Don't Wave a Flag, Wave a Poem! by Chloe Garner

As I walk past the union jack flags and bunting hanging up outside shops and homes in Ledbury, I think that as an emblem a flag is so vague - what does your flag mean? Why do you care about having had the same queen for 60 years? Do you want to participate in a ‘historical occasion’? What kind of Britain are you proud to be part of? Are you anti-Europe? Do you like the red, white and blue colour combination? By contrast – a poem, many of which can fit very neatly onto the average flag, is an emblem that can communicate something very distinctly about you and your unique take on the world, the United Kingdom, the Jubilee or whatever you choose. Ozymandias by Shelley might be my flag of choice for this weekend, but that is just me.

Poems that I read over and over become like emblems to me – they symbolise how I feel about certain key events in my life or parts of myself and somehow crystallise things for me. I emblazon them by hand into a special book. But I am constantly discovering new poems that I want to wave like flags. Most lately I am reading over and over Elegy by Sean O’Brien in his new collection, November. It is full of sadness and anger for a life finished and perhaps for a life not quite fulfilled, as in the partial refrain that runs through the poem, “There was a book you always meant to write.” In this poem Sean O’Brien says “But let me do it honour and repay your gift of words.” I am moved by the sacrifice of a mother and a wife and the child trying to repay this through the use of the same gift never realised in his mother. It is a poems about dreams put aside and hints in a veiled way about even worse endured in a marriage, yet at the same time it brings up vivid memories – “The dark was in the orchard now, scarf-soaking fog/Among the fallen fruit.” The sense of a proud woman revealed in snippets of her words spoken and heard still in the poet’s memory “There’s nothing worse, You used to say, than scratting after coppers.” I think that perhaps as a mum and as a woman this poem hits me with how life can slip by, that we can perhaps endure too much and for too long, until it is too late. Sean O’Brien’s The Drowned Book is the only book of poetry to have won both the Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes. As I read November I feel at times immersed in the world of a gorgeous black and white film. I am really looking forward to hearing Sean O’Brien for the first time when he returns to read at Ledbury with Katharine Towers.

Sean O'Brien ph. Caroline Forbes