Our sweet matter to anti-matter the gilded cage gridded, blocks, contains epitome of class, pleasure and power
Always six paces behind, a life of service I brushed by them one east end afternoon As Charles and Nigella floated by
Like peacocks emerging from a stairwell Their expensive coats azure blue, bejewelled At a secret view of Conran’s new restaurant
I stood watching my artist friend imitate Chagall Stair painted for the decorative pleasure of diners Indian and Jewish colours swirling like feathers
A car waiting above to return her to a fake kitchen A fake marriage with fake lighting, fake cooking Performing normality in front of chauffer and chef
The ringmaster always in control, labour doesn’t work A Thatcherite generation child lost to trauma Washed up in a promotional video that became life
Decorous, dysfunctional, abused, depressed Then trapped in a paparazzi shot forever choked Mouth dripping chocolate like fake blood
This is a kind of auto-biography of myself and my hometown of Didcot where I lived for a good part of 30 years. The title is a reference to the love of country music that my family had instilled in me from a young age and the experience of hearing Dolly Parton at full volume drifting across the estate from the working-men’s club on a saturday night.
If I cannot get a publisher to take this chapbook length collection on I will try and publish as a Horsehoe Press pamphlet.
Potentially in future I would like to publish the poems alongside a sequence of photographs I took in 2011-12 for a multimedia project called TRACK which almost but not quite became a PHD in 2018…
If England was a target and you were looking at cross hairs In the centre of the cross hairs would probably be Didcot The most normal town in England according to the pollsters The 11th worst place to live according to crap towns
My home town, the town my family still live in, die in A town that should not really be there, a ghost town Only there because the residents of Abingdon and Oxford refused the nasty dirty mess that they called a railway
So Brunel bent the line through a village called Didcot They been taking other people’s shit there ever since First it was provisions for the railway and a huge depot Logistics was invented there to provide fodder for horses
Didcot has been a place to move stuff through and to ever since From the army barracks, to the brand new Tesco mega storerooms Where my family froze in huge freezers as warehouse operatives Work for people with nowhere to go or reaching the end of the line
It’s the town people joke about, Didcot Parkway, gets its mentions A place to glide through on the way to better destinations Poets and novelists mention it in passing never stopped there Never ventured off the trains to actually see it, a place holder
A place fit for commuters and immigrants, CHAVs and drug dealers No place that anybody wants to live in for long, or stay forever M parents grave is situated 500 yards from their council house Now partitioned and resold built on a prisoner of war camp.
Thousands of lifetimes wiped away now and brushed into the past Like the post-war immigrants who found a home there that could last From Poland and Italy, Germany, Slovakia and the death camps They preferred the dead centre of everything to anywhere else
They escaped the cross hairs and started again. Built new lives and blessed every day that was normal
Thrived and felt safe. Normal. Ignored. No longer a target. Dead centre.
I shall be reading from new Horseshoe Press pamphlet ‘Thames Valley Texas’ next Tuesday at the Organ Grinder on Open Books second birthday. Without the hard work of the T S Eliot of Bus Drivers there would be no Open Book so thank you Neil Fulwood here’s to the next two years…
Date for your diary: Tuesday 3rd October 2023, from 8pm. Open mic, headline sets from Shaun Belcher and Tony Challis; plus special appearances from some mystery guests. So head to the Overlook Hotel, er, I mean The Organ Grinder, Nottingham and join in the fun. Anyone missing out will be “corrected”.
One of the fabulous things about the modern poetry scene is the hatred of ‘self-publishing’ as somehow amateur or not professional…a opinion reinforced by those with most to lose i.e. the publishers.
GRASS CLOUDS contains everything I have written as ‘poetry’ since I arrived in Nottingham in 2002 so about 20 years worth
Contains 80 poems and some illustrations.
Includes the following pamphlets and projects:
Drifting Village Poems 2001-2011
Edwin Smith Commission 2014
Burning Books and Buying time 2017 – 2018
My Father’s Things (illustrated) 2019
At the Organ Grinder I shall be reading from the new volume ‘Substitute’ which I am working on now.
Shaun Belcher was born Oxford, England in 1959 and brought up on a down-land farm before moving to a council estate in the small town of Didcot in 1966 just as England won the world cup..
He studied fine art at Hornsey College of Art, London from 1979–81 where he sat under a tree with Adrian Mitchell.
Began writing poetry in the mid 1980s and subsequently has been published in a number of small magazines and a poem 'The Ice Horses' was used as the title of the Second Shore Poets Anthology in 1996.(Scottish Cultural Press).
He now lives in Nottingham, England after two years in Edinburgh studying folk culture and several years in the city of expiring dreams working as a minion at the University of Oxford.
He is currently enjoying retirement from 20 years of teaching and hopes to write something on a regular basis again. He has been involved in various literary projects including delivering creative writing workshops in Nottingham prison for the ‘Inside Out’ project.
He supports Arsenal football club.
Favourite colours therefore red and green like his politics.
We have not won the world cup again since 1966 and Shaun Belcher is not as famous as Simon Armitage although his songs are better.