Matt Bryden Poetry

Great to have my poem ‘Landscape’ appear in the Ted Hughes sister journal Recklings. It won the William Soutar prize in 2020, judged by Samuel Tongue.

Here’s the essay I wrote to accompany it:

A decade ago, I was driving from Lisbon down to Aljezur in Southwest Portugal on Easter Sunday. The heat was direct and intense – service stations seemed like shrines, white and cool, with areas of shade for vehicles and air conditioning. The road surface had that shine that seemed just shy of melting. We pulled off the motorway and found a bar where we could take respite from the heat, as well as some water for some pills. My partner went inside and I waited outside. Over a low, makeshift wall, a garden sloped away before reaching up into the hills. Suddenly, a woman was beside me, washing her linen in a pool filled with fish. The suds spread into their water and gills and they went into a kind of frenzy. She didn’t seem to consider them at all.

I was imagining how I might capture this landscape in a poem – landscape in a ‘terroir’ sense: the combination of soil, climate and environment that gives character to a wine. The poem opens with an element of parody, documenting the scene in precise figures to which no one could have access: 0.032 of a person, 75,234 mgs of eucalyptus. This kind of enumeration and calculation was to miss the spirit of the landscape entirely. I had in mind Ted Hughes’s ‘Pike’ which begins in a similarly literal way: ‘Pike, three inches long’, ‘A pond I fished, fifty yards across’, before the pike make a mockery of such rational thinking: ‘one jammed to the gills down the other’s gullet’, the pond itself ‘as deep as England.’

The poem was originally titled ‘A Short History of the Staple Singers,’ after the American gospel, soul and R&B group formed in the ’50s. While they don’t hail from Portugal, I was thinking how a person carries the environment in which they are raised with them, however far they travel. I was thinking of singers because I could inhale the atmosphere outside that bar. So I turn to a singer in the final four lines and imagine how the landscape would influence her – just breathing this in, the intensity of the relentless heat, the beauty – and transform her.