Biographical Details
Jenny Hockey’s poems have appeared in The North, Magma, The Frogmore Papers, Orbis and Dreamcatcher and in a poetry card for Poems in the Waiting Room (NZ). New Writing North awarded her a New Poets Bursary in 2013 and Oversteps Books published her debut collection, ‘Going to bed with the moon’ in 2019 (jennyhockeypoetry.co.uk., familyhistoryandwar.com)
Cycle Ride North
Alnmouth is grey. Not snowing.
And so we set off. Even when you
forget the map, I find one in a shop.
Three days in and we’re old.
Nothing keeps out this drenching ice.
When will I start to cry, slide my bike
in a ditch, cleave to the comfort of mud?
Four days in and we arrive,
expecting a family fanfare, a measure
of hullabaloo. It is as though we’d never
got lost in the fog on the Lammermuir Hills
under eerie giants, the swish, swish, swish
of their blades —
never been greeted by bin bags
held out wide for our shoes and clothes
before a landlord would let us in —
nor squeezed between lorries and verge
for miles up the roaring A1, two spectres
hunched in the spray — bounced
over cobbles to Leith, too wet for a dry café.
Five days in and we wake
to the Edinburgh sun
smiling through the shutters
belatedly.
© Jenny Hockey
Gunnerside Ghyll
and us on a confident bridle path,
alert for a gully the miners once scoured,
hushing for lead, now our descent
to a dormitory bunk tonight.
Map-flapping wind drives us into the ghyll —
but we find no path across and I’m for the road,
the extra four miles, but it’s past three o’clock
and summer’s closing down.
We keep on trying the slope, the sky behind us
leaking light —and then there’s a man
in country green with a large-scale map
who shows us the route ahead
where dregs of sun spill into our eyes
as we clamber over the opposite edge
and can’t stop our feet from jigging and springing,
never knew turf with a bounce like this
all down a snaking path to Keld,
some kind of drug alive in our veins,
to cup after cup of hostel tea, tea like no tea
was ever before, to shepherd’s pie and a warning
of trackless moors to come, possible fog.
We just can’t wait.
© Jenny Hockey
Front Garden
After Gregory Kearns’ ‘Cherry Tree Lane’
2 June, 1953
Bonnie Garwood and me
with my arm round her shoulders,
both of us smiling and plump.
I’m an inverted English rose,
swagged in multiple layers of skirt
to celebrate Her Majesty.
Behind us in the window
a card baptises our house:
DERRYVALE,
a song my Grandad loved.
21 September, 1996
A little landscaped plot
long overgrown, fence gone awry
and someone who’d been Dad
peering across a four-inch chain
bolted to the door.
No-one but me on his case.
15 March, 2018
Nothing shows up on Google
but a tight-lipped frontage
paved over for cars.
© Jenny Hockey
Ashbank
When you arrive you look
at the shoulders of fields
combed right down to the earth,
stare at shadows of clouds on the fells,
clouds like whipped whites of eggs
before the sugar’s spooned in,
watch the forehead of Ingleborough
furrow with pride, sometimes screened
by mist, sometimes a slice of shade,
notice the rickety legs of the foal
working out how to fold down,
how to come to a halt.
When you arrive you look
at cattle planted between three fields,
wonder what stirs them to move —
but stay here a week
and you have it inside.
© Jenny Hockey