an open field

Remember. Imagine. I know the smoke and steam of industry. Tall chimneys, the cordons of terraced houses. Shift changes: men in caps and thick jackets leaving or returning home in the dark. The cover of Frances Angela’s new chapbook, Philip Street , evokes these memories of my hometown in South Wales. I recall the streets named for landowners, builders and benefactors. Remember the kids we were warned against playing with …   they didn’t like me playing with patsy o’malley they said her family were thieves and rogues [i] And there was the library too: the library just for the smell [ii] I know that smell: dust, polish, paper.   But then my childhood path diverges from the one that unfolds in the subsequent pages: a children’s home, a catechism class, whiskey. This is not my story. Yet somehow, it is my story, the one I imagine, the one I experience through my senses… pub night the dark heap of mother’s clothes [iii] … and through empathy...