Poem Of The Week : Furnace Hill By William Bedford

It isn’t often that we revisit old territory in our Poem of the Week strand, but William Bedford’s engaging, self-contained ‘Furnace Hill’ is taken from a collection that is constructed around a single unified theme: that of different perspectives of a working class Sheffield in the early part of the twentieth century, and bound up, indivisibly, with collective family memory.

Rendered in three quatrains and a concluding tercet, in the manner of the whole collection, the poem is loaded with the kind of meaning that sonnets are usually distilled to convey. ‘Furnace Hill’, a title that carries the brute unambiguousness of a Bessemer convertor, denotes a city and a district’s main economic impetus in two words – no more, no less. Sheffield’s denizens, the labouring classes, the steel workers, cutlers and mesters, are caught within the points of its singular compass, and it is they who make up the rump of a landscape circumscribed by mills and manufactories.

Poetical leanings have no place in this hinterland of fire and blast furnace, a point not lost on the librarian for whom any suggestion of Blakean fellow feeling is ludicrously inconsistent: the person described by the narrator must be ‘mekking things up’, as poets are everywhere wont to do. Bedford’s flourish is Harrisonian to the core, as double-edged as the binary possibility of an elemental symbolism obtaining in the tempering flames. In the universe of the prophet – Moses Jones is a kind of shaman – it is possible to find value in hope and endurance, as Tony Harrison does in the broken-backed bookseller, Thomas Campey.

There is a defiant certainty in the closing stanza of this fine poem: that the Hephaestean underworld of blast furnaces is also a domain of words, poetry and a sense of purgative renewal. Though the view from Tinsley Viaduct today is not one that William Sergeant could have anticipated.

‘Furnace Hill’ is taken from The Bread Horse and is published by Red Squirrel Press (2015)