Listening to the Landscape, Phoebe Caldwell

Fisherrow, 2021     £4.00

Seeing and listening

I have decided: the point of interest for me here is the haar in the poem ‘Ben Hope’, the sea-fog that ‘can move mountains.’ I live on the coast, and while there are no mountains nearby, I know how easily haar moves saltmarsh, beach-huts, and geese feeding on low-tide mud. I know how silently it arrives, and leaves, changing every sound it touches.

But focussing on the haar alone would leave no place in this OPOI for the woman in ‘Time out of sync’, who ‘pauses by the recycling bins / for rest for reflection.’ No place for the car park and rugby pitch that would (‘before the Leeds-Liverpool canal / ran out of funds’) have been the terminus for barges, and where this woman would have had

space to sit and think — or just sit —
watching horsepower churn the water
dozing on a wooden bench
as the long-boats turned, headed back to port.

I have sat like that often myself, and as I listen to this woman pausing, resting and reflecting, I become her, sitting in a landscape I can hear as clearly as I can hear the haar. But this is not about me.

So I’ll focus on another visual detail. The one that shows Phoebe Caldwell’s ability to make her reader listen … really listen … is the workmen taking a break ‘on the grass triangle’ in ‘Settle’, men who presumably work in wood and stone, resting surrounded by trees and stone:

One sucks pie
from a polystyrene dish, the second
lies on his back tickling his nose
with a dandelion,
the third flicks orange peel
into the bucket of his dumper truck.

I find myself listening to pie being sucked across tongue and polystyrene; the friction of yellow on a stranger’s skin; peel’s contact with metal.

Thank you, Phoebe Caldwell, for making me listen more intently than I have done for ages. I’m going to listen like this more often. To people and landscapes.

Sue Butler

[Copies available from Fisherrow Press, 17 Limestone View, Settle, North Yorkshire BD24 9FH]