Sophie Mayer

...which I preface by saying that, like Virginia Woolf, I feel that "as a woman, I have no country." On the other hand, I am grateful for the opportunities presented by a British passport, privilege that rests on the displacement and degradation of the rights of others. So my gratitude is mixed with guilt, and a fierce rage against borders and delimiting institutions of all kinds. And a rage against certain constructions of Englishness, whether rural nostalgia or shiny-shiny capitalist greed -- or even the separatist reconstructions of locality undertaken by Geoffrey Hill in Anglia and Ted Hughes in Yorkshire (once the kingdom of Elmet) in an attempt to claim some exclusive English indigeneity that ignores this island's constantly changing cultures and peoples. 

Yet writing about West Yorkshire was a pleasure, because it's a boundaryless edge. Despite being a metropolitan county, for me it's a wild place -- even in Leeds, where I encountered a different kind of wildness when my brother was a student there. The "golem of beer cans" is his. The workers' libraries (discovered in a compelling scene in Lynne Reid Banks' novel Path to the Silent Country, in which Charlotte Brontë's maid tells her that Jane Eyre has been bought for the local workers' library) are the first of several references to the Brontës, who appear in the poem as genii loci and historical individuals. The Hockney opera sets are exhibited at Salts Mill, part of the magic at this amazing former mill that is now a workplace for artists and craftspeople.

And -- on a visit to Saltaire -- I really did see a fairy at the top of the Shipley Glen tramway. So.

*

No Dragons but Fairies: West Yorkshire

I am not Masgwid Gloff, first king of Elmet
and I am not Elmet's last bard

I am not Leed's spirit of the blitz
nor a royalist, nor a great house.

Not a heritage railway
no model village drinking no beer

nor the stodge of Hovis
or its nostalgia, fake

as Cottingley fairies
as a postcard of Ilkley

but my fingers are caught in woollen mills
and my books come from workers' libraries

and I have long, dark bones
under eyes of pearl

and I have salted away Hockney's
starcast sets ("space,"

he says, "is more interesting to me
than time") for The Rake's Progress

I am a Moor, black beetle-browed and calling, calling
I am a golem of beer cans and spliff-ends

upsetting your census I am an anti-racist
protest and Tina's kids making Mischief Night

I am the undemographic fairy, green on green, coved by
Cloven Hoof Well in Shipley Glen and shimmering

with heathersun, and I am the will o' the wisp spirit
lit window at the Parsonage against the dark

some say: the three Fates, spinning their word-wheel
some say: at back of the North wind

here comes the girl and her dog
leading you past death into wildness

where there is no nation, no county, no names
only place

only those soft, imagined kingdoms
shaped by children in script so small

the page becomes a moorland, unbordered,
its weft and carboniferous

warp that calls for no passports, no dragons
and no crowns