Reclamations from London’s Edgelands

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.

Keywords:

• poetry
• reclamations, London Olympics
• Lower Lea Valley

Which Wick?

Wandering on Wyke Rd, you knew you were

in old country, a Latin vicus – settlement –

or a Viking vik – inlet or creek – the weak point

to invade, then a trading post. In Middle English

it became -wich in salt brine wells and spas:

Droitwich or Nantwich, or a -wich which was

a landing place for goods special to that place

like wool-wich –Woolwich – or a trait of the place

such as green-wich – Greenwich – or a -wick where

the village grew up around dairy farms like

Hackney Wick – the 13^th Century ferm of Wyk –

or around dairy produce, cheese wick – Chiswick –

and goat wick – Gatwick. Just as a candle

dies down leaving only the trace of a wick,

when the land disappears, so too does the language.

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:

Memory never dies

I love you dad I am with you

It's us at Staffa Rd

It dawns on my companion this is the place he's read about, where a migrant died in a fire. We walk on a few steps past a windowless brick hut sprayed with a line of gold towers, cupolas and crosses:

the artist imagines

the City of God as ours

all-encompassing

the place perhaps the man was trying to get to before he was burnt to death. As I come out into an opening I'm struck by a dirty white, ragged guy you might throw on a bonfire. Its uncanny presence is so petrifying, I can't move. I call out to Charlie who's also transfixed. But then he runs forward as though to dare the effigy, show he isn't scared. He kicks it. And it turns out to be nothing more than a tied-up duvet whose contents spill out.

The traces obscure

the man’s fear and inner flame –

invisible remains

Bill

For a moment I saw the face of a fawn but the body

curved like a whippet’s, coloured fawn and flecked

with white and Bellingham blue – she had taken

her master for a walk on the marshes. He was sat

at the table, square – his arms blue with tattoos,

outstretched like oars, ginger hair curling down

his shoulders, crutches propped against the table.

Sophie dilly-dallied fussing with her food.

Bill said they were mourning Lucy, the older hound

who’d died suddenly. She was the one who’d drawn him

outdoors and made him walk again, though

he had bone disease. Within a week, he could

hobble about for an hour – within two, out

every day: I gave her a good life and she gave me one.

Three hip replacements had not deterred him

from walking the dogs, or stopped him losing his teeth,

spitting them out one after the other with blood –

the price of being stationed on Malden Island, then

Christmas island, then Bikini Atoll on his tour of duty.

Desire Path

Through this green swathe, how many feet have gone?

Ah! the difference the trampling to mud makes

when the trampled grass becomes a path.

We follow a whim, taking the diagonal trail

through Lammas Meadow – on the desire path

extending freely to those who come after,

who may be lured by the emerald field,

become immersed in its pasture, one foot

after the other, leaving a single line

without a tar or gravel scar churning up

the past or effacing it. Strange how walking

has changed the course of grass and repossessed

the Lammas lands – the right to graze surpassed

by the right to roam, pass through, reflect, pass on.

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 20^th, 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]