Jodie Hollander: poet in residence

Jodie Hollander in Mytholmroyd: our first Poet in Residence

Jodie stayed in Ted’s House for two weeks in June and ran a reading and workshop from the house, as well as a workshop and reading in Heptonstall Museum. She has also started to write her own work about the experience of staying in the house and exploring the surrounding landscape and shared this new poem with us.

If you want to read more of her poetry, she has two collections: Nocturne and My Dark Horses published by Pavillion Press.

 

1 Aspinall Street

Mytholmroyd

Nobody told me I’d find you so quickly, 

moving assuredly through the old, terraced house.

First in your bedroom, where you slept beside Olwyn,

keeping her close in the cold Yorkshire nights.

Up the narrow staircase to the sloped attic,

where you and Gerald invented adventures;

a small, locked window looked out to the moors.

Then down near the kitchen, where Edith bathed you,

just a shivering boy then, wrapped up in a towel,

held safe and tight in his mother’s loving arms.

All through the house there are pictures of you,

handsome and confident, a man of the world.

Yet night after night something unsettled 

traverses the roof, rain lashes the window,

rattling the room where you were born.

Is that you, Hughes, in from the moors, 

wanting to come back? Back to camping and curlews

and fishing in the canal. Back to hunting with Gerald

and swimming with school friends, hiking the hills

and picnicking with family. Back, all the way

back to the beginning. Back, at long last to love?