Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Another Look
- A Great-Grandfather
- A Great-Grandmother
- Grandfathers
- Grandmothers
- Birthplace
- My Mother and her Two Brothers
- Their Wedding Photograph
- Sticks and Stones
- Hickory Dickory
- Jolson Sings
- First Day at the Grammar School
- Catching an Old Film on Television
- Days of TEFL
- Snap
- May 1997
- Emma at Seven Months
- Somewhere Down the Line
- No Joke
- For the Man I Used to Go Fishing With
- Fishing in the Grounds of a Therapeutic Community
- Not at his Best
- Dead of Winter
- ‘Committal’
- The Dovecote
- The Idea of Order at Hunts Cross
- Jupiter Optimus Maximus
- Squeezing a Poem out of Me
- Fragment
- Something for Gael Turnbull on his Seventieth Birthday
- Making an Arrangement
- An Invitation to Breakfast from Sydney Smith
- Hiroshima
- Sez I Sez I in Stephen's Green
- Seventh Heaven
- At Drumcliff in 1997
- Getting There
- Mnemósynon
- Moonlight on Leros
- Olives
- The Quality of Greek Light
- Scottish Waiter Bringing Squid
- Funerary Monuments, Aegina
- Taking the Hexameter a Walk
- Moonlight on Aegina
- Whalewatching – Vancouver Island
- Seventh-Storey Heaven
- Sarah Biffin
- Ancestors
- In the Dock Canteen
- On Tape at the Old People's Home
- Winter Solstice 2001
- A Long Way from Home
- Publisher's note
Seventh-Storey Heaven
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Another Look
- A Great-Grandfather
- A Great-Grandmother
- Grandfathers
- Grandmothers
- Birthplace
- My Mother and her Two Brothers
- Their Wedding Photograph
- Sticks and Stones
- Hickory Dickory
- Jolson Sings
- First Day at the Grammar School
- Catching an Old Film on Television
- Days of TEFL
- Snap
- May 1997
- Emma at Seven Months
- Somewhere Down the Line
- No Joke
- For the Man I Used to Go Fishing With
- Fishing in the Grounds of a Therapeutic Community
- Not at his Best
- Dead of Winter
- ‘Committal’
- The Dovecote
- The Idea of Order at Hunts Cross
- Jupiter Optimus Maximus
- Squeezing a Poem out of Me
- Fragment
- Something for Gael Turnbull on his Seventieth Birthday
- Making an Arrangement
- An Invitation to Breakfast from Sydney Smith
- Hiroshima
- Sez I Sez I in Stephen's Green
- Seventh Heaven
- At Drumcliff in 1997
- Getting There
- Mnemósynon
- Moonlight on Leros
- Olives
- The Quality of Greek Light
- Scottish Waiter Bringing Squid
- Funerary Monuments, Aegina
- Taking the Hexameter a Walk
- Moonlight on Aegina
- Whalewatching – Vancouver Island
- Seventh-Storey Heaven
- Sarah Biffin
- Ancestors
- In the Dock Canteen
- On Tape at the Old People's Home
- Winter Solstice 2001
- A Long Way from Home
- Publisher's note
Summary
‘Liverpool's greatest native poet’
The chap with the foreign moniker and his ‘dear Mildred’
in a room at the top of Trafford Chambers: ‘tall, dark warren’
of offices, ten pounds a year, with Liverbird views of ships
and quays, river heading west. Him drudging at accountancy,
her waiting at tables, Miss MacPherson's café, Tithebarn Street.
A happy time, despite the desperate stairs: a raven's nest
of books and flowers, a hire-purchased upright where she sang
his favourite songs, while he ‘commenced author’ above and despite
the city with its dark paternal face. Yes, they had quarrelled,
son and father, had faced each other classically. That lad's
too dreamy, spineless, always reading trash, does not understand
the meaning of… etc… Let him run a brewery like me then see
how well… etc… Let him work at Chambers & Wade in Fenwick Street,
apprentice him to a sturdy provincial desk, have him learn to remain
a humble servant faithfully yours.
In their seventh-story heaven, as he called it in The Yellow Book,
she would watch him scribbling away – his work on Meredith,
his head full of poems – touch him on the shoulder, run her fingers
through his hair. Should she play some soothing thing for him?
See, there are stars in the skylight looking down on them.
On such a night, there is no death. Yet she will gasp
with typhoid fever three years hence, this room become
drab office to a chandler, Richard will hobnob with
the decadent and infamous awhile then be forgotten. On such
a night as this, the poet and his Mildred loved and dreamed.
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- Information
- Getting There , pp. 63Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2001