Black Country
by Liz Berry
Commuters saw it first, vast
on the hillside by the A41,
a wingless Pegasus, hooves
kicking road into the distance.
It had appeared over night.
A black shadow on the scrub,
galloping above the gates
of the derelict factories,
facing East, towards the pits,
mouth parted as if it would
swallow the sun that rose
from behind the winding gear.
Word spread. Crowds gathered.
Kids, someone said,
but when they examined its flanks
they found pure coal,
coal where none had been mined
in years, where houses
still collapsed into empty shafts
and hills bore scars.
A gift from the underworld,
hauling the past
from the dead earth. Old men
knelt to breathe the smoke
of its mane, whisper
in its ear, walked away
in silence, fists clenched,
faces streaked with tears.
From Black Country. Reproduced with kind permission from Chatto & Windus.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Winner Best First Collection 2014
Black Country
Liz Berry
About Liz Berry
Liz Berry (b. 1980, Black Country) won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2018 with ‘The Republic of Motherhood’, having previously won Best First Collection in 2014 for her Chatto debut Black Country. ‘Highbury Park’ describes an overgrown park in Birmingham where Berry went on long walks with her newborn son: ‘As the spring came I felt my body being brought slowly back to life by it. I thought often of Highbury’s nighttime lovers (I was the day shift) and how the pleasure of our experiences and longings might intertwine.’
Berry’s advice to poets starting out is to ‘be tough on your poems but kind to yourself… Listen to poems being spoken, let their electricity light you’. Berry’s unforgettable final image of the lover taken by the wind — ‘stripped and blown, / then jilted dazzling in the arms of the trees’ — is surely a prime example of that illuminating electricity.
Forward Prizes History:
- 2019 Forward Prizes for Best Single Poem, shortlisted for ‘Highbury Park’ (Wild Court)
- 2018 Forward Prizes for Best Single Poem, Winner for ‘The Republic of Motherhood’ (Granta)
