A Poem a Week- Coombeland : John McCullough

Coombeland

Work of the devil. Dark place where hills

mould men. Where sense and breath adjust

to a muscular camber, the grounds diaphragm

small houses riding contractions, stiff verbs.

Chalk ridges give the dialects backbone.

The hole-ridden earth draws in watery vowels.

Ploughshares bring up guttural relics

flint-teeth with the sibilant ocean inside.

Stroke a nugget of chalk. Already white dust

accents the contours of your fingertips. You inhabit

the past tense, submit to a crumbling tongue

the way the hard c in coombe yields

to liquid and the unsayable ghost of a b

that’s the beat of the land’s hollow heart.

John McCullough


I have no idea where I found this poem but it is one I have since come back to time and time again. I love poems to be spoken aloud and with its onomatopoeic wordiness this poem is almost sensual when read out.  With the final stanza in particular you find yourself caressing the  "c in coombe" which "yields to liquid". You get the sense that this is a poet who really loves the language with all its flexibility and gorgeous verbosity, but despite this manages to be gloriously understated at times, the simplicity of: "Stroke a nugget of chalk" gives the poem a ceasura from the language and allows the poem to still feel light. The conjunction of body language and landscape is also something I find particularly interesting, and this poem places me on undulating downland whenever I am stuck inside.