Anne Caldwell | United Kingdom

Slow Train North

Alice leaves King’s Cross and loses her

mobile signal. She sits in the quiet

coach as it rumbles through the

hinterlands of the capital. Flats and

terraced rows give way to avenues,

semis with clipped privet. Here’s the

Lincolnshire flatlands – big skies, reed

beds, wild ducks. Alice listens to the

person opposite breathing, to the

rhythm of the diesel engine and the

whirr of an old heater in the carriage.

Her coat’s heavy with it. There’s her

reflection, bunched up like the March

Hare caught by headlights somewhere

in The Wolds. There’s the warmth of

her face against glass. The Wash sprays

salt through an open window, and that

pull north is stronger than ever. The

Pole’s magnetic embrace.Maybe she’ll cradle a block of ice and

rip the skin off her fingertips. But right

now, she’s reading Louis MacNeice and

this is the ‘Slow Movement’: the pause

between opening and closing, the

allegro and appassionato. This is where

she sits. Between the city and the

icebergs, the heat and that stretch of

winter. No sun for three months. She’s

just passing, finding joy in the view

from the window: wetlands alive with

trout, fireflies dancing, rookeries

chattering and their offspring plump

with love.

Anne Caldwell. Prose poem from her

new collection, Alice and the North

(Valley Press) November 2020

Ferns and Voles

Alice doesn’t have a looking-glass but
there’s   a   full-length    mirror   in her
mother’s room and a cat that refuses to
smile.  She’s  five and the world’s full of
wonder. She makes rose petal tea for
her dolls, rabbit and stuffed tiger. Alice
has a den   in   the bottom of her
wardrobe that smells of  plimsolls. She
visits a treehouse at Sarah’s in a   crack
willow where the branches fork and the
sky falls in. Henny Penny run, run!

When it snows,  Alice burrows in   drifts
like   a vole and the world is crystalline
and   mauve. Ice   ferns her   bedroom
window and she doesn’t speak for days.
She turns six and a baby sister appears.
Alice makes a new den in the garage
from two deckchairs,   a broom and a
grey felt blanket. She steals a packet of
her sister’s Farley’s rusks and eats them
out there on the concrete floor.

A chest freezer full of lamb  carcasses
and frozen veg hums in the corner.
Somewhere in the house, her father is
curled up   like   a caterpillar   in an
armchair, listening to Bach, his   head
wreathed in smoke.

Anne Caldwell – Prose Poem from her
new collection, ‘Alice and the North’
(Valley Press November 2020)

Curriculum Vitae Anne Caldwell