Poetry

Berlie reading her poem ‘My Sparrow Gran’ on the BBC website

The BBC’s Learning Zone website features a short video of Berlie reading her poem ‘My Sparrow Gran’ and explaining a bit about it. Click here to view (works in the UK only).

I love writing poetry and I have many poems published in anthologies edited by John Foster, David Orme, Gillian Clarke and others. I’m very grateful to John Foster in particular, who published so many of my poems that I was able to put them all together in a collection! (Walking on Air). (A poetry anthology is a book of poems by different authors; a collection is all the work of one author).

The Forsaken Merman and Other Story Poems (an anthology)
illustrated by Nick Maland
Hodder Wayland 2002

Sadly, this is now out of print.

Riddle Trail

Step into the garden of surprise.
First find the place where two bright eyes
Reflect the movement of trees and skies.

An iron rose, half-open gates,
Show where a secret garden waits.

Down in the woodland of whispering green
A quiet moment to sit and dream

Now follow a dinosaur, steady and slow
To a tree that lived millions of years ago.

Mice and birds and squirrels throng
Where the spirit of nature pipes his song

Find a circle of stone opened up to the stars,
Where huge animals lived in a cage without bars.

Summer in winter, the world in one place
Outside is inside the palace of glass.

Step your way to the great stone arch
Where the riddle circle ends and starts

This was created for the Sheffield Botanical Gardens.

The series of riddles consists of eight pieces of artwork, starting and finishing at the Gatehouse. I wrote the riddles in 1999 and the trail was completed and opened in 2005. I am very disappointed that the Botanical Gardens has refused to acknowledge the artists in any formal way, except on a leaflet, so here are the names of the artists:

Chris Campbell: Dinosaur Footprints
Bryan Frisby, Sue Jenner: Timber Bench
Nick Hunter: carving on bench
Tracey Hayes: Ceramic Leaves
Celia Kilner: carved stone lettering
David Mayne: Bear sculpture
Jez Thompson: glass sculpture
Corale Turpin: mosaic

Sheffield Arts asked me to write a poem to be engraved into the pavement on the Moor, a pedestrianised shopping area. It’s got bits of chewing gum stuck to it now!

This is what it says:

Here lies
a city’s heart.
There in her hills lie
her green bones, quiet under
the clutter of houses and streets.
And there in her rivers run veins
that long ago powered her mills.
Her long limbs reach to the
moors. But here, here
lies her throbbing
heart.

B.D.

Photograph: Dave Ball © copyright Sheffield Hallam University

Out of print (these are my own collections):

Big Slimy Fat Black Slugs, Nelson
Walking on Air, illustrated by Janna Doherty. Collins
Walking on Air, illustrated by Kevin Kimber. Hodder