the language which resonate in lyric and verbatim poems. Underlying the collection is the metaphor of reclamations – not only the process of reclaiming land from the marshes which the Olympics set in train, but the contested claims of whose land it is, the overlooked, suppressed or forgotten histories and voices embedded in the marshes. The sequence echoes their regenerative capacity to take in waste, rubble and flood waters and transform them into productive crafts, industries, recreations and a wild ecology, absorbing at the same time the marginalised, giving us a space to breathe and a place where we can feel at home.
Which Wick?
Haibun
A few steps away from the stream of traffic on Lea Bridge Rd, an open gate draws us into a thicket of hawthorn and nettles. We go along a narrow path a little way. On our left, we find a tree with charred branches that forms a burnt-out hollow, where the light is sickly. Underneath there's a make-do shrine – a few yellow chrysanths in a vase, three lanterns in a row, sturdy enough to weather any storm and a white cross made out of skirting, tied at a tilt as though it has dislocated a shoulder. A small board commemorates Krzystof in fragments of Polish that declare:
Bill
Desire Path
Copyright note
I will retain copyright for these four poems re-published in CITY. The four poems are originally published in Reclamations – Voices from the Olympic zone published by Paekakariki Press (May 2024).
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my publisher Matt McKenzie at Paekakariki Press for permission to reprint these poems after May 20th, the publication date for my collection, Reclamations – Voices from the Olympic zone, from which they are drawn.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jude Rosen
Jude Rosen is a poet, historian, urban researcher and translator. She teaches English and runs poetry workshops for refugees and migrants. Her pamphlet, A Small Gateway was published by Hearing Eye in 2009. Her collection Reclamations – Voices from the Olympic zone has been published by Paekakariki Press (May 2024). Poems from the sequence have been published in The Art of Dissent: Adventures in London's Olympic State, eds. Hilary Powell and Isaac Merrero-Guillemón, Marshgate Press, 2012; Long Poem Magazine, South Bank Poetry London Poems Anthology and Envoi and have been performed on poem and living history walks of the Olympic zone (poemswalks.wordpress.com ). A video “Desire Paths – a film haibun” was produced by Fawzia Kane in 2016 (https://vimeo.com/197324168). Email: [email protected]; [email protected]