UNDER THE ROCK: THE POETRY OF A PLACE
BENJAMIN MYERS ELLIOTT AND THOMPSON, £14.99 (HB)
This compelling book has a powerful rhythm – I seemed to hear the words being recited more than read them. It also has a potent sense of place. Roman coins, asbestos and rubbish have all been buried on Scout Rock. Layered and decaying, bottles, dismembered dolls and faux-rococo plates are revealed by rain. Also disclosed in glimpses are 18th-century bandits, textile workers, writers and musicians from Dickens to Throbbing Gristle, from Glyn Hughes to Ted Hughes.
Myers left London in search of “space, silence and the suggestion of financial survival”. In West Yorkshire’s Upper Calder Valley, he discovers natural history, community and local characters: Jeanette ‘The Dragon’, Alan the Postman. But this is not a cosy escape-to-the-country book. Rather, his account is honest – about change not preservation. The land contains “lone, low-skulking farms policed by the throaty bark of caged dogs, of quadbike carvings, of belching bogs and farting quags and sodden sumps that bubble from sulphurous subterranean waterways.” It has murders, asbestos deaths, suicides and heroin overdoses, crushed foxes and dead sheep.
Myers suffers sometimes from depression. He questions to what extent the landscape in its bleaker moods influences humanity. But there is light, too. He finds stimulation in cold-water swimming, warmth in community, beauty in a single feather. He delights in shrews, stoats, reeling stars, deer, peregrines and foxes whose blue eyes light the dark. And in regeneration. The poisoned pond is now full of fish and Mytholmroyd’s town tip – “thrillingly reclaimed by nature” – the domain of bees again. Review by Julie Brominicks