Poem of the Month
We invite you to raise a glass (of whatever you fancy) to toast the fact that Writing Literary Portsmouth will celebrate the amazing and continuing traditions of Portsmouth poetry with the launch of our Poem of the Month feature.
We’re really excited at the prospect of being able to place a different verse in front of you every month, and we’re particularly interested in poems that give a strong flavour of the city, its spaces, and its inhabitants. They may be funny, moving, heartbreaking, or inspiring, but we’re sure that you will enjoy taking a poetic journey with us – meandering between Portsmouth’s fascinating past, present, and future – and using this most mercurial and vivid of literary forms as a way to explore the city’s many and varied identities.
Writing Literary Portsmouth is the blog behind the Portsmouth Literary Map, a project devoted to mapping, exploring, sharing, and celebrating our city’s remarkable literary energies. See our introductory post, Welcome to Writing Literary Portsmouth to find out more.
Introducing our poem of the month
Our first poem of the month is ‘Portsmouth Harbour (at 8.45 p.m., 7th July 1971): A Note to Vera’ by the Portsmouth-born miner-poet, Harry Haines, and it has been chosen for a number of reasons. As we begin to emerge from the latest Covid lockdown, and as we reflect on many long months of restrictions of one kind or another, most of us have been spending quite a lot of our time fondly remembering those things we have so suddenly been unable to do. Often the simplest of pleasures – or those that once seemed so simple and so customary that we never had cause to imagine life without them, or stopped to value them properly – are those that we have come to crave the most.
For many people, one of those once simple and ordinary pleasures we have at last been able to not simply dream about but to experience again is having a quiet drink at a pub. And so our Poem of the Month this month is an evocation of just that experience. If you have ever partaken of refreshments at the Spice Island Inn in Old Portsmouth, and particularly if you have taken a seat outside in good weather, it will be possible to see in your mind’s eye the scenes that Haines describes as he looked out over the harbour on that summer evening almost fifty years ago.
In Haines’s time, the Spice Island Inn was called The Lone Yachtsman. Some of our older city residents will perhaps remember it, and will know how much has changed, and how much has stayed the same, in the days since Haines sat outside the pub with that beer in his hand.
Better still, wander down there yourself, with this blog in your hand (via your mobile phone or tablet) and read the words aloud as you feel the fresh breeze off the harbour, a drink on the table in front of you. One of the beauties of the Portsmouth Literary Map is that you can take it with you as a handy guide to the city, exploring the entries street by street, landmark by landmark, as fancy takes you.
The poem is a finely-crafted evocation of a moment of peaceful thought that is no less compelling for its simplicity. It centres on love, and on the connections that love forges even when we are separated from those who are dear to us. Note also the understated power of Haines’s description, and the ways in which he subtly draws on naval and military imagery in ways that are vividly appropriate to this particular location.
If you are interested in finding out more about Haines’s interesting life, you can do so via the Portsmouth Literary map, which also features this poem:
Portsmouth Harbour
(at 8.45 p.m., 7th July 1971)
A Note to Vera
by Harry Haines
It is cool now, with a slight breeze
rippling the water.
I bring beer from the Lone Yachtsman
and I sit on a bench with your absence
as my companion.
I know you will be happy here
and that thought calms me.
So I am content to look
and take my fix on the future.
The sun goes down on the Solent,
a golden submarine submerging
to leave its wake trembling
in a path to another world
that could tempt a tourist dreamer
to walk his miracle across.
Faintly, beautiful in the distance,
a sad bugle sounds
to the lowering of flags:
an old sailor remembers
and spits the lump in his throat
into the dark gathering water.
The sun completes its stately descent
and the blushing complimented sky
fades slowly to twilight to beckon stars.
I finish my beer watching a small cruiser
sail on a light breeze towards a calm sea.