Peter Cash: LINCOLNSHIRE CHURCHES (1998) £4.50

£4.50

Of English counties, only Norfolk and Somerset can boast more churches than Lincolnshire.

Peter Cash grew up in area of the county in which church buildings are ubiquitous.  “They creep into your consciousness,” he explains, “whether you hold religious beliefs [which he doesn’t] or not …  

You cannot drive more than five miles in any direction without coming across yet another of them, usually standing in open countryside, abandoned by the community which it once served, probably because that was a village which has disappeared in all but name: for example, Croft, Wainfleet St Mary, Haugham, Ashby Puerorum, Waithe.”

There are few better accounts of Lincolnshire’s churches than this paragraph from 1989 by a writer whose mother became Supreme Governor of the Church of England in 1952:

“Lincolnshire, I know, is blessed (some see it as an intolerable burden) with over 600 remarkable churches.  Despite the fact that in these days they may be redundant owing to declining populations and dwindling congregations, they are nevertheless extremely important monuments and a vital part of our national heritage.  Each one has a character and a fascination of its own.  They were built literally to the glory of God and in a sureness of faith which may seem strange nowadays. The very stones they are built with seem to have a soul of their own.  They provide a focal point for the village and a landmark in the sweeping Lincolnshire countryside.”  

They are ‘monuments’, says Prince Charles.  But to what exactly ..?  The answer, to coin a phrase, is to a civilisation gone with the wind off the North Sea.  In this collection, Peter Cash meditates upon this melancholy loss of purpose.  He wonders what happened to the religious and social forces which put these fine buildings in their pre-eminent places on the Lincolnshire landscape: in doing so, he perceives an ironic incongruity between the grandeur of the buildings and the decline of those forces.  In 1998, Anne Stevenson wrote:

“In Peter Cash’s poems, patient and unobtrusive networks of rhyme and half-rhyme transform grammatical statement into art.  This is the kind of quiet excellence which is usually passed over in poetry competitions, but which is in fact flawless.”

Anne Stevenson
CROFT
Unfrequented roads run nowhere  
except into one another.  Even where they intersect, 
signposts can only point forlornly 
through flat pastures to the slow neglect

of All Saints’ Church: a square
point of reference on which those doubts 
– cast by open land and sky –
converge.  Quite whereabouts

my ancestors had dwellings
(which made this tower imperative)
has – for this half-century, at least –
been hard to see: by 1965,

too few lived near enough the fête
to fill the Vicarage lawn again ...
The closed school is an unused ‘hall’;
cow-parsley ruminates on Pinchbeck Lane.

In fact, I never found a churchyard
more confused, worse wrecked
– as if the community lost its shape 
long before its last Searby died.  In fact,

each grave is nothing but a clever stone
made stupid and illegible by rain;
nor can the table-tomb under the copper beech
– collapsed, embarrassed, vain –

be much of a comfort to Jobs 
in their constant adjustments to loss.
Outnumbered children, with a dog, 
rampage across the sunken moss.