Matt Gilbert publishes ‘Street Sailing’, a Bristol-inflected poetry collection

“From an early age I’ve been fascinated by the idea of ‘place’,” muses Matt Gilbert, the Bristol-born poet who has just released his debut collection, Street Sailing (published by Black Bough Poetry, 2023).

“What makes somewhere distinctive? What is it about a particular landscape, the people and ambience of one site that sets it apart from others?”

For Gilbert, growing up in Bristol, the streets, parks, railway tracks, crumbling walls and wild corners of the city were amongst his earliest poetic inspirations.

From the overgrown former burial ground that once belonged to the Royal Infirmary, tucked behind the second-hand bookshop on Upper Maudlin Street once owned by his parents, to the woods, scrubland and sloping allotments around Narroways Hill and Ashley Vale in St Werburghs – the boundary between the natural, and human-impacted landscapes have always proved to be an exciting playground.

Matt Gilbert – photo: Abigail Fellows

“Cities are, after all, simply another habitat,” Gilbert reflects. “Many of the poems in Street Sailing play with this intersection – at home, on streets, in woods, fields, shorelines or sometimes through time.

“Some poems also contain a supernatural element – springing from a long-standing interest in ghosts, hauntings and folklore.”

The collection includes several Bristol-inspired poems, and also features familiar regional landscapes a bit further afield, in Portishead and Tickenham.

Bristle

Light jabs of rain arrive against my face,
like firm strokes from a metal pinhead hairbrush,
poking me back in, on foot from Temple Meads,
along a stretch of Avon. Today, wind-shredded,
the river shrugs, surging toffee brown towards the centre,
as discordant gull hoards scream: ‘Not you again’ –
cries shattering on contact with air and in their midst,
one great black-backed fiend, carts a headless pigeon off
to finish on the dirty water, while nearby, reflex shoppers
shuffle round the concrete remains of Broadmead,
‘Well, what did you expect?’ ask rattled chimney pots,
smokeless, scowling, chess piece kings, throned on worn
Victorian rooftops, sharp crenelated crowns low slung,
above the gloomy faces of rambling relic buildings,
shaded, in the city’s signature pennant stone, 4B pencil grey.
I’m back to visit, between storms with names and it seems
we’ve changed, my hometown and me.

Matt Gilbert – photo: Sam Gilbert

Tickenham Hill

Somewhere beneath that listening ridge
the winds are gossiping again, in tongues
beyond the most vague and coarse translation.

A breezy sonic-catalogue of air let loose,
wheezes in, behind walkers staggering up
the slopes, outroaring the M5 at every step.

Until the top, with banks now bare again,
fit for prehistoric sentries to cast their eyes
across the stretching flats. Land Yeo wriggling

off towards the estuary’s greyed-out islands.
Wales industrious over fast brown waves,
not quite yet the sea, still almost as strange.

It is a chafing edge of sorts, rabbits racing
over grass towards the woods. Not waiting
to witness other beings cloud over the horizon.

Cover for Matt Gilbert, Street Sailing (Black Bough Poetry, 2023) – cover art: Ben Pearce

Matt Gilbert: Street Sailing is out now, edited by Matthew M. C. Smith, with cover art by Ben Pearce, and published by Black Bough Poetry. For more information, visit Matt’s blog at www.richlyevocative.net.

Main photo: Ben Pearce

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