Sunday/Berkeley

“The Men from Praga”, first published in the TLS in 2001, won the TLS / Blackwells Poetry Competition that year and went on to be the title poem of Anne Berkeley’s collection, which appeared in 2009. Of this volume, the poet Matthew Francis wrote that her “poems manage to seem unnervingly direct while coming at you from the most unexpected angles”. Indeed, the clipped quality of her sentences and her frequent use of caesuras in the poem this week lend it a matter-of-fact immediacy, as if the speaker were writing a postcard to send to a friend. Yet the descriptions we might typically expect from someone’s travels abroad are missing, and the speaker seems unable to trust what she herself sees: her “camera’s jammed”, she mistakes ice on the Vistula for “scum that snags on reeds”, and she cannot at first make out what the men “on camp stools” are hauling from “the tricky gleam” of the river. Because she does not know the Polish for “tram ticket”, the speaker tells us “I have to walk”, and in the hard consonant sounds that dominate the poem – “jab”, “brush”, “flings” and “grit” appear in the first three lines alone – we can almost hear her heavy footsteps on the frozen tarmac.
In the final stanza, however, the speaker surrenders (“it’s all beyond me”), and stops searching for a sense of comfort in this distant country. She accepts her foreignness, knowing that she will never be as “at home” on this holiday as she would have liked. (tls)

The Men from Praga
Because my Polish doesn’t run to “tram ticket”,
I have to walk. And my camera’s jammed.
I jab it with my gloves. Brush at orange grit
the wind flings off the tarmac. It’s miles.
And anyway, the light’s gone.
Over the bridge, across the Vistula, is Praga –
the Bear-Pit, the badlands, the concrete tower blocks.
The sky weighs down on the river, beats it flat,
squeezing out the scum that snags on reeds.
I imagine heavy industries upstream.
But it isn’t scum. Ice. Its visible edge. Because,
down on the river, far from shore:
two men crouch on camp-stools, hauling
something in from the tricky gleam, doing
delicate, intricate things with their bare hands.
I watch them. They’re quite at home
out there in the channel. Smoking, fixing bait.
The wind flicks Polish at me. It’s all beyond me –
their Sunday morning ease, their ice,
the fluent fish at large below their feet.
ANNE BERKELEY (2001)