Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

Two days running, I’ve had serendipitous, marvellous encounters with sand martins.

On Wednesday, I intended to, and still did, walk up the Sheffield and South Yorkshire Navigation – i.e. the canal parallel to the Don – towards Swinton, but first I got distracted by the sand martins whizzing and falling, u-turning and tumbling, their white bellies skimming the river in one seamless, incessant movement on a riffled stretch downstream of Chantry Bridge, below the bus station in Rotherham town centre.

I’d been periodically looking out for them in May, but it took until its final day for me to get the chance to watch stand there, mesmerised, watching them from the railings at the back of a car park. As I said to a 4×4 driver, it’s mindboggling to think that sand martins (and those other acrobats, house martins, swallows and swifts) come all the way from sub-Saharan Africa to sub-Arctic Yorkshire, where there was spit in the air – while half the country’s enjoyed temperatures above 20 degrees, here it’s struggled to get above 10 all week.

Yesterday, Lyn and I walked along the canal in the other direction, towards Sheffield, because we wanted to have a wander round Attercliffe, where she was born. It was that sort of day when it was too cold to go without a jacket, but you felt too hot wearing one – it was, and is, June, for pity’s sake. Anyhow, having looked in the beautiful former Banner’s department store building, now used for not a great deal other than a greasy caff, we ended up trotting through Attercliffe Cemetery and down to the Don again, where we had a fantastic view of sand martins flying in and out of pipe outlets.

That reminded me of seeing them somewhere near Skipton, along the Skirfare, a lovely tributary of the Wharfe, about 20 years ago, with other British Haiku Society poets, in, I think, May 2006. From that experience I produced this haiku, published in Presence 30, then Wing Beats and The Lammas Lands:

river loop—
a sand martin squirms
into its nest hole

It seems like a lifetime ago. Those few days there were notable, among other things, for a renku session run by John Carley, who did as much as anyone in the UK to promote the creation of haikai linked forms not just as a literary exercise, but as an enjoyable, collaborative social event. He was a very erudite man, and absolutely passionate about renku. I think that was the only time I was involved in a renku session in person. I took part in several by email with Ferris Gilli, Paul MacNeil – who took the ‘conductor’ role and very much kept us focused – and Ron Moss, across three continents; but it would have been amazing if we’d been able to write them face to face. Like John, Paul was very exacting and knowledgeable about the subtleties of ‘link and shift’, i.e. how each verse was connected to, and simultaneously moved away from, the previous one. Sadly, both John and Paul are no longer with us.