An interview for Cheltenham Poetry Festival

Here's an interview conducted a few weeks before The Soil Never Sleeps came out for Cheltenham Poetry Festival, at which I will be reading in April, alongside Jonathan Davidson. So much has happened since the book came out, I'd all but forgotten that this had happened...

Here’s the full text of the interview, if you’d prefer not to follow the link to Facebook…

I take the bus, but Coopers Hill is closed on the road between Cheltenham and Stroud so the bus takes a detour. I am late arriving.

He was, he admits, just beginning to wonder where I was. We talk about the weather. It is, in fact, the perfect introduction to a discussing a book about farming, a work that is both poetry and journalism, a book in which landscape and weather feature as characters as much as people and animals; a book that has captured me entirely, an evocation of a way of life not just a job, as much about the land, it’s sometimes parlous condition, as the people who endure it.

So why this book, why now?

He smiles. ‘That’s an easy one: it was a commission from the pasture-fed livestock association.’

Who do not sound like a group that one would automatically associate with hiring a poet.

‘Well, I knew the chairman of the association and he came up to me in one of the bars in Stroud and asked me if I would be up for it.’

It really was that simple. ‘Four farmers were found who willing to put up with me.’ Which is in itself a interesting fact. Farmers willing to take a poet observer into their homes, their lives to say... what, exactly.

There was no ‘agenda’ to the book as such – the commission was to write poetry or prose- in celebration of the relationship of man, animal and landscape. As it turned out it was an interesting year to be doing it, with the Brexit vote coming in the middle.. ‘That was just a fortuitous circumstance,’ he smiles and pauses. And were the farmers all Brexiteers, I wonder. ‘By no means. Some for, some against, just like the rest of the country.

This leads me to ask whether in the year it took to research Adam changed his mind about anything – I say this having read beforehand that he has always been vegetarian. ‘And I still am, but there’s a balance...’

He tails off. That word balance comes up a lot in the poems, I say.

‘It does. It’s crucial.’

There is a sequence of poems about an Abattoir, was that part of the balance? ‘Actually it was part of the commission. It was suggested I visit one to and I agreed that it would be worth doing. I didn’t go as far as seeing anything killed, but it was a strange enough experience.’

I ask how the book was actually made – I mean the process of writing, of formulating the poems, the facts, the experiences. Does he write poems, or the draft of poems at the moment of observation?

‘ No. The book took shape in note form at the time of my visits – I filled up a pile of moleskin pads.

All of that acts as a trigger for the poems.’ So six months went by, more or less before a poem found its way to the page.

The book wrote itself almost in reverse, he says, ‘Because I started writing properly only in the winter.’

I ask about the sequence of the poems, the sections are labelled after the seasons but are out of sequence: Spring, Autumn, Winter, Summer.

He says that this was more to do with the time frame in which he visited the various farms: ‘The last poem I wrote was the spring poem – I found some stuff on a recording none of which was written down in notebooks.’ So the sequence of the book is not the sequence in which he visited the farms.

The feel for the landscape – where does that come from? He is not looking at me as he answers, and I don’t mean just physically – it is as if he is seeing someone else, some other time, it is a noticeable change. So much so that I wonder if I have said something wrong. But he says; ‘ I grew up with my mother. We travelled a lot. I followed her when I could. Cumbria, the North Country... Do you know my mother’s writing?’

Frances Horovitz was once described as a poet ‘Not of the age, but of the earth,’ so I suppose I should not be surprised that she has influenced her son so much. I nod merely, but I wonder if he sees, he is quite lost in the past for a few moments. Clearly, the memory, the influence, the love was profound. I feel as if I have witnessed something intimate and private and wondered even if I should write about it, but decided yes, it is obviously such a strong link to his poetry that it deserves a place.

He changes tack slightly, drawing us back to the present.

‘Did you know that Oxford children dictionary excised several hundred nature words’. I didn’t know that. ‘Civilisation has shifted our perception of land and weather... I was saying to a friend just a few days ago, before this,’ he indicates the outside world with its snow and ice-bound streets, ‘that I can smell the snow coming. She, a London girl, was surprised. Didn’t think such a thing was possible.’

If ask him if he was to get just one thing from this collection what would it be? ‘That sense of balance. The fact that things are not as they seem.’

Would it be fair to say most of the poems are observational not allegorical. He agrees. ‘Yes. It’s quite direct, but there are some things buried in there. if you care to find them.

And believe me, you should care: there is so much in this collection that is good and beyond good that it is hard to know where to begin. From the simple observation: ‘ Skirrid sucks cloud into itself/ as the first rains of Autumn sing...’ To ‘Nothing but a weasel/ which stirs red lightening in the hollow lane..’

I ask about the painter Samuel palmer, who gets a mention in the book. ’One of the farms was physically where he painted and you can still see the same streams, the landscape unchanged.’ I noted a reference to Blake as well, does this mean that Adam would consider himself a Romantic? He considers this for a while (he is, I have noticed by now, never swift and glib in his answers. Always thoughtful and considered.) ‘No,’ he says in the end. ‘And certainly not after this. There are hard truths out there. Especially in the abattoir. There is a poem about a calf, followed immediately by the one about the slaughterhouse. There is no sentimentality in farming.’

But, I say, it is moving and powerful in a way that grasps the realities without being brutal. I think there is an echo of the Romantic about the poetry nonetheless. He smiles again and says simply,’ Thank you.’

I wonder if the year had changed him at all, in any way. He smiles ‘It made me fitter.’ All that walking and being outdoors.

As a poet... he trails off. ‘It’s a semi-journalistic book. Journalism has been done down in recent years. The arts pages are disappearing in local newspapers. But journalism itself is still so very important.’

Who would you aim this book at? ‘One of the exciting things is that farmers themselves after initial scepticism became enthusiastic. I did the OFC conference as resident poet, the farmers were sort of saying what the bloody hell do we need a poet for - but I read a poem at the end to a really good reception. I think they got it.’

The publishers are keen on taking it to schools. ‘I love reading aloud so I want to take it on the road. All my poems are meant to be read aloud’. And hopefully awaken a discussion on the contents as well. ‘It’s something children should be aware of, don’t you think? Farming, where food comes from, how it is grown.’

Our time is up, we shake hands and I go to find my bus in the bitter cold. Half way home the bus breaks down and I sit for half an hour in the frozen landscape, listening to the very British understated complaining. On my left there is a snow covered field, a farmer towing a trailer of hay for his snow-bound sheep and I think of a line from the poem that stands first and alone in Adam’s book. It is called ‘I Believed I Understood the Land.’ The line is this: ‘ I would not dare,/ now, to say I knew anything of land. It has no master;/ only people who strive to learn and understand...’

But thanks to this masterly work, I believe I have understood a little more, at least.

Martin Lytton is the author of Enclosure - a new drama running at The Everyman Cheltenham from April 1