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Thames Valley Texas
Thames Valley Texas is a new project highlighting the multi-faceted work of former country star/fine artist/poet and outsider artist Shaun Belcher a.k.a. Trailer Star. Never has an artistic practice broken down fences on the U.K. range with such gay abandon…and curiouser than Alice.It all connects ..no really..
This poem’s got the lot….eco critical content, poet-historical referencing…
the notes to a John Lucas book on Goldsmith and hell it is even place-centred too……
The Drifting Village
Deep in the sleet
Forward slanted, rimed with ice
the cottage, wrecked and the tree
catching a fire on a winter’s eve
Stars and a dance of the dead
across hills and exotic trees
brought in from ships at Tilbury
and carted to the master’s door
The crackle of horsehair chairs
and splintered bed timbers collapsing
All that remained of Bab
and what Bab held dear.
Like a frail cross the tree smouldered
then burnt to the ground
reminding the assembled multitude
of their right and true position
Then, heads bowed on her behalf,
with a tear here and there
At her body still warm in the ground
they felt the village tug one last time
slipping from their fingers
Like the mooring ropes a river away
being loosed from the India Docks
as particles of spice drifted loose
from briny planks fell into eyes
She had held that village like a hulk
in its original berth.
Stopped it sliding up from the floodplain
to the master’s new dock on the hill.
Now a three century gap gone
the same village a berth for commuters
watches as the water floods once more
as if it had found its true course
All the spilt contents bobbing on a sea of silt
the mobiles, the dvds, the trash of the eastern shore
All cascading just like that submerging barque
A hundred years before slid back to the river plain
And settles into its original image
marking out her last resting place like a chalky line
a scuzz of empire flashing like flags on the mud
her tree’s new roots a catchment of time.
Barbara Wyatt resident of Nuneham Courtney village refused to leave her tree when the Harcourt family moved the village
for landscape improvements. It is probable that Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’ was based on this village. She was tolerated as a ‘talking point’.In 2007 the new village (now a commuter village near Oxford) was flooded as a result of a local farmer’s mistaken attempt to alter a drainage pattern.
