Sorry to hear of the death of the Liverpool poet Brian Patten. I first met Brian in 1997. I’d been invited to a friend’s wedding in Valencia but a few days before the wedding the venue had been moved to Mojácar. The groom, my friend Tim O’Grady, because of the change of plan, asked me if I could pick up a hire car in Valencia, then pick up two more guests who were later flying into Alicante airport a few hours apart. They were Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of the Oxford Stage Company, and Brian Patten.
I had heard of Brian, long associated with the Liverpool poets of the Sixties. In later years, anytime I was staying in Hammersmith I would call in and see him or have a drink with him.
The journey from Valencia to Mojácar was about 250 kilometres. It was around midnight when Brian landed at Alicante. Dominic, Brian, and I at the wheel (driving for the first time on the ‘wrong’ side) then headed off in the car to the quaint and picturesque Andalusian town in Almería, telling stories to pass the time.
I told Brian that across the North he was famous and that his poems were framed and on the walls of many republican homes. (I had heard somewhere that when he was a kid Brian might have followed the Liverpool Provincial Grand Orange Lodge, though I never had this confirmed.)
He was taken aback and then I explained.
I was in Belfast Prison in early February 1990, before Valentine’s Day, when I received a copy of his book, Love Poems. At teatime I brought the book into the canteen during recreation and there was a free-for-all. Grown, gruff, ‘RTPs’ made a dive for the book and were arguing over who got it next.
‘Don’t forget, I bags it after you.’ ‘Fuck off, I asked him first!’ ‘Look, I only need four lines.’ ‘So what! You can wait your turn.’
When it comes to love, comradeship goes out the window! Oh, the scramble for St Valentine’s Day—the day when birds choose their mates for the year!
I told Brian that his love poems had been transcribed and then signed and passed off by the prisoners as their own work.
‘There are girlfriends and wives in Derry, in Belfast, in Crossmaglen who to this day think their husbands could have been the next Yeats or Heaney but for their dedication to the Republican cause. As proof they point to the framed verse hanging proudly on the living room wall: “To Geraldine. A few thoughts, a few lines I penned, just to say how much I love you.”’
Brian was in stitches.
Rest in Peace, good man.
-oo0oo-
Now that the summer has emptied
and laughter’s warned against possessions,
and the swans have drifted from the rivers,
like one come back from a long journey
no longer certain of his country
or of its tangled past and sorrows,
I am wanting to return to you.
…………………………………………………………
Probably it is too early in the morning;
probably you have not yet risen
and the curtains float
like sails against the window.
But whatever, whatever the time, the place, the season,
here I am again at your door,
bringing a bunch of reasons why I should enter.
………………………………………………………
I will give you a poem when you wake tomorrow.
It will be a peaceful poem.
It won’t make you sad.
It won’t make you miserable.
It will simply be a poem to give you
when you wake tomorrow.