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Best Famous Barry Tebb Poems

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Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

My Perfect Rose

 At ten she came to me, three years ago,

There was ‘something between us’ even then;

Watching her write like Eliot every day,

Turn prose into haiku in ten minutes flat,

Write a poem in Greek three weeks from learning the alphabet;

Then translate it as ‘Sun on a tomb, gold place, small sacred horse’.

I never got over having her in the room, though

Every day she was impossible in a new way,

Stamping her foot like a naughty Enid Blyton child,

Shouting "Poets don’t do arithmetic!"

Or drawing caricatures of me in her book.

Then there were the ‘moments of vision’, her eyes

Dissolving the blank walls and made-up faces,

Genius painfully going through her paces,

The skull she drew, the withered chrysanthemum

And scarlet rose, ‘Descensus averno’, like Virgil,

I supposed.

Now three years later, in nylons and tight skirt,

She returns from grammar school to make a chaos of my room;

Plaiting a rose in her hair, I remember the words of her poem -

‘For love is wrong/in word, in deed/But you will be mine’

And now her promise to come the last two days of term,

"But not tell them", the diamond bomb exploding

In her eyes, the key left ‘Accidentally’ on my desk

And the faint surprise.


Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

To The Sound Of Violins

 Give me life at its most garish

Friday night in the Square, pink sequins dazzle

And dance on clubbers bare to the midriff

Young men in crisp shirts and pressed pants

‘Dress code smart’ gyrate to ‘Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb’

And sing along its lyrics to the throng of which I’m one

My shorts, shoulder bag and white beard

Making me stand out in the teeming swarm

Of teens and twenties this foetid Friday night

On my way from the ward where our son paces

And fulminates I throw myself into the drowning

Tide of Friday to be rescued by sheer normality.

The mill girl with her mates asks anxiously

"Are you on your own? Come and join us

What’s your name?" Age has driven my shyness away 

As I join the crowd beneath the turning purple screens 

Bannered ‘****** lasts for ever’ and sip unending 

Halves of bitter, as I circulate among the crowd, 

Being complete in itself and out for a good night out,

A relief from factory, shop floor and market stall

Running from the reality of the ward where my son 

Pounds the ledge with his fist and seems out to blast

My very existence with words like bullets.

The need to anaesthetise the pain resurfaces 

Again and again. In Leeds City Square where 

Pugin’s church, the Black Prince and the Central Post Office

In its Edwardian grandeur are startled by the arching spumes

Or white water fountains and the steel barricades of Novotel

Rise from the ruins of a sixties office block.

I hurry past and join Boar Lane’s Friday crew

From Keighley and Dewsbury’s mills, hesitating

At the thought of being told I’m past my 

Sell-by-date and turned away by the West Indian

Bouncers, black-suited and city-council badged

Who checked my bag but smiled at ‘The Lights of 

Leeds’ and ‘Poets of Our Time’ tucked away as carefully as condoms-

Was it guns or drugs they were after

I wondered as I crossed the bare boards to the bar.

I stayed near the fruit machine which no-one played,

Where the crowd was thickest, the noise drowned out the pain

‘Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb’ the chorus rang

The girls joined in but the young men knew 

The words no more than me. Dancing as we knew it 

In the sixties has gone, you do your own thing

And follow the beat, hampered by my bag

I just kept going, letting the music and the crowd

Hold me, my camera eye moving in search, in search…

What I’m searching for I don’t know

Searching’s a way of life that has to grow

"All of us who are patients here are searchers after truth"

My son kept saying, his legs shaking from the side effects

Of God-knows- what, pacing the tiny ward kitchen cum smoking room,

Denouncing his ‘illegal section’ and ‘poisonous medication’

To an audience of one.

The prospect of TV, Seroxat and Diazepan fazed me:

I was beyond unravelling Meltzer on differentiation 

Of self and object or Rosine Josef Perelberg on ‘Dreaming and Thinking’

Or even the simpler ‘Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States’ 

So I went out with West Yorkshire on a Friday night.

Nothing dramatic happened; perhaps I’m a little too used

To acute wards or worse where chairs fly across rooms,

Windows disintegrate and double doors are triple locked

And every nurse carries a white panic button and black pager

To pinpoint the moment’s crisis. Normality was a bit of adrenaline,

A wild therapy that drew me in, sanity had won the night.

"Are you on your own, love? Come and join us"

People kept asking if I was alright and why 

I had that damned great shoulder bag. I was introduced

To three young men about to tie the knot, a handsome lothario

In his midforties winked at me constantly,

Dancing with practised ease with sixteen year olds

Who all seemed to know him and determined to show him.

Three hours passed in as many minutes and then the crowds

Disappeared to catch the last bus home. The young aren’t 

As black as they are painted, one I danced with reminded me

Of how Margaret would have been at sixteen

With straw gold hair Yeats would have immortalised.

People seemed to guess I was haunted by an inner demon

I’d tried to leave in the raftered lofts of City Square

But failed to. Girls from sixteen to twenty six kept grabbing me

And making me dance and I found my teenage inhibitions

Gone at sixty-one and wildly gyrated to ‘Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb’

Egged on by the throng by the fruit machine and continuous

Thumbs-up signs from passing men. I had to forgo

A cheerful group of Aussies were intent on taking me clubbing

"I’d get killed or turned into a pumpkin

If I get home after midnight" I quipped to their delight

But being there had somehow put things right.
Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

Sorry I Missed You

 (or ‘Huddersfield the Second Poetry Capital of England Re-visited’)



What was it Janice Simmons said to me as James lay dying in Ireland?

“Phone Peter Pegnall in Leeds, an ex-pupil of Jimmy’s. He’s organising

A benefit reading, he’d love to hear from you and have your help.”



‘Like hell he would’ I thought but I phoned him all the same

At his converted farmhouse at Barswill, a Lecturer in Creative Writing

At the uni. But what’s he written, I wondered, apart from his CV?



“Well I am organising a reading but only for the big people, you understand,

Hardman, Harrison, Doughty, Duhig, Basher O’Brien, you know the kind,

The ones that count, the ones I owe my job to.”

We nattered on and on until by way of adieu I read the final couplet

Of my Goodbye poem, the lines about ‘One Leeds Jimmy who could fix the world’s.

Duhigs once and for all/Write them into the ground and still have a hundred

Lyrics in his quiver.’



Pete Stifled a cough which dipped into a gurgle and sank into a mire

Of strangulated affect which almost became a convulsion until finally

He shrieked, “I have to go, the cat’s under the Christmas tree, ripping

Open all the presents, the central heating boiler’s on the blink,

The house is on fucking fire!”



So I was left with the offer of being raffle-ticket tout as a special favour,

Some recompense for giving over two entire newsletters to Jimmy’s work:

The words of the letter before his stroke still burned. “I don’t know why

They omitted me, Armitage and Harrison were my best mates once. You and I

Must meet.”



A whole year’s silence until the card with its cryptic message

‘Jimmy’s recovering slowly but better than expected’.



I never heard from Pegnall about the reading, the pamphlets he asked for

Went unacknowledged. Whalebone, the fellow-tutor he commended, also stayed silent.

Had the event been cancelled? Happening to be in Huddersfield on Good Friday

I staggered up three flights of stone steps in the Byram Arcade to the Poetry Business

Where, next to the ‘closed’ sign an out-of-date poster announced the reading in Leeds

At a date long gone.



I peered through the slats at empty desks, at brimming racks of books,

At overflowing bin-bags and the yellowing poster. Desperately I tried to remember

What Janice had said. “We were sat up in bed, planning to take the children

For a walk when Jimmy stopped looking at me, the pupils of his eyes rolled sideways,

His head lolled and he keeled over.”

The title of the reading was from Jimmy’s best collection

‘With Energy To Burn’

with energy to burn.
Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

Incompatabilities

 For Brenda Williams



La lune diminue; divin septembre.

Divine September the moon wanes.

 Pierre Jean Jouve



Themes for poems and the detritus of dreams coalesce:

This is one September I shall not forget.



The grammar-school caretaker always had the boards re-blacked

And the floors waxed, but I never shone.

The stripes of the red and black blazer

Were prison-grey. You could never see things that way:

Your home had broken windows to the street.

You had the mortification of lice in your hair

While I had the choice of Brylcreem or orange pomade.





Four children, an alcoholic father and

An Irish immigrant mother. Failure’s metaphor.

I did not make it like Alan Bennett,

Who still sends funny postcards

About our Leeds childhood.

Of your’s, you could never speak

And found my nostalgia

Wholly inappropriate.



Forgetting your glasses for the eleven plus,

No money for the uniform for the pass at thirteen.

It wasn’t - as I imagined - shame that kept you from telling

But fear of the consequences for your mother

Had you sobbed the night’s terrors

Of your father’s drunken homecomings,

Your mother sat with the door open

In all weathers while you, the oldest,

Waited with her, perhaps

Something might have been done.



He never missed a day’s work digging graves,

Boasting he could do a six-footer

Single-handed in two hours flat.

That hackneyed phrase

‘He drank all his wages’

Doesn’t convey his nightly rages

The flow of obscenities about menstruation

While the three younger ones were in bed

And you waited with your mother

To walk the streets of Seacroft.

“Your father murdered your mother”

As Auntie Margaret said,

Should a witness

Need indicting.



Your mother’s growing cancer went diagnosed, but unremarked

Until the final days

She was too busy auxiliary nursing

Or working in the Lakeside Caf?.

It was her wages that put bread and jam

And baked beans into your stomachs.



Her final hospitalisation

Was the arena for your father’s last rage

Her fare interfering with the night’s drinking;



He fought in the Burma Campaign but won no medals.

Some kind of psychiatric discharge- ‘paranoia’

Lurked in his papers. The madness went undiagnosed

Until his sixtieth birthday. You never let me meet him

Even after our divorce.



In the end you took me on a visit with the children.

A neat flat with photographs of grandchildren,

Stacks of wood for the stove, washing hung precisely

In the kitchen, a Sunday suit in the wardrobe.

An unwrinkling of smiles, the hard handshake

Of work-roughened hands.



One night he smashed up the tidy flat.

The TV screen was powder

The clock ticked on the neat lawn

‘Murder in Seacroft Hospital’

Emblazoned on the kitchen wall.



I went with you and your sister in her car to Roundhay Wing.

Your sister had to leave for work or sleep

You had to back to meet the children from school.

For Ward 42 it wasn’t an especially difficult admission.

My first lesson: I shut one set of firedoors while the charge nurse

Bolted the other but after five minutes his revolt

Was over and he signed the paper.



The nurse on nights had a sociology degree

And an interest in borderline schizophrenia.

After lightsout we chatted about Kohut and Kernberg

And Melanie Klein. Your father was occasionally truculent,

Barricading himself in on one home leave. Nothing out of the way

For a case of that kind. The old ladies on the estate sighed,

Single men were very scarce. Always a gentleman, tipping

His cap to the ladies.

There seems to be objections in the family to poetry

Or at least to the kind that actually speaks

And fails to lie down quietly on command.

Yours seems to have set mine alight-

I must get something right.
Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

Letters To Friends

 I


Eddie Linden

Dear Eddie we’ve not met

Except upon the written page 

And at your age the wonder 

Is that you write at all

When so many have gone under 

Or been split asunder by narcissistic humours

Blunder following blunder

Barker and Graham, godfathering my verse

Bearing me cloud-handed to Haworth moor

From my chained metropolitan moorings,

O hyaline March morning with Leeds

At its thrusting best, the thirsty beasts

Of night quenched as the furnaces

Of Hunslet where Hudswell Clarke’s locos

Rust in their skeletal sheds, rails skewed

To graveyards platforms and now instead

Skyscrapers circle the city, cranes, aeroplanes,

Electric trains but even they cannot hinder

Branches bursting with semen

Seraphic cloud sanctuaries shunting

Us homeward to the beckoning moors.

II

Brenda Williams

Leeds voices soothe the turbulence

‘Ey’ ‘sithee’ and ‘love’, lastingly lilt

From cradle to grave, from backstreet

On the social, our son, beat his way

To Eton, Balliol, to Calcatta’s Shantiniketan

And all the way back to a locked ward.

While I in the meantime fondly fiddled 

With rhyme and unreason, publishing pamphlets

And Leeds Poetry Weekly while under the bane

Of his tragic illness, poet and mother,

You were driven from pillar to post

By the taunting yobbery of your family

And the crass insensitivity of wild therapy

To the smoking dark of despair,

Locked in your flat in the Abbey Road

With seven cats and poetry.

O stop and strop your bladed darkness

On the rock of ages while plangent tollings

Mock your cradled rockings, knock by knock.



III

Debjani Chatterjee

In these doom-laden days

You are steady as a pilot nursing tired ships homeward

Through churning seas

Where grey gulls scream

Forlornly and for ever.

I am the red-neck,

Bear-headed blaster

Shifting sheer rock

To rape the ore of poetry’s plunder

Or bulldozing trees to glean mines of silver

While you sail serenely onward 

Ever the diplomat’s daughter

Toujours de la politesse.

IV

Daisy Abey

Daisy, dearest of all, safest

And kindest, watcher and warner

Of chaotic corners looming

Round poetry’s boomerang bends

I owe you most a letter

While you are here beside me

Patient as a miller waiting on wind

To drive the great sails

Through summer. 

When the muse takes over

I am snatched from order and duty

Blowing routine into a riot of going

And coming, blind, backwards, tip

Over ****, sea waves crashing in suburbia,

Saturnalia in Sutton, headlines of mad poet

Striding naked over moors, roaring

"I am here I am waiting".

V

Jeremy Reed

Niagaras of letters on pink sheets

In sheaths of silver envelopes

Mutually exchanged. I open your missives

Like undressing a girl in my teens

Undoing the flap like a recalcitrant

Bra strap, the letters stiff as nipples

While I stroke the creviced folds

Of amber and mauve and lick

As I stick stamps like the ********

Of a reluctant virgin, urgent for

Defloration and the pulse of ******.


Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

A Hope For Poetry: Remembering The Sixties

 There was a hope for poetry in the sixties

And for education and society, teachers free

To do as they wanted: I could and did teach

Poetry and art all day and little else -

That was my way.



I threw rainbows against the classroom walls,

Gold and silver dragons in the corridors and

Halls; the children’s eyes were full of stars;

I taught the alphabet in Greek and spoke of

Peace and war in Vietnam, of birth and sex and

Death and immortality - the essences of lyric poetry;

Richards and Ogden on ‘The Meaning of Meaning’,

Schopenhauer on sadness, Nietzsche and Lawrence on

Civilisation and Plato on the Theory of Forms;

I read aloud ‘The Rainbow’ and the children drew

The waterfall with Gudrun bathing, I showed

Them Gauguin and Fra Angelico in gold and a film

On painting from life, and the nude girls

Bothered no-one.



It was the Sixties -

Art was life and life was art and in the

Staff-room we talked of poetry and politics

And passionately I argued with John. a clinical

Psychologist, on Freud and Jung; Anne, at forty

One, wanted to be sterilised and amazingly asked

My advice but that was how it was then: Dianne

Went off to join weekly rep at Brighton, Dave

Clark had given up law to teach a ‘D’ stream in the

Inner city. I was more lucky and had the brightest

Children - Sheila Pritchard my genius child-poet with

Her roguish eye and high bright voice, drawing skulls

In Avernus and burning white chrysanthemums, teasing me

With her long legs and gold salmon-flecked eyes.



It was a surprise when I made it into Penguin Books;

Michael Horovitz busy then as now and madly idealistic

As me; getting ready for the Albert Hall jamboree,

The rainbow bomb of peace and poetry.
Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

Infamous Poet

 I never did fit in – at six or sixty one –

I stand out in a crowd, too young or old

And gather pity like a shroud. "Is that real silk?"

A teenager inquired. "As real as Oxfam ever is

For one pound fifty." The vast ballroom was growing misty

And blurred with alcohol I’ve never had the taste for.

"**** off" a forty-plus dyed blonde said half in jest.

So I chose the only Asian girl in Squares with hair like jet

And danced with her five minutes centre stage –

I’ve lost all inhibitions in old age. A Malaysian architecture

Student invited me to sit and get my breath back

"Le Corbusier described a house as a machine for living in,"

I quipped; she slipped a smile and sipped her drink and said

"I love Leeds and its people; in seven years I’ve never 

Heard a single racist comment, whatever the papers say"

Malaysian girls are rightly known for their sensual beauty

But I made my pitiful excuses and slipped away.

I knew I couldn’t make it, couldn’t even fake it

With all this damned depression in the way.

Leeds boys are always friendlier than the girls,

They see themselves grown older in my years

And push the girls towards me with a glance

"Go and give the poor old man a dance!"

And dance I do and show my poems around

Like calling cards and jot lines on my palms.

Reading Lacan into the night I thought things through

But somehow none of them was half as good as you.
Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

Apologies For Absence

 Sorry, Neil Oram (with an orange in my pocket)

I can’t make ,your loch-side commune by bonny Drummadrochit.



Sorry Brenda Williams, I can’t share your park bench protest near the Royal Free

At sixty I need a fire and slippers, -4 outside just isn’t me.



Sorry, Chris Torrance, I can’t make your Welsh eyrie

Just spelling Gymmercher Isaf Pontneathvaughan quite fazes me.



Sorry, Seamus Famous, your hide away in Dublin Bay

No doubt is bloody grand but I can’t face the journey to a far off foreign land.



Sorry James Kirkup, your Andorran niche

Is just too complicated for me to ever reach.

Apologies especially to Emily Bronte’s ghost -

You are the mostest hostess that I could ever boast

Your heather moor and cobbled street’s allure

Are something I’ve put off until the braw New Year.
Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

In Harm's Way

 I was never a film buff, give me Widmark and Wayne any day

Saturday matin?es with Margaret Gardener still hold sway

As my memory veers backwards this temperate Boxing Day-

Westerns and war films and a blurred Maigret,

Coupled with a worn-out sixties Penguin Mallarm?-

How about that mix for a character trait?

Try as I may I can’t get my head round the manifold virtues

Of Geraldine Monk or either Riley

Poetry has to have a meaning, not just patterns on a page,

Vertical words and snips of scores just make me rage.

Is Thom Gunn really the age-old sleaze-weasel Andrew Duncan says?

Is Tim Allen right to give Geraldine Monk an eleven page review?

At least they care for poetry to give their lives to it

As we do, too.

My syntax far from perfect, my writing illegible

But somehow I’ll get through, Bloodaxe and Carcourt 

May jeer but an Indian printer’s busy with my ‘Collected’

And, Calcutta typesetters permitting, it will be out this year

With the red gold script of sari cloth on the spine

And **** those dusty grey contemporary voices

Those verses will be mine.

Haslam’s a whole lot better but touchy as a prima donna

And couldn’t take it when I said he’d be a whole lot better

If he’d unloose his affects and let them scatter

I’m envious of his habitat, The Haworth Moors

Living there should be the inspiration of my old age

But being monophobic I can’t face the isolation

Or persuade my passionate friend to join me.

What urban experiences can improve

Upon a cottage life with my own muse!
Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

New Year Poem

 For Jeremy Reed



Rejection doesn’t lead me to dejection

But to inspiration via irritation

Or at least to a bit of naughty new year wit-

Oh isn’t it a shame my poetry’s not tame

Like Rupert’s or Jay’s - I never could

Get into their STRIDE just to much pride

To lick the arses of the poetry-of-earthers

Or the sad lady who runs KATABASIS from the back

Of a bike, gets shouted at by rude parkies

And writing huffy poems to prove it...



Oh to be acceptable and

IN THE POETRY REVIEW

Like Lavinia or Jo

With double spreads

And a glossy colour photo

Instead I’m stuck in a bus queue at Morden

London’s meridian point of zero imagination

Actually it’s a bit like ACUMEN with the Oxleys

Boasting about their 150,000 annual submissions-

If what they print’s the best God help the rest...)

At least my Christmas post had - instead of a card

From Jeremy Reed - his ELEGY FOR DAVID GASCOYNE -

The best poem I’ve had by post in forty years

And Jeremy’s best to date in my estimate -

The English APOLLINAIRE - your ZONE, your SONG

OF THE BADLY LOVED - sitting in a cafe in South End Green

I send you this poem, Jeremy, sight unseen,

A new year’s gift to you, pushing through

To star galaxies still unmapped and to you, BW,

Sonneteer of silence, huddled in the fourth month

Of your outdoor vigil, measuring in blood, tears and rain

Your syllable count in hour-glass of pain.

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry