Matt Bryden Poetry

What a pleasant surprise to learn that this poem was shortlisted by Abigail Parry for the 2024 Live Canon International Poem competition. Not least because it documents a trip from the Czech Republic to Germany eighteen years ago, when I and my then girlfriend hitched a lift from Prague to attend a christening in Hamburg. We stopped off for a few days to see her father in Berlin, which is where I was struck by the sight of people eating noodles out of paper cartons on the street, something I had only ever seen in the futurist noir setting of Blade Runner.

I can still remember the biting cold of that trip. Another reason for my surprise was that the announcement was made in the same week that David Lynch died, and the poem recalls a trip to the cinema to watch the just released Inland Empire. Being a German theatre, the exchanges in Polish were dubbed into German. My girlfriend spoke Polish and all through the film – one of his longest – she leant over and whispered a translation in my ear.

In the end, there was something episodic about our journey and I had a sense our relationship would not last long (it didn’t). I particularly loved one of the quieter moments in Ridley Scott’s film, in which Deckard rotates a photograph slightly and it flickers into a kind of life, like a gently shaken snow-globe. I imagined tilting our picture and my girlfriend and I returning to the amicable and platonic colleagues we used to be.

The poem was read alongside 14 others by actors from the Live Canon stable before the prize went to Dillon Jaxx for their ‘The Fisher Price Hospital’. It’s a cracking winner, but almost all the poems shortlisted shared something of an Abigail Parry flavour – full of play and tricks and sleight of hand. A great experience all round. The anthology will be published shortly and I’m really grateful that this poem will be a part of it.