This is a kind of auto-biography of myself and my hometown of Didcot where I lived for a good part of 30 years. The title is a reference to the love of country music that my family had instilled in me from a young age and the experience of hearing Dolly Parton at full volume drifting across the estate from the working-men’s club on a saturday night.
If I cannot get a publisher to take this chapbook length collection on I will try and publish as a Horsehoe Press pamphlet.
Potentially in future I would like to publish the poems alongside a sequence of photographs I took in 2011-12 for a multimedia project called TRACK which almost but not quite became a PHD in 2018…
The playgrounds were strewn with ash Smoke still billowed from the underpass Further out in the estuary steam rose From the tanker now beached and rusting
Lights now only flickered around the estate On every other day to conserve energy Milk floats converted to run on steam Carried bodies of those who froze
Up the icy streets to the crematorium The one place left they still used gas The old cylinder gas tanks long since Deflated like punctured balloons
Horses and cattle roamed the empty fields Looking for their owners and a bale of hay But the engines that brought them Had long since died and started to rust away
No-one now could remember how it started One day there were fires everywhere The pylons buzzed in the rain Then it stopped, silent roads, empty skies
Hands scratching for fuel kept finding Impressions of leaves and insects in the coal For a while the neighbours chopped down trees Built holes in their eco-house roofs
To let the newly built fire-places let out smoke then the hard winter stopped that By spring there was no firewood to be had All the oil and gas had burnt out long ago
Slowly the bones started to appear Bodies lying in the fields slowly fading back into the chalky soil Row upon row of chalky fossils.
Shaun Belcher was born Oxford, England in 1959 and brought up on a down-land farm before moving to a council estate in the small town of Didcot in 1966 just as England won the world cup..
He studied fine art at Hornsey College of Art, London from 1979–81 where he sat under a tree with Adrian Mitchell.
Began writing poetry in the mid 1980s and subsequently has been published in a number of small magazines and a poem 'The Ice Horses' was used as the title of the Second Shore Poets Anthology in 1996.(Scottish Cultural Press).
He now lives in Nottingham, England after two years in Edinburgh studying folk culture and several years in the city of expiring dreams working as a minion at the University of Oxford.
He is currently enjoying retirement from 20 years of teaching and hopes to write something on a regular basis again. He has been involved in various literary projects including delivering creative writing workshops in Nottingham prison for the ‘Inside Out’ project.
He supports Arsenal football club.
Favourite colours therefore red and green like his politics.
We have not won the world cup again since 1966 and Shaun Belcher is not as famous as Simon Armitage although his songs are better.
