Article
Poetry Up Close: Liz Berry’s ‘Homing’
‘Consonants you could lick the coal from’
June 30, 2015
The repressed aspect of personal and linguistic identity is manifested in the idea that this identity is only allowed to escape ‘sometimes’, like a Freudian slip of the tongue, and solely in the warmth of the congenial or the familial social situation. Berry deftly interweaves an image of the Black Country and its epithets with the characteristics of its dialect: its ‘vowels ferrous as nails’ and ‘its consonants you could lick the coal from’, its ‘pits, / railways, factories thunking and clanging / the night shift’, all become beautifully edible to the poem’s speaker. The speaker’s mouth becomes ‘a blacksmith’s furnace’ in which the regional voice can be forged anew, using the raw material of language to reshape and reclaim home. Connected to this reappropriation of cultural identity is the empowering image of the bird, the symbol of flight and freedom, being sent from the roofs, ‘fluttering for home’.
Of course, not just any bird would do. In adherence with British working-class culture, Berry uses the image of the pigeon racing home to evoke the proud liberation of her native tongue. Read more about Berry and a selection of her poems here on Poetry International, thanks to our UK editors at the Poetry Society.
Jonas van de Poel is the current web/editorial intern of Poetry International. In addition to studying at the University of Amsterdam, he is a poet and co-founder of the Amsterdam Writers Guild.
Liz Berry (1980) was born in the Black Country, a region to the north and west of Birmingham which, during the Industrial Revolution, became heavily industrialized. This West Midland poet’s first collection of poetry, Black Books, was published this year, and is most notable for its vernacular diction. In a country where regional dialects are often considered ‘backwards’ and mocked, and where the Estuary English of Jamie Oliver and Ricky Gervais is becoming ever more dominant, a young poet’s proud reappropriation of the voice and language of her home stands out as a celebration of variety, and resistance against conformity.
Berry’s poem ‘Homing’ discusses this issue explicitly, describing the violently imposed loss of one’s regional accent – ‘the teacher’s ruler across your legs’. This hidden away accent has been kept ‘for years’ in a ‘box beneath the bed’, signifying the private homeliness and the locality of personal and linguistic identity. Striking is that classic image of the 19th-century’s working-class habitat: the ‘red brick / back-to-back’ house.The repressed aspect of personal and linguistic identity is manifested in the idea that this identity is only allowed to escape ‘sometimes’, like a Freudian slip of the tongue, and solely in the warmth of the congenial or the familial social situation. Berry deftly interweaves an image of the Black Country and its epithets with the characteristics of its dialect: its ‘vowels ferrous as nails’ and ‘its consonants you could lick the coal from’, its ‘pits, / railways, factories thunking and clanging / the night shift’, all become beautifully edible to the poem’s speaker. The speaker’s mouth becomes ‘a blacksmith’s furnace’ in which the regional voice can be forged anew, using the raw material of language to reshape and reclaim home. Connected to this reappropriation of cultural identity is the empowering image of the bird, the symbol of flight and freedom, being sent from the roofs, ‘fluttering for home’.
Of course, not just any bird would do. In adherence with British working-class culture, Berry uses the image of the pigeon racing home to evoke the proud liberation of her native tongue. Read more about Berry and a selection of her poems here on Poetry International, thanks to our UK editors at the Poetry Society.
Jonas van de Poel is the current web/editorial intern of Poetry International. In addition to studying at the University of Amsterdam, he is a poet and co-founder of the Amsterdam Writers Guild.
© Jonas van de Poel
Sponsors
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère