Cenotaph South - South London's poetic landscape

'Cenotaph South: mapping the lost poets of Nunhead Cemetery' (Penned in the Margins, 2016) by Chris McCabe is a remarkable book. Partly it is what it says on the cover – an exploration of some of the largely forgotten poets buried there including Marian Richardson and Albert Craig. But he also wanders over the wider South London poetic landscape, extending from Robert Browning's cottage on Telegraph Hill, through the cemetery and onto William Blake's Peckham Rye and then to Dulwich woods and village where the Crown and Greyhound pub ('the Dog') hosted poetry gatherings upstairs from 1940s to 1980s. He also mentions contemporary Peckham poets like Caleb Femi, performing at the Review Bookshop in Bellenden Road.

He goes in search of a hawthorn tree suitable for Blake's vision of angels on Peckham Rye and find the most appropriate candidate is to be a tree on the Rye Hill estate:

'Quaint English Bauhaus. There is a map of Peck Hill and Rye Hill Park Estate laid out in the colours of a Butlins map: south London joyland. I check the Rocque map, completed almost to the date that Blake was here: this would have been open fields, the edge of an enclosure separating the Rye from what was most likely private fields. I weave through the outskirts of the estate. The land around Frome House is lined with what look to be ancient trees, bark knotted in folds. The trees grow within yards of the windows of the flats, past the patched light that breaks through the skeleton of a scaffold. The trees are trying to grow inwards, towards the sun. There is what looks like a hawthorn here - gnarled and ancient-looking, awesome in scale, towering over the flats. This is a hawthorn to take on the oaks. A hawthorn worthy of any angel'.

We don't have to take literally that this is the tree - the details of Blake's childhood visions are sketchy to say the least - but I like the idea that it might be found not in the park itself but in nearby council estate. 

In 'mapping out the woods, pubs, colleges and houses of South East London's dead poets' he finds the area to be 'the richest landscape of poetic activity in London'. Is it something about the hills, home to the muses in classical times according to Robert Graves so why not here too? 

'The word muse, we are told, comes from the root mont, meaning mountain. I think of the high points around Nunhead cemetery, Telegraph Hill (where Robert Browning lived) and the higher neighbouring peaks of Sydenham Hill and Forest Hill. There is a pull to poets in these high points, an irresistible urge for the heights: light, perspective, space'.