My thoughts are as fragmentary and clamorous as the urban spaces I wander around. I wanted to start with the process of walking, with the idea of an encounter. I wanted to start with Roy Fisher, with Alice Oswald, with Steve Eely, with Donna Stonecipher, with Stephen Emmerson, with Annie Ernaux, but they all collided in my mind before I could pin them down.
Who was it said if you know the local, you know the world? If you write your street, your own particular environment, in a way you do write everything; by sharing your own part of the universal you enter into a dialogue of generosity and understanding. I underlined it. Somewhere.
I wanted to explain how I make a poem. How I’ve been walking around the towns and between-spaces of post-industrial Northern England looking for a way to consider, for example, a roundabout, or the ruination of a closed supermarket and the spread of its atmosphere throughout the neighbouring streets and towns. What closed sites and their ongoingness can do to a mood, and what those moods can do to politics, and therefore to our future landscapes, that is, future closed sites and future moods and politics and on. And what poetry can do, in perhaps the opposite direction, by attending to such moods, to such ruins, by inhabiting and pulling at the currentness of our spatial habits.
During the last couple of years of walking and reading and looking and writing, I’ve seen a lot of depressed urban environments, and during this time, and through this attention, what I have needed to make a poem has lessened. What is obsessing me has localised via my experience of its repetition. What I have needed to make a poem has distilled into the small-scale manifestation of the world that is my one high street and the little side roads that rib off it. It all starts from there.
Like Roy Fisher, when he writes:
I have begun to see the city, and my life in it, only in the last few months. Every so often now, while I’m walking along, or reading, I feel a jerk, a grating contact with something firm. This is electrifying. It is happening in the places I have inhabited for years; yet now the story is different, the models in the shop windows begin to tell the histories of their lives. At last I have been here long enough.[i]
Or when he writes:
I am becoming known by sight.[ii]
And I’m immediately struck by having that same thought yesterday – in what was then yesterday – in the greasy-spoon café with my mum and her friend, and it was me, not them, who had six people say hello to me, like that scene in Groundhog Day, which, when I watched it with my children not long ago, I told them was not too far away from parenting. Me, who spent so long running away and only recently came back again.
And my 5-year-old son, in London in the holidays, he said stop making friends with everyone, on the train, in the restaurant, at the bus stop, before someone sat at the table next to us and I smiled and they started talking to me. If you love the landscape, whatever it is, you can start to exude that. It can start to love you back. To offer you moments.
What my particular landscape has offered me recently is this tiny crack between two terraced shopfronts that join at the back, and its full of litter, an avalanche, but it’s a between-space and I like it. A little secret I can smile at. And before which I access a certain communion. A communion that passes through the sensory un-sentient. Which connects me, in feeling, with anyone else noticing at any moment in time this same crack.
The landscape allows us to connect with people through it. It acts as transmitter, as transient object, and if we give ourselves to it, it yields.
Roy Fisher
again, because I’m talking to him. He’s walking around his lost future the same
way I am mine. The way he says it is:
You’ll know this ten-yard stretch
of suburban tarmac, where something
shakes at you; this
junction-place of back lanes, rutted gullies
with half a car
bedded in half a garage,
this sudden fence-post that breaks step;
the street, the chemist’s shop, the lamp;
a stain in the plaster that so
resembles – and that body of air
caught between the ceiling
and the cupboard-top, that’s like
nothing that ever was.
And I remember my valve that resembles a mallard. How I say to my children doesn’t it look like a mallard, on the way to school sometimes. Or how I stop them by the horse-feed buckets in the window of the horse-riding shop where the three buckets say Pegasus, Frosty, and Tony, and I cry with laughter at the juxtaposition of lofty and lowbrow prospective horse names, while my children point across the road to the charity-shop window where one of the mannequins’ jumpsuits has fallen down.
I find a newspaper article that says of Roy Fisher’s landscapes:
Such places demand to be escaped from, and then strenuously demand to be re-found. Uninvited, their numinous shabbiness enters our dreams.[iii]
Through looking, the landscape gets thicker. And through this thickness, I speak to my children, and they speak back to me, about the litter, about our given processional names for things, for ginnels and closed shops and specific crevices, and the immediate environment gets thicker still. Some of our non-places are named after things that have happened there. One of the shutters is called Sorry About This.
After several years away, and after mapping myself explicitly onto the streets of Amsterdam – during my initial navigation phase, during the birth of my first child, during a pandemic, during repeated migratory lonelinesses – I returned to the place of my childhood and was forced to map my new self onto it again, and to narrate that place for my children who were now living it with me.
Recalling formative influences such as the Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, Victor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, and their tragi-optimist wrangling of their environments – as material, as muse, as confidant, as playmate, as method of survival – I follow the landscape. Or, for example, the work of Annie Ernaux – her attendance and commitment to the everyday, to every experience, every space. Her trips to the supermarket over the course of a year in Look at the Lights, My Love, whose title takes a simple sentence from mother to baby and abstracts it, lifts it, lifts us, until we are all new little people gazing up at the spoils of the illuminated megacity and naively marvelling. I have to find a way to love where I am because I’m here and, while I am, the time of my life is passing – and what is a place or a life without love in it?
Annie Ernaux says supermarkets “are part of the landscape for everyone under fifty”[iv], that she puts herself in “idle mode”[v] when inside them and takes a walk around. When I lived in the Netherlands, I spent a lot of downtime wandering the largest shops with my baby, the ones I could get most lost in. And my friend, in Berlin, said of her time in the UK, also with a baby, that mostly she missed the supermarket. And myself again, when I was visiting home, I wandered the same megastore over and over with my mum and my then-baby daughter, three generations of shoppers, bargain hunting – gathering, providing, in the newest of the old ways. On Reddit, people are saying if you shop with a basket rather than a trolley it shows people you are single, like a modern mating ritual.
A place that doesn’t reject you becomes a friend. A place with enough room to wander, to think, to be left alone yet not be alone, not entirely. It’s not just the supermarket. This extends to the retail park, the car park, the abandoned factory. I walk along the lines with my children. I climb over walls. A place that doesn’t reject you lets you play with it. A place no longer defined, or whose definition you, by playing with it, can question, also broadens who you are, what you could be.
I digress. That’s okay. I do this too while walking. I make my poems that way.
Annie Ernaux says the journal is “the form most in keeping with [her] temperament … partial to the impressionistic recording of things, people, and atmospheres”. She calls it “a free statement of observations and sensations, aimed at capturing something of the life of the place.”[vi] The journal, to me, is like long-form or large-scale poetry, the way it fragments, the detailed noticing. The life, the supermarket, the city, they all continue between journal entries, which are themselves poems. Each vignette just an expanded line of verse, carefully juxtaposed between vibrant unrecorded silences.
Donna Stonecipher mentions the “speech act of pedestrianism”[vii], which is a form of touch, which is embodiment, which is knowing, however we may perform it. Our being in a place. In a chapter called “Gaps”, she considers the line break. I find my line breaks in the city, jammed together, collaged, between the assonance of old and new build, the metaphors urban flux uncovers, and the friction and flow of spatial and mental juxtapositions.
The city is prose poetry; it wraps me up and I’m cosy in the onslaught. In its complicated human messiness.
My poetry jumps around like poetry, but it walks like prose. Much like this talk. It goes where it goes and I follow my instinct until I don’t. Space is a luxury[viii]. Calm is a luxury. I’ve learnt to dissociate while I associate, to make a kind of frantic art from my environmental wrangling, playing in the hot core of colliding pasts and futures, where structures rise up as others burn down. I’ve learnt to find the gaps and enter them, in which I dream of numinous shabbinesses. I write my poetry on the bus, on my phone.
Roy Fisher
again, on the something he’s narrating:
Something’s decided
to narrate
in more dimensions than I can know
the gathering in
and giving out of the world on a slow
pulse, on a metered contraction
that the senses enquire towards
but may not themselves
intercept. All I can tell it by
is the passing trace of it
in a patterned agitation of
a surface that shows only
metaphors. Riddles. Resemblances
that have me in the chute
as it meshes in closer many modes
funnelling fast through one event,
the flow-through so
dense with association [ix]
My own flow-through is forty years later; that is, both myself and the landscape are forty-years faster, sunk in the stop-start rhythms of communicative capitalism. I like it best when the line walks like I do, when it keeps going on – stable, predictable. It can say what it likes, as long as it keeps going on. Like Beckett’s prose, Kafka’s – just consciousness and rhythm, and then the familiarity. That dark humour looking after me again. I rest in the movement, as in a gently swelling ocean. It’s terrifying and we might die, but the voices are like music. The kindness is in the staying with me. The supermarket is open, the cafés. The lights of the city stay on all night.
Stephen Emmerson says:
Driving to work I am lorry and car. I am grey cloud approaching from the north-west. I am every single lane on the motorway. What are words for? They are for dreaming.[x]
I dream of labyrinth hotels. Of four-storey indoor market palaces with trapdoors and narrow passages and impossible connections. The landscapes of my dreams take the landscapes of my real life and they sculpt them into what needs to be imagined. I am Brutalist building. I am boarded-up cinema. By Torres Blancas in Madrid I sat down and wept. Its amber-glass visor, so casually cool over the main entryway. The cloudness of it.
I walk to a building and I encounter it. The almost death of it, the almost life of it.
Donna Stonecipher:
It was like going to see “The Unbuilt City,” an exhibition of plans and models designed to transform your city – grids, towers, monumental ministries, vast plazas – that came to nothing.[xi]
Today it was like walking to the pit head. It was my boots in mud. It was standing at a crossroad of is-this-private-land where, after an hour of no one, two women and a buggy, a man on a bike, and myself, converged at a dirt-track bottleneck. The women asked is the canal over there, and I asked is the pit over there, and that moment of noise, I thought, that overlapping, is what a city is like.
I remember once on a frozen sea next to Poland, a car pulled up on the ice and asked me the way to the lighthouse before driving off to the frozen horizon. I remember once on a major road in Manchester, a group of people asked the way to the recently opened sinkhole – we were all looking for it, going to meet it like a visiting celebrity, a rare chance to peer inside our built-on urban earth. I remember once, on my own bike, asking a man with a paper bag if I was yet in Belgium – the tarmac had changed consistency; it couldn’t still be France.
Stephen Emmerson again:
As a child I used to collect objects of interest that were of no interest to anyone else. On one occasion I found a small metal object about an inch long. … I took it with me everywhere. The touch the feel the look. Eventually I moved on to another object but I did not forget about the earlier one. Still further down the line a box within which the object was housed was thrown away by someone who did not realise the object was in there and even if they had realised that the object was in there they would not have been able to understand that it was the most important thing in my life.[xii]
So with the buildings. The cracks and gaps in the urban environment in which I house my heart. Forgotten, unwanted, ugly. It’s not me, not that exactly, but it is kinship. There is a sense of being somehow alike. I run my hand along the concrete. The future it, like me, was promised. The house, the car, the job, the love. We’ve so many been disappointed. Been left stood outside in the weather, in this slipshod future.
Like Steve Ely’s eel who travels from the Sargasso, through a “sheer-walled stream between the London-Edinburgh railway line” where “blue shit seep[s] from chemical toilets” and “cormorants dribbl[e] lead”, where “rats feed from litter bins” and “the little eels slither in the meal-deal flow”.[xiii]
That’s how we are in the landscape, adapting, casting off. And I pause by the dying structures, because my own future is also held in whatever they are telling. The dated buildings, stripped of function, serve as tombs to an imagined future-past. They promise the things we used to believe in. Remind us that nothing is certain, apart from this now, here, ourselves, and what we do with it.
Alice Oswald, in the river, says:
I’m struggling now to find the really lovely stones I dream of: maroon stones, perfect ellipses – but it’s not just stones, sometimes huge bits of wood with the texture of water still in them in the plane of movement, a kind of camber.[xiv]
We’re all dreaming, and a city, too, flows like water. Buildings I grew up with are gone, hated, obscured, or become something entirely other. Our trajectories are the same, the mysterious processes of capitalism convince us of one thing or another. These buildings are my neighbours; I must love them anyway. I look at pictures of when they were younger. How they change by staying the same in a world that wanes and transfigures; how meanings and associations layer; their durability, reliance, persistence. How they perform sculpture, imply secrets. How they invite and contain me. The way they catch the light.
[i] Roy Fisher,
The Citizen and the making of City, Bloodaxe, p95
[ii] Ibid. p95
[iii] https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/jun/09/poemoftheweek42
[accessed: 16/03/2026]
[iv] Look at the
Lights, My Love, p6
[v] Ibid. p47
[vi] Ibid, p11
[vii] Prose Poetry
and the City, p81[viii] Ibid, p80
[ix] Dow Low Drop, p152
[x] Big Song, p59
[xi] Donna Stonecipher, Model City, p42
[xii] Headland, from A series of tics #2
[xiii] Eely, p23
[xiv] Dart, p33
Lydia Unsworth is a poet from Manchester, UK. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. She is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Place Writing in Manchester, looking at kinship with disappearing post-industrial architecture. She has 6 poetry collections and 4 above/ground chapbooks, and has two new poetry collections coming out in 2026, Stay Awhile (April, Knives Forks and Spoons Press) and This Now Extends to My Daughter (May, Blue Diode Press).
