Lost City: From Detroit to Birmingham

Ten years ago I came across some haunting photographs of abandonment and ruin in Detroit. These were photos of unpeopled landscapes: schools, libraries, dentists, police stations, factories, theatres and ballrooms, all emptied out, as if some invisible apocalypse had breathed through the city. They were melancholy, beautiful in a ruined kind of way. It was the silence they evoked that got me writing.

I was interested in the absence present in the images – not so much what was there but what wasn’t. Every photograph seemed to be covered in fingerprints: scattered mugshots on the police station floor, the empty dentist chair poised at just the right angle for a person to slide out, the biology dummy on the wooden block in the school science lab. There was no-one to be seen, yet people were tangible by what they had left behind.

In December 2017, I sent six poems to The Emma Press during a submission window for poetry pamphlets. Lost City was chosen as an Emma Press pick. By 2019, I had 20 or so poems to work with. Some of those were strays that I quite liked and hoped to shoehorn in, but Emma’s eagle eye soon weeded them out. A stronger thread and direction emerged. 

Emma’s first main edit was a revelation and a release, she asked questions of tone, content, line endings, sense, how pieces were linked, came together, diverged. These gentle but forensic questions opened up new territory, I began to experiment, move away from early drafts, try out new moods, dropped linearity. It was exciting to have an editor committed to the work but willing to push me to make it sharper, bring it more into focus. 

‘The Tour Guide takes a Boat Trip’ was in my first draft. Emma asked me to consider a series of points – like, ‘what is the “cold spillage’’?’ and ‘Can you explain the sense here?’. The resultant poem, ’Elephant Tenderness’, that found its way into the finished collection is very different, but it grew from that poking and questioning.

It’s fascinating to me how a poem can be transformed/filleted with the intervention of pertinent questions and some spaciousness in which to experiment.

I’ve been studying Buddhism over the last ten years too. One of its central tenets is that change, from the molecular to the stratospheric, is inevitable. I wanted to explore the notion of impermanence, the rising up and falling away of all things. Impermanence means loss, as well as renewal and hope. The notion fits perfectly into my poetry terrain. I’m interested in loss, in the tenderness and sadness around it how we suffer and heal. How we connect to ourselves, others and the world around us.

As I was writing Lost City, I was aware of a strong feeling of helplessness and revulsion around the damage the Trump administration was wreaking on America and the world. It made me reflect on the narcissism of all toxic political leaders, how their personal agendas and need for adulation cause deep and lasting harm. 

I finished the manuscript during the pandemic, when our own cities became ghostly. Birmingham fell silent between the cranes and canals, everyday had the feel of a late Sunday afternoon when tourists and shoppers drift away. 

A final poem from the collection:

Writing the sequence using various voices felt like writing on a big, open canvas which allowed me the opportunity to explore a wide range of emotional states in relation to living with trauma: powerlessness, hate, love, shame, gratitude, disgust, joy – which I simply wouldn’t have been able to summon without recourse to imagined back stories.

Buy Lost City.

[Title image from Flickr Commons, from a book called The Making of Birmingham, by Robert Dent, pub. 1894. Digitised by the British Library.]