Liverpool

Friday Poem – ‘Going to Liverpool’ by Sheenagh Pugh

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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Going to Liverpool’ by Sheenagh Pugh from the anthology Newspaper Taxis: Poetry After The Beatles. Congratulations to Paul McCartney’s The Lyrics which won Waterstones Book of the Year 2021.

Newspaper Taxis: Poetry After the Beatles. Edited by Phil Bowen, Damian Furniss and David Woolley.

January 1963. ‘Please, Please Me’ by The Beatles shoots to number one. So begins a new era, in which one band transforms the face of music, youth and popular culture. Taking in everything from the music, their influence, the way we lived then and the way we live now, Newspaper Taxis is a response to the Beatles’ creativity and capacity to influence successive generations. Beatles fans young and old will want this anthology to add to their collection.

GOING TO LIVERPOOL I am a middle-aged woman travelling on business and I’m going to Liverpool, where I’ll take time out to visit Albert Dock and the museum where my youth is preserved. The fashions I followed, the songs I knew by heart, the faces that convulsed my own into screams and sobs, they’ll all be there. I’m going to Liverpool, and it is autumn. The fields outside Leominster lie in stubble, the leaves of Ludlow’s trees are jaundiced and flushed with the fever that says they’re finished. The ticket collector said Thank you, Madam. My daughter’s grown up and my mother’s dead, and between the pages of the notebook where I’m writing this I keep a yellowed ticket to a match, a picture of an actor, Edwin Morgan’s reply to my fan letter, and I’m going to Liverpool because I’m the kind that always will. Sheenagh Pugh

Newspaper Taxis is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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‘Real Liverpool’

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Published 1st January 2009 by Niall Griffiths.

In population terms, Liverpool isn’t a huge city (it is dwarfed by Birmingham), but it looms colossally in the history (recorded and mythical) of the British Isles, and indeed the world. Real Liverpoolis Niall Griffiths’ antidote to some of mawkish twaddle that has marked Liverpool’s year as European City of Culture. Griffiths’ love/hate relationship with the city of his birth is central to the book. He explores the various facets of the city – its maritime and merchant histories, class divisions, sectarian divides, Celtic influences, and the siege mentality underpinning the celebrated Scouse humour. Nor does he flinch from Liverpool’s dark side: the money from the slave trade, the drugs, the urban blight, the fallout from Thatcherism, the internecine violence. Jamie Bulger, Heysel, Hillsborough, the Dockers’ Strike, the Toxteth Riots, all of these and more are discussed.Real Liverpoolis underpinned by a strong autobiographical element which details the author’s birth and formative years in the city, his movement away from it, the abiding pull it exerts. In addition, Griffiths interviews many people connected closely to the city, from personal friends and family members to artists and workers. From the Wirral to Warrington, Anfield to Everton, Bootle to Diddyland, Griffiths criss-crosses Liverpool by the Ferry and through the Tunnels, from John Lennon airport to the racecourse and down the docks, building a picture of a city which, whatever its faults, is never dull.’Real’ Series Editor: Peter Finch