Dig deep for good books, Benjamin Zephaniah, and gloaming in Devon
With Roy McFarlane and Jade Angeles Fitton
Over the past 72 hours, I must have been asked at least eight times if I’m feeling anxious about my looming wedding. As I type, I realise that it is now less than a fortnight away. I suspect I should be feeling at least some sense of anxiety – yesterday evening Constance and I were working the seating plan so that warring family members don’t have to acknowledge each other.
And yet, I’m not really feeling much wedding-related stress at all. On Thursday, I have a new book out, about our complicated relationship with the land, which is consuming almost every iota of thought I can muster.
This morning I received a note from a lady who lives in the Highlands who I went to see when I was researching the book – she is working hard currently to try and get more venison onto peoples’ plates. Deer numbers are a problem in Northern Scotland and she wants them to become a resource held in common. She was writing to say that she saw some coverage of the book this morning, in which she gets a mention, and she was immensely flattered by it. Her thoughts differed somewhat to a young landowner who called me up last week to say he felt I’d made him look a little more privileged than he’s comfortable with. He is, I pointed out, a guy with many thousands of acres – hardly normal, is it? In the end he conceded that I might have a point.
Good narrative non-fiction ought to try to get to the truth and at times the truth can be uncomfortable. Who knows what publication day will bring.
It’s a real joy to get a lot of coverage for a book. People like The Times, The Telegraph, and The Observer have been very positive. But when I look at their review pages I always find myself thinking about all the books that haven’t made the cut.
I really think we owe it to those people who write to dig a little harder when we’re deciding what to read to next. There are gems published every month that inevitably take some finding. Dig a little.
Patrick Galbraith
Editor
Of owning and being owned
Jade Angeles Fitton writes about Devon as part of our series 'There's a street in my neighbourhood', which has taken us so far from Suffolk to Minneapolis
I’m relatively new here, and have been eager to inform anyone I bump into on The Loop that I’m from Devon. Depending on how long we talk, I’ll inform them that one side of my family has always been ‘here’. By ‘here’ I mean ‘Devon and Cornwall’.
The Loop is a 1.6 mile circuit that looks a bit like a fox head on a map. Almost every day for nearly four years, I’ve walked this circuit. To the uninitiated, The Loop might appear like an anonymous country lane with high hedgerows and deep potholes: nothing to speak of. But, like more inhabited places, it has its sights.
Within one of the fox’s ears, there is a field with a 300 year old oak, where the buzzards eat their kill and, at dusk, call to one another to roost. Just up from patches of comfrey, lungwort and honesty, there’s the old potter’s; his hand-built kiln chimney a turret in the sky. Someone told me David Attenborough buys his wares there. All I know is that if Attenborough does buy their teapots, he is paying £450.
At the bottom of the stream that cuts through the circuit is a wood where roe deer hide. There’s the limb-like beech where great spotted woodpeckers nest. On the opposite side of The Loop, the stream reappears from beneath a drystone bridge, where damselflies rally in summer. As the road rises towards our hamlet, there are vole runs and patches of violets, in March, sitting in the moss. They were once packed in boxes and were sent to London in boxes marked ‘Devon Violets’.
A man who retired to The Loop from Brighton said, ‘There’s a lot of miserable old bastards round here.’ But there are lovely people too. When my favourite farmer does his rounds he always asks about my writing, and I always ask about his farm. When I bumped into him late last year, he had an open wound after slipping and getting trodden on by a heifer during artificial insemination. I had been writing a book proposal for almost a year and gave him an idea of what that constituted. We both agreed we would rather not do the other’s job.
I don’t particularly like that I felt the need to profess that I’m from ‘here’, from the other side of the river Ted Hughes used to fish on. I suppose it was a means of assuring others that I belong here, long before I felt any specific sense of belonging beyond it being my home county. Until I read Alan Garner’s The Voice That Thunders, I’d never really been cognisant of ‘belonging’ anywhere. Of his landscape at Alderley Edge, he writes, ‘It was imperative that I should know my place. That can be achieved only by inheriting one’s childhood landscape, and by growing in it to maturity. It is a subtle matter of owning and being owned.’
Poems published in their hearts
National Canal Laureate Roy MacFarlane on being inspired by the great Benjamin Zephaniah
Benjamin Zephaniah spoke of making poetry simple and accessible to all people. He didn’t just want to read poems, he wanted to perform poems, rooted in the oral traditions, bringing poetry to life. His mantra regarding poetry can be found in the powerful poem ‘Dis Poetry’. “Dis poetry is not afraid of going ina book / Still dis poetry need ears fe hear an eyes fe have a look.”
Benjamin’s desire for poetry needing ‘ears fe hear an eyes fe have a look’ was honed in Handsworth, the West Midlands town where he grew up — first as a young teenager preaching in church in the 1970s and then surviving bullies in the school yard by making people smile with his words. By the time he was 21 he was writing and performing poems for anti-racist demonstrations against the National Front.
Benjamin straddled the world of reggae and sound systems as well as the punk and rock scene where he could be seen on TV on Channel 4 chanting lyrics. His was a face and voice for those who struggled to see representation of themselves on the screen or in books back in the 1980s.
His influence on multi-cultural Britain cannot be underestimated. With his flashing locs, energetic performances jumping and prancing on the stage, speaking a mix of Brummie-Jamaican patois, he blazed a trail and opened doors of literature for others of colour to follow.
He became a national treasure, the people’s laureate after refusing an OBE in 2003. As he wrote at the time: ‘Up yours, I thought. I get angry when I hear that word ‘empire’; it reminds me of slavery, it reminds of thousands of years of brutality, it reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised.’ He was able to be all things to all people through his poetry, the voice of the oppressed rocking the stage with punks and rockers, chanting the struggles of the working class, fighting against apartheid and other world struggles.
Roy McFarlane is a poet, writer and former youth and community worker. Born in Birmingham of Jamaican parentage, he spent most of his years living in Wolverhampton and the Black Country; he now lives in Brighton. He is the former Birmingham Poet Laureate and is currently the National Canal Laureate. His collections are published by Nine Arches Press: Beginning With Your Last Breath and The Healing Next Time was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and longlisted for the Jhalak Prize and his third collection, Living by Troubled Waters is out now
He is reading Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide by Atef Abu Saif
The Traveller, by Benjamin Zephaniah
A previously unpublished poem, from Dis Poetry: Selected Poems & Lyrics
I trod over the mountain I trod over the sea, One thing I would like to see is East Ham’s people free, I do get stopped by cops a lot But that don’t bring me down, And I am not afraid to say that I love Canning Town. The bright colours of Green Street And those kids that make me laugh As they make up real rude poems As I jog round Plashet Park, I know every fox on High Street South And every fox knows me, I’ve spent hours upon Beckton Alps And I still can’t bloody ski. I trod over the mountain Rhyming as I go, There are many great poets In sweet Stratford-le-Bow. And I don’t need the TV To see well paid pretenders, Everyday I see the truth, I live with real Eastenders.
Dis Poetry: Selected Poems & Lyrics was published by Bloodaxe Books on April 15 2025. It brings together all the poems from Benjamin’s three Bloodaxe collections, City Psalms (1992), Propa Propaganda (1996) and Too Black, Too Strong (2001), as well as some from The Dread Affair (1985), along with previously unpublished work and lyrics from various recordings