Britannia Pier

for Roy Fisher

fore far fair ground

sand blows the promenade

Surprising how fashions come around… 

I chose the blue

Are you all right? Do you want me to hold you?

Britannia Pier     closed for the winter

he is painting the underside white         reaching above

white beard   overalls spattered

decaying concrete supports gun metal struts

vigilante rail system

semi automatic tex

Romany Palmist   Engaged when door is closed

psychic text service

the [ghost] train doesn’t run here anymore

ride the giant slide to the end of the pier

with Helen Shapiro

rough thin grass grey pebbles

parchment pale sea weed

you cannot see Holland

cold Dutch sand under my feet

wave roar wa wa oh ra ra

fashion a fish

it’s lovely wish   you were here

walking back to happiness yay yay yay

Great Yarmouth, February 19

Published Collected Poems (Shearsman, 2022)

Frances Presley was born in Derbyshire in 1952 and lives in London.  Recent publications include Halse for Hazel (Shearsman, 2014) and Sallow (Leafe, 2016) on trees and their languages, with images by Irma Irsara; Ada Unseen (Shearsman, 2019) on Ada Lovelace, mathematician and computer visionary, also a collaboration with Tilla Brading, ADADADA (Odyssey, 2022). Black Fens Viral began in June 2020 on a slow train through East Anglia’s flat, agricultural, landscape of black peat, once marshland: ‘viral’ refers both to Covid and to a text generator known as the Markov chain. The first poem was published as a Literary Pocket Book (2021).  Presley’s Collected Poems 1973-2020 was published in two volumes by Shearsman in 2022.  She has written essays and reviews, especially on innovative British women poets. Her work is in the anthologies Infinite Difference (2010), Ground Aslant: radical landscape poetry (2011), Out of Everywhere2 (2015) and Fractured Ecologies (2020).   www.francespresley.co.uk 

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