Memory Maps: 'Elementary Estuaries', by Philip Terry

A work-in-progress

On the afternoon of the first of January 2006, I set off under grey skies along the Wivenhoe trail following the banks of the river Colne to where the land turns in upon itself to form Arlesford – once Alder’s Ford – Creek. There was some construction work taking place on the former site of Wivenhoe shipbuilding yards. The building site was encased in a white corporate fence – I thought of the ever expanding 'Centre' in José Saramago’s novel 'The Cave' – emblazoned with signs reading DANGER: CONTAMINATION. There was a light breeze, and as you proceeded along the hazardously muddy track you could hear your squelching footfalls, birds calling, and the odd hoot from a distant train making its way back from Clacton.

I remember too the noise of cars passing on the road, the roar of a jet plane, the muscular beating of the wings of a swan in flight, and the colourful buoys marking the river course, green, red, blue and black. By the time I turned to make my way back, it was almost dark, and looking out over the mudflats you could see the distant silhouettes of wading birds captured against the sunset, perched by the edge of the river’s diminished channel. This was the image that would stick in my mind as I sat down the following morning to write a poem based on the walk, and it was this which formed the backbone of the piece.

This poem was the first of a planned series of fifty, still in progress, to be composed around estuary walks in Essex, ranging from the Thames, Roach and Crouch in the south, to the Blackwater Estuary leading to Maldon, to the inlets and channels in and around Mersea Island – Ray Channel, Sampson’s Creek, Strood Channel – to the Colne and the Stour in the north.

The plan was, and is, to write fifty poems over the year – one a week with two weeks off in the summer – and build up an archive of places, sights, sounds, textures, sensations, people, birds and animals, in a word a 'memory map' of these often haunting, neglected estuarine landscapes, which to this day carry traces of our island’s history, from the site of the Battle of Maldon on the Blackwater, to the ruins of Hadleigh Castle near Southend, broodingly captured by Constable in the 1820s, to the elaborate Shandean earthworks making up the defences of Tilbury Fort on the Thames, near to where Elizabeth I delivered her speech to the nation after the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

Charles II’s Chief Engineer at Tilbury was the French Military Architect Bernard de Gomme. The form I employed for the estuary poems is one created by another Frenchman, Raymond Queneau, a form which has come to be known as the 'elementary morality' after his 1975 volume of the same name. Queneau describes it as follows: 'First come 3 series of 3+1 pairs each consisting of a noun and adjective (or participle), freely including repetitions, rhymes, alliterations, and echoes; next, a kind of interlude of 7 lines, each 1 to 5 syllables long; last, a conclusion of 3+1 pairs of words (noun and adjective or participle), more or less recapitulating several of the 24 words of the first part.'

Supremely visual in its nature, the form has many attractions: its appearance on the page, suggestive of receding flatnesses, seems perfectly adapted to the depiction of estuarine landscapes; and simultaneously, in its mathematical rigour, it functions like a grid or a primitive pinhole camera, able to capture and freeze elements of a place or a landscape as in a time capsule. Then, finally, the form, previously unexplored in English, nevertheless finds its echo in the very roots of English poetry, the kennings of Anglo-Saxon verse.

The following poems, written between January and September 2006, represent the first thirty-three in the series entitled – after Queneau – 'Elementary Estuaries'.

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