William Wyld

Poet and artist William Wyld is hosting the next Yer Bard poetry night at Dash the Henge in Camberwell on June 18th 2025.

William works out of a studio at Thames-Side studios in Woolwich and I went along to their open studio this weekend. There were poetry readings from William and other poets including Erica Hesketh (also at Yer Bard this month), Jasmine Cooray,  Michaela Coplen and Mark Rodenhurst. William's diverse body of work was on display including portraits, natural landscapes from the Hebrides (including my ancestral homeland of Islay) and shamanic bird and crab masks. William's poetry has been published in 'Queer Life, Queer Love II' and elsewhere and they have been involved in the Southbank Centre New Poets Collective.

Slam poetry at The Duke

Coming up at the Duke in Deptford on Sunday July 19th (5 pm - 9 pm), Platform 7 present:

'2014 UK & reigning BBC slam poetry champion, David Lee Morgan performing his brand new 2015 Full Edinburgh preview show, BUILDING GOD, 8:00pm [watch David from 2014 here]

With special guest, Bird Radio performing his stunning new album featuring the words of Walter De La Mare, OH! HAPPY ENGLAND (7:15 pm)

Confirmed poetry performance sets by:

Isabel White
Jah-Mir Early
Mell B. Nyoko
Nat Nye
and the inimitable Jazzman John Clarke'

The Duke is at 125 Creek Road, SE8 3BU

Music (and poetry) Monday: Joseph O'Connor

As part of the Irish President's recent state visit to London, there was a night of Irish music broadcast on BBC-4 as 'Ultimate Irish Music at the Royal Albert Hall: A Presidential Celebration'.

Truth be told it was a bit patchy, but one of the strongest parts was a reading from the writer Joseph O'Connor, best known for his novels 'Star of the Sea' and 'Redemption Falls' (and incidentally Sinead O'Connor's older brother). His poem drew on the experience of London Irish migrant workers, with some nice South London references:

'the dancehall in Brixton, the chapel in Bow,
oh the freeze of a South East London morning,
digging trench tunnels in the Lewisham snow,

... remember me sister, in Stepney and Bayswater, is all I ask,
without sorrow or hate in Harwich and Deptford and Romford and Woolwich,
in Canning Town, in New Cross Gate,
through the city of songs where the sweet Thames flows for a London calling with lustre and light,
from the Waterloo Sunset to the rainy nights of Soho,
and down in the tube station at midnight where I drove their trains, where I hefted a pick,
as my daughters taught their children or nursed their sick...'

Joseph O'Connor

O'Connor lived in Lewisham in the late 1980s, not sure exactly where. As mentioned here before 'Star of the Sea', a novel of 19th century Irish emigration, features a criminal parody of the Lord's prayer with the words 'Our old guv'nor,which dosses in Lewisham, swelled by thy moniker, Thy racket be come, thy crack-job be done'.

O'Connor's Albert Hall poem reminded me of Dominic Behan's song McAlpine's Fusiliers, a ballad of road digging and building sites most famously performed by The Dubliners (less famously we used to play/sing it in a session at the now demolished St George's Tavern in Lambeth Road SE1 in the early 1990s):

'I've worked till the sweat near has me beat
With Russian, Czech and Pole
On shuttering jams up in the hydro dams
Or underneath the Thames in a hole;
I grafted hard and I got me cards
And many a ganger's fist across me ears;
If you pride your life, don't join, by Christ,
With McAlpine's Fusiliers'.

The ghost of the Behans was certainly hovering over the Albert Hall the other night, it ended up with Elvis Costello, Lisa Hannigan, Paul Brady, Imelda May, Andy Irvine and others singing Brendan Behan's The Auld Triangle.

If I ever get the time I could surely write a good few posts about the Behans in South London.... Brendan finishing off his play The Hostage at Joan Littlewood's house in Blackheath, Brian being jailed for his role in the South Bank builders strike in the late 1950s... more to come (maybe).

Kate Tempest wins Ted Hughes prize

Well done Kate Tempest for winning the Ted Hughes award for innovation in poetry last night. The prize was awarded to her by Carol Ann Duffy in a ceremony at the Saville Club.

The award was in recognition of her work Brand New Ancients, which relocates old gods to modern London. Brand New Ancients was co-commissioned and presented last September at the Albany in Deptford and Battersea Arts Centre.

Kate, who started out performing locally as Excentral Tempest, grew up in Brockley and has a long association with the Albany. Her latest work, the play Glasshouse, was performed at the Albany by Cardboard Citizens theatre company earlier this month.

Charles P. O'Conor: An Irish Poet in Deptford

A little St Patrick's Day post:

Charles P. O'Conor's collection of poems, Songs of a Life, was printed at the Kentish Mercury office in Blackheath Road in 1875 and reviewed by Matthew Arnold in the Pall Mall Gazette in June 1875.

In Arnold's essay, A Deptford Poet, O'Conor is described as 'an Irish workingman settled at Deptford' whose poetry 'has gaiety, tune, pathos; it invigorates...We are told that Mr O'Conor's songs are sung by Irish workmen, and we are not surprised at it. He is best when his themes are Irish, drawn from his native country and his intimate experience... here is a poor Irishman with a soul for refinement and delight, whose lot is to work with his hands down at Deptford, with frail health, work uncertain, and a wife and children to maintain; yet he managees to feel and to illustrate the truth of Schiller's excellent saying that "all art is dedicated to joy".

According to Catherine Reilly's 'Mid-Victorian Poetry, 1860-1879' (1999): Charles Patrick O'Conor was born  in County Cork in 1837 to 'poor parents'. He 'went to England in his youth, writing verse for newspapers and songs for music. Appointed to a government clerkship in Canada, but soon retired owing to ill health. Known as 'The Irish Peasant Poet'. He lived in Lewisham for many years and was often thought of as a Kentish poet. Received a civil list pension of £50 a year'. As well as 'Songs of a life: Wayside chants; Fatherland' publsihed in 1875 (96 pages), he had a collection called 'Wreaths of fancy' published by George Vickers, London, 1870 (92 pages)

So clearly there's a large body of work, only a little of which seems to be available online at present. I did though come across one of his songs that was included in a 1932 anthology LYRA CELTICA

Maura Du of Ballyshannon by Charles P. O'Conor

Maura du of Ballyshannon!
Maura du, my flower of flowers!
Can you hear me there out seaward,
Calling back the bygone hours?
Maura du, my own, my honey!
With wild passion still aglow,
I am singing you the old songs
That I sung you long ago.
And you mind, love, how it ran on--
"In your eyes asthore machree!
All my Heaven there I see,
And that's true!
Maura du!
Maura du of Ballyshannon!"

Maura du of Ballyshannon!
Maura du, my soul's one queen!
Big with love my heart is flying,
Where the grass is growing green.
Maura du, my own, my honey!
That I love you, well you know,
And still sing for you the old song,
That I sung you long ago.
And you mind, love, how it ran on--
"In your eyes asthore machree!
All my Heaven there I see,
And that's true!
Maura du!
Maura du of Ballyshannon!"

Maura du of Ballyshannon,
Maura du, the day is drear!
Ah, the night is long and weary,
Far away from you, my dear!
Maura du, my own, my honey!
Still let winds blow high or low,
I must sing to you the old song,
That I sung you long ago,
And you mind, love, how it ran on--
"In your eyes asthore machree!
All my Heaven there I see,
And that's true!
Maura du!
Maura du of Ballyshannonl

Maura du of Ballyshannon!
Maura du, when winds blow south,
I will with the birds fly homeward,
There to kiss your Irish mouth.
Maura du, my own, my honey!
When time is no longer foe,
By your side I'll sing the old song,
That I sung you long ago,
And you mind, love, how it ran on--
"In your eyes asthore machree!
All my Heaven there I see,
And that's true!
Maura du!
Maura du of Ballyshannon!"

(*asthore machree, "The darling of my heart.")

Lots more Transpontine South London Irish history and culture posts here

'William Blake - Visionary Anarchist'

William Blake - Visionary Anarchist is a group show in the Freedom Gallery of work inspired by Blake. The Gallery space is upstairs in Freedom Bookshop, the long established anarchist bookshop in Angel Alley, 84b Whitechapel High Street London E1 7QX (next to Whitechapel Art Gallery). The exhibition continues until September 30th.

Blake's Peckham visions (discussed here before) feature as a key point of reference, including John Riordan's great illustration 'William Blake and the Angels of Peckham Rye':

A poem by John Crow, with crochet by Katy Kaos, also alludes to this: 'On Peckham Rye I walked with Blake, I asked if we could see, Where he once saw the Angels, Bespangling a tree. But Blake he smiled, then on we strode, And never saw the tree. Conversing with Angels, In Eternity'.

An issue of Papakura Post Office zine produced for the exhibition includes some more related reflections in an essay entitled Blake's Absence by John Cunningham:

'Walking around Peckham Rye Common in 1767 the young William Blake glimpsed a vision of angels glittering in the branches of a tree. In the UK PLC of the 21st century this would be the imaginary jittering of an imbecile, a child that might prove not only unfit for future work but would probably be unfit for anything much except remedial education, therapy and pills. Even in Blake’s time Mommy Blake had to dissuade Daddy Blake from thrashing him. Angels seem wholly absent from Peckham Rye in 2012, unless one is occasionally conjured up from the skunk smoke of bored teenagers or the desperate yearnings of the Sunday leisure time of middle class families. Needless to say, angels are more likely to respond to the former than the latter...

X: Do you think Blake actually saw an angel on Peckham Rye Common that day in 1767?
Y: I don’t know, it’s hard to put oneself in the field of vision of a ranting non-conformist like Blake. If he did I like to imagine that through the cross hatch of messianic time Blake glimpsed the slightly demonic angel that the painter Paul Klee dubbed ‘Angelus Novus’. Claws, staring eyes, out stretched wings: an angel that the Kabbalistic Marxist Walter Benjamin thought of as being a witness to the ongoing catastrophe  of capitalist history. The ‘angel of history’, condemned to always be looking back
at the accumulated debris but awaiting her chance to become one with profane time and redeem this through destruction. It’s in Benjamin’s Theses on History'.

(more posts on Blake)