In 2018, I was delighted to win a Literature Matters prize from the Royal Society of Literature for my Lost and Found project. The poems step through the Lost and Found Office at Bristol Temple Meads station and re-emerge in the Greek Underworld.
The 2018 RSL Literature Matters Prize: (left to right): me, Michael Caines, Kate Clanchy, Gillian Slovo (judge), Evan Placey, Pascale Petit and Owen Lowery.
The idea came to me while watching a woman methodically open a suitcase as I sheltered from the cold at the station one late winter evening. She took out a book, hairbrush and nightdress with the emotional distance of a nurse itemizing the effects the deceased has about their person. She entered details into a computer, neatly returned the items, tied a tag to the resealed bag and moved on to the next. It reminded me of the indifferent, cosmic machinery of Powell and Pressburgers’ A Matter of Life and Death. Why should this woman receive her lost wedding ring and this man not?
At the same time, I was struck by the emotive, human quality of the items themselves. In this regard, it reminded me of Stanley Spenser’s ‘The Resurrection, Cookham.’
The office is in the subway of Bristol Temple Meads station. Blue triangles point upstairs and red arrows point down. So it is easy to think of the Underworld (or an ethereal heaven and fiery hell). The office – which offers warmth on the cold winter days and evenings – is situated in the subterranean space below the platforms, connected by a lift which also descends to the old, hidden part of the station where unclaimed goods are stored before recycling. So there is a sense that passengers who reclaim their goods ascend, whilst unclaimed goods descend. The recycling of unclaimed items in prisons and schools could represent a kind of Elysian Fields, or resurrection.
In writing the poems, I was interested in demonstrating that our concerns and predicament have barely changed in the intervening millennia. We still exercise good luck charms and prayer. The slipperiness of translation itself – ‘owl-eyed’, ‘bright-eyed’, ‘green-eyed’ or ‘grey-eyed’ Athena – and her various guises suggests the difficulty of achieving a reading on events, while the unceasing flood of the items themselves eloquently speaks of our passions, connections and wants.
Readings
In May 2019, I read a selection of these poems for Exeter Classical Society before an audience including Dr Sharon Marshall and Professor Daniel Ogden.
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I also took part in a related interview with Molly Rosenberg for the Royal Society of Literature:
In 2021, I gave an online reading for Oxford University’s Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama Series of readings by contemporary poets engaging with the classics alongside poets Vasiliki Albedo, Kym Deyn, and Mehmet Izbudak:
In 2025, I took up the project again and with the benefit of a Free Read by Rishi Dastidar (for the Literacy Consultancy) and mentorship from the poet Dr Rebecca Goss, I am working on securing publication for these poems.
Matt Bryden Poetry 