Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

I’ve written before – notably here – about much-missed John Foggin’s Covid-time project of asking poets to write a poem after Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poem ‘Swineherd’, which begins ‘When all this is over, said the swineherd’, but with a different occupation. 26 of the poems were chosen by Kim Moore for publication in a delightful Calder Valley Poetry pamphlet When All This is Over (2020), still available to buy here. One of the poems I enjoyed most was ‘Cats’ Meat Man’ by Sue Riley, which Sue has kindly given me permission to quote in full:

Cats’ Meat Man


When all this over, said the Cats’ Meat Man,
I’ll become a nomad and travel
where everyone goes wild about birdsong.

I’ll listen to the street cries of the sellers of birdseed,
where blue tits have remembered
how to pierce the tops of milk cartons.

I’ll learn to cook and savour the aroma
of a rich lentil stew, with never a whiff of horsemeat,
the gnarled leavings of a slaughterhouse.

I’ll lie in long grass, hear bees counting as they forage.
At the top of Lookout Hill, I’ll reach up
and feel like I’m touching heaven.

I’ll watch the breeze stroke the surface of a pond,
ruffle the wild thyme,
and I’ll think of waves travelling through air.

At night I’ll feel the breath of the Sphinx moth
as it flies by moonlight, sips nectar from evening primroses
that glow like yellow lamps.

I’ll lie in my tent, listen to the crooning turtledoves,
and there’ll be no unearthly calls of tomcats,
no secretive scratchings in the darkness.

I like this poem for two reasons: because, thanks to its sense of yearning (during lockdown) for the freedom of travel and its accumulation of sensory details in each stanza, it’s a very fine poem per se, and for another reason I’ll come onto later. Like the way in which the phrases of songs and tunes you really like click into place perfectly on the ear, so Sue’s language in this poem does the same.

The phenomenon of the cats’ meat man is covered, and beautifully illustrated, in a fine essay by Kathryn Hughes, here, It’s pleasing that both Sue and John chose Victorian professions – he wrote, splendidly, about the ‘Night Soil Man’ – though Sue’s cats’ meat man somehow seems to me to be much more present in contemporary Britain than John’s excreta collector would be.

I love the specificity of the blue tits, Lookout Hill (the one in Greenwich?), wild thyme, the Sphinx moth, the evening primroses, the turtledoves – it’s exemplary in how these are deployed without seeming in any way fake or outlandish.

I love, too, how ‘a rich lentil stew’ will replace ‘the gnarled leavings of a slaughterhouse’ (and not just because I haven’t eaten meat since 1982). My 1978 edition of the Collins Concise English Dictionary gives ‘leavings’ as an alternative for ‘leftovers’, but I suspect it’s an anachronism now – I wonder if it’s still used in Wombwell/Barnsley where Sue is from, though despite the places’ close proximity, my Sheffield-native wife Lyn says she’s never heard it. Either way, it looks and sounds just right, doesn’t it? When I attended ‘Poetry from Art sessions at Tate Modern from 2008 to c.2014, Pascale Petit exhorted participants to ‘use all the senses’, and that’s certainly what Sue did in this poem.

Above all, I adore how Sue ends the poem so beautifully, with ‘the crooning turtledoves’ – one of our most extinction-threatened bird species – and invites us readers to hear their song instead of the tomcats on their night-time prowl.

The other reason why the poem speaks to me is a more personal one: as I mentioned on this blog just after Kim chose the poems for the pamphlet, my dad used to say ‘Quick, quick, cats’ meat!’ as a (no doubt vain) way of trying to get my brothers and I moving faster. I can’t remember any of us asking Dad where it came from or him volunteering the information, but now I surmise that it must’ve been used as a bogeyman threat against one or both my paternal grandparents, who were born in 1903 and 1904. Whether the streets of Eastbourne, where they were born and grew up, resounded to the cries of a cats’ meat man or two I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I’ve occasionally said the phrase to my children over the years, but not without derision . . .