On Pete Green’s Sheffield Almanac (Longbarrow Press 2017/23)
Pete Green’s Sheffield Almanac shines, lending his land light
And lustre, as the North for these southern eyes broadens,
Not only under sun but through rain; weathered by words,
This pamphlet poem is concerned with what we do with
Belonging, as place becomes person and person a place
Graced by pain. Stripped of its steel Green’s opening lines
Epic out economics. ‘Now brass is made in learning
The city’s an amalgam of wide-eyed youth..industrial yearning’
And athemic tipped dancefloors, echoing all that’s been
Emptied, from disembarked citroens to ‘sterling streaming’
To disillusion and an ‘atrophied arm’ in a ward. This then
Is a testament to the torn, to the ravaged air and insurgence,
It is a grand, noble telling which in nudging in the new lifts
The sword if not from stone then coalface, or the psychology
Of the landscape. Green’s should be a prize-winning poem
In which Sheffield itself sings and groans. In his search for
‘new blood, new reason’ Green writes to wrench colour
From the cold spent by snowfall to the ‘scarlet clamour’
Of drinkers washing Brexit away to attone for the isolation
Self-taught which can only condemn this carved country,
Lost in its own self-delusion. ‘How buggered are we?’
Green asks you to show him the works spanners shed.
‘The frontage of a lifestyle’s’ what’s left. Each and every phrase
Sounds out, truthful. Gormley’s statue may mark it in the most
Casual of ways, but in his angelic NorthGreen has bled
From heart and sleeve onto page to both eulogise and engender,
Not only his city, his county, his hearth and home but his heart.
As poet fuses and primes the possibly untraveled reader across
Field and border and future too through eye art. Which is what
Poetry is as well as painting and this sleek and portable canvas
Becomes map and music stirring the other senses as well:
A mind chart. Five rivers drive down through limestone, tears
From a terrain long encumbered, leaking political lies across
Landscape as each section heading captures in quotes
The malaise. Green is there in those fields, in both an
Expected way and as something deeply totemic. He is,
As grass and leaf singer, making vows from verse to amaze
Those who seek truth as well as those who avoid it. He growls
Through each garden and with these lines cuts a scathe
Into all which has scarred his sacred soil, and what’s on it;
The world we have wrought and the ruins from which
Each new edifice has been lain. In ‘trying to extend the metaphor..
whereby the choking up of channels, denying outlet to the current,
becomes an emblem of the body politic’s dysfunction’ Pete Green
As prophet seeks to alleviate each day’s strain. As with shin splints
In the leg, when you have walked too hard, muscles masking
An abundance of effort, he is trying to shift by word gifting
Some of our unease and loss into gain. But this is as hard a fight
As that found by the ‘Disinherited chest-deep in boxes’ which we
All have become, leased by leaders whose aims are like arson
With or without any flame. They would raze us all to the ground,
But on page 26 there’s defiance, where ‘We took refuge in the
Winter Garden/Watched a cloudburst runnel down the class’
And where ‘a warming core of goodwill’ duly flickered as companions
And friends felt the same. This is verse as public service and soul
Inked on white, but heart hooded. In his Afterword, Green writes
Of the temporal aims of his project, and in writing of and about
The one city to see if he could stir bordering interest. But he has done
So much more; from detailing the effects of uncivil action, demolitions,
Desires, kerfuffles and forms which invest in a future community
Formed not by what’s been done to it in the so called search
For progress, but for what it is, a true city, a structure in which
Hope has home. London doesn’t feel like that to me, not at all.
But I am often at times lost within it. In Pete’s poem, the future
For communal care seems to roam along each field and street.
His almanac arrives as curation. Longbarrow Press, of his city
Carry now and deliver these words and wisdom which all
Neighbours now need, and should own.
David Erdos 7/11/25
.
.