Poetry Rocks!

Sorry, terrible pun I know, but I couldn’t resist. On Friday night at King’s Hall, Ilkley, Simon Armitage read his Stanza Stones poems for the first time, and very good they are too! These six short poems, all on the theme of water in its many forms and inspired by the local landscape, have been carved into rocks in the countryside for people to stumble upon. The locations were revealed on Friday, and are as follows:

Snow -Pule Hill Quarry, Marsden

Rain – Cows Mouth Quarry, Littleborough

Mist – Nab Hill, Oxenhope

Dew – Rivock Edge, Riddlesden

Puddle – Causey Paving, Ilkley Moor

Beck – Backstone Beck, Ilkley Moor.

I think that this whole project is a great idea, following in the footsteps of the prehistoric cup and ring stones on Ilkley Moor, and more recently the intriguing and romantic eighteenth and nineteenth century graffiti carved into many stones on the moors in the area. For the carvers of the mysterious cup and ring stones, the moor and the landscape was a sacred place, and for many today, ramblers and climbers, painters and poets, it still is, although many wouldn’t express it in that way. But it is a scared place, a place where many people who wouldn’t set foot in a church go to think, to contemplate, to take a little time out of the hectic mundane everyday and to marvel at the beauty and awesomeness of the land, something so much bigger, older, more powerful than ourselves. And I think that coming across one of Armitage’s poems whilst wandering in the great outdoors, would only enhance that experience, and perhaps lift the spirits on a rainy day or describe something that you have always known about the beauty of snow or mist, but have never quite been able to, or even tried to, put into words. I do understand that for some this is a desecration, vandalism, human intervention in a place that is made special by precisely the absence of man, but I think that as the poems age and weather, become encrusted with lichen and moss, they will become part of their environment. And perhaps over time the poet and the mason, the man who wrote the words and the woman who carved the stone, will be forgotten, and the Stanza Stones will, in many many years, be as mysterious and magical as the prehistoric carvings are to us today. They will show that the twenty first century was not all about industry, pollution, population explosion and urban living, but be a monument to those of us that love the land and the country and still believe in the power and magic of nature.