LINKLOVE
Poems by Barrie Wade

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Barrie Wade went to school in Killamarsh (Derbyshire) and Skegness (Lincolnshire). He took a BA in English at Nottingham, gained an MA at Leeds and a PhD at Birmingham. He has taught in a number of schools, including Counthill, Oldham, and Havelock, Grimsby as well as lecturing in the Faculty of Education at Birmingham University and editing Educational Review.

He has written educational books and articles, books for children and some stories for radio. His poetry has been read on radio and published in magazines. He has edited Lines and Levels, a volume of poems about Lincolnshire, and was for a number of years the editor of Lincolnshire Writers.

He was one of three poets whose work formed the volume Not for Ambition or Bread, edited by Brian Birch. He was a prizewinner in The National Poetry Competition in both 1981 and 1984. Linklove is his first full collection of poems.

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Linklove

You bring me cherries in a paper bag,
their juices pressed into a crimson blush
of skin, their tenderness of eyes that beg
the touch from me upon a cheek’s cool flesh,

and down my years you tumble. I take
you to the teatable, the blacklead grate,
the seconds china Dad got cheap from Stoke
and little stones in tandem round a plate;

to Mum, with TB fastening in her cheeks
and cherry rubies dangling at her ears,
doing her gypsy dance . . .
               . . . the breeze here seeks
from slanting meadow grass a dry applause.

Distance-drained to formal white and black,
a magpie stabs its stark routine at vision’s edge
and some staccato elemental beat
rivets your presence to my past. The bridge

heaves and settles, linked loves hold the strain;
promises of youth renew in taste
and touch; remembered juices stream
to refresh our places parched by pain and waste.

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LINKLOVE
Price £7.95 per copy post free (£5.30 post free to Associate Members)
Cover illustration: ‘Compendium of Medicinal Plants: Picking Cherries’. (Sloane MS 4016 folio 30). Courtesy of The British Library.
Publication: AUTUMN 1985 (56 pages laminated paperback)