THE MARCHES by Huw Parsons

AN ENCHANTING MONUMENTAL DECEIT
Blanche Grandison's effigy in Much Marcle church is the best example I know of 'beauty being a joy that lasts for ever.' Such femininity, such grace, yet all an illusion painstakingly chipped with a hammer and chisel from a block of cold, hard stone.

FOUR MINUTES AND EIGHT SECONDS
Peter Perkins was born in 1937 in the workhouse in Abbey Dore. When he was nineteen he ran the mile at Pontrilas show in four minutes and eight seconds, which was years before Roger Bannister did it in four minutes.

GREEN LEEKS & WHITE CHEESE
A poem about the age-old animosity between the Welsh and the English that was once all too commonplace in the Marches. Written for Saint David's Day from an English perspective that has a distinctly anti-Welsh sentiment – except for the last line that uses the symbolic meaning of a flower.

HEREFORDSHIRE REVISITED
A bright, crisp March day in the Western parts of England's most rural county, with an endless succession of tiny pleasures remembered, encountered and compared.

JEZEBEL
A very short poem about 'Jezebel' a life-size wooden giraffe, who stands alone in the garden of 'The Cornewall Arms' in Clodock.

MANY A COUNTRY MILE (With Music by ‘The Dolphins.’)
A poem about an old mini I chanced upon rusting away in a garden in Vowchurch, one of many I've since encountered in and around the Black Mountains. It's one of my deep, life-long regrets that I never owned a mini when I could have done (then being young and foolish) and this poem reminds me of that.

MONNOW
The river Monnow begins as a mere trickle high up on the Black Mountains. It then flows through a hybrid country, neither truly Welsh nor quite English, before being diluted a thousand fold in the brown salty waters of the Severn Estuary.

PERPETUAL SUNDAY
A poem written some years ago after seeing the horror of the building work that was taking place in Hereford Cathedral Close. However, now that it's finished the result isn't too bad – but I still wonder if all the disruption was worth it

RAGS & TATTERS
A poem about a walk around White Castle on a fine January day, where the medieval past is glimpsed in a landscape of odd field patterns, scattered farms, tiny villages, a ruined mill and a sunken road.

SAINT ANDREW'S SOLSTICE
Written in Saint Andrew's church in Bredwardine, one of my favourite Herefordshire churches, on the longest day of the year. This poem uses the same complex rhyming pattern that the great Bob Dylan uses in his once heard never forgotten song 'Simple Twist of Fate.'

SO HELP ME GOD
I love to visit old churches and will often light a candle and say a prayer, more often than not wondering how a religion based on events in Palestine two thousand years ago could have got this far.

THE BOYS
'Nev,' 'Fred' and 'Sarge' were three friends from the Midlands who spent lifetimes cycling the lanes of the mid-shire Marches, getting out and about on their bikes at every opportunity.

WIGGA, BILBO AND PLASH
I will always associate the countryside on the Eastern flanks of The Black Mountains with the colours of autumn – patches of bracken turned brown by the first cold nights and pink ice plants covered in swarms of brown and orange butterflies.

WINDS OF A THOUSAND YEARS
A motor mower close by drowns out all other sounds, Then it stops abruptly and a quiet calm resumes, only punctuated by the barking of a far off dog and the creaks, squeaks and groans of the gently swaying branches of an ancient yew.

WITHOUT FOCUS OR LIFE
In the chancel of Moccas church there is a little-known but truly fabulous alabaster effigy of a medieval knight in surcoat and chain-mail. For hundreds of years he's lain there, with relentless days and nights flickering past as if in a dream.

Huw Parsons was born in 1954, grew up in Llyswen, near Hay on Wye, and educated at Brecon Boys’ Grammar School and Chelsea College of Art.

He feels neither wholly English nor particularly Welsh, with his life’s diversity a social impostor and a cultural chameleon.

His influences: the poems of John Betjeman & Phillip Larkin, the novels of Leslie Thomas, the song lyrics of Sting & Jake Thackray.

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