ADAM HANSEN is Senior Lecturer in English at Northumbria University. He has published widely on early modern culture in its own time and in later appropriations. He has also been publishing poetry for more than 10 years, with work featuring in Oxford Poets: An Anthology, edited by David Constantine and Bernard O’Donoghue (Carcanet, 2007), BBC Radio 3’s Words and Music(2010), the London-based contemporary poetry magazine inc. (2012), and The Tangerine(Belfast, 2016).
poetry
Widdop Road
Adam Hansen, Northumbria University
for Joe, August 2018
Soaking in sunshine all summer, the hills
had near forgotten what to make of rain
so on that day hail hit the drum-tight skin
they thrummed in newly-minted green, growing
greener and larger than memory, throwing
everything out of perspective –
unmoored,
the windmills and the manky caravans,
the chapel, school, and back-to-backs clung on,
livestock flew to the gap-toothed wet stone walls,
slack wires tuned up, taut, the tops ballooning
to move high heavens and make low clouds bow,
and with the steeps convexing, cloughs hillocked,
parched springs fountained, and stacks fireworked anew
as waters ran from sky to swell and back
again to shake the ghosts of England loose.
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