1 November 2022
Jeremy Duffield & Tuesday Shannon
Jeremy Duffield is a Derbyshire poet and playwright who has been writing since the mid 1970s.
His work has featured widely in magazines and anthologies and he has been successful in many competitions.
His poems have most recently been published in the Peterloo Competition Anthology, Staple, Poetry Nottingham and by Ragged Raven Press.
He has had two collections: Danced by the Light of the Moon (1994) and Oak Apples and Heavenly Kisses (2000).
He also facilitates poetry workshops and was a member of Inside Out – a collective of Nottingham-based writers who worked with prisoners at HMP Nottingham, and Open Doors at Sudbury Open Prison in Derbyshire.
His plays have been performed by the Pomegranate Youth Theatre in Chesterfield, Derbyshire. and his other interests include painting, walking, theatre and music.
FAMILY BUSINESS
The outside steps to the store room
are only a zigzag mark in brickwork now,
and there is no smell of brine
where sausage skins were left to soak.
I walk into the yard.
On the right is the bake-house.
My glasses steamed up on cold days
and I worked through finger smears,
jellied pies,
caught cockroaches,
had tea-breaks.
In the next room
Trevor took the end off his finger in the mincer;
Pop called him a twerp.
The end room is where we boiled hams,
chawls, black-puddings
in three great coppers.
The deep-freezers are empty shells,
only hinges in door-frames
where foot-thick doors once hung.
Reg would never have got out
had Pop not gone back after the telephone call.
Almost as cold as New Zealand lamb
Reg didn’t seem graetful,
just angry,
a string of expletives
as Pop rubbed his hands and shoulders, back and legs.
Reg laughed a funny laugh, then walked home.
‘The alcohol in his blood stream must have saved him’
Pop said.
How did so many beasts fit into this slaughter-house?
I take photographs of rusting hooks,
runnels in the floor,
brambles trailing through a broken window.
There was a scalding tank here,
brim-full of boiling water
where pigs’ heads bounced as I scraped
bristles from shoulders and flanks
leaving flesh as clean and fresh and pink
as a young girls.
My camera flashes and flashes and flashes.
How can walls this thick be bulldozed?
TUESDAY SHANNON
https://twitter.com/tuesdayshannon
from The Regulars
Tuesday Shannon
About Tuesday Shannon
Tuesday Shannon is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate at Nottingham Trent University. Her work has been featured in Soundswrite Press’s ‘Take Three: Volume One’, Left Lion, and others.
https://wildcourt.co.uk/new-work/two-poems-by-tuesday-shannon/
‘HOPE’
Between a boarded-up chippy and a boarded-up florist second- or third-hand fridges lean to attention. But there are no passers-by, no eyes to catch and tempt – just fallen leaves, empty buses, artificial light. In the shelter of a closed shop door a teenager tugs at his hoodie, lifts a cigarette with his left hand, shakes a cannister in his right. Across every shutter one word in thick black paint repeats like a mantra, or prayer. The streetlights splutter on.