Mary Aherne writes poetry and short fiction, and her work…
‘Heirloom’ forms part of a sequence of poems written for the Hornsea Regeneration Project celebrating Hornsea Pottery, some of which appear in the public art trail and are included also on the website here .
After he died we found boxes of the stuff
gathering dust in the loft, mouldering in his cluttered shed.
Ashtrays, bowls and dishes, jugs, planters, boots and clogs,
mugs adorned with birds and fishes, posy vases, posy troughs.
Relics of a lifetime spent labouring in the pottery,
the pottery in the garden, the pottery in Edenfield.
Tea-time talk was of blungers, pugmills, jiggers and jolleyers
while Nan loaded the Heirloom plates, seconds from the factory shop,
with meat and tatty pie and gravy. Hard graft, a forty-five hour week
mastering moulding techniques, the art of screen-printing, squeegees
pulling the glaze over the screen, pushing the glaze through the design
positive onto the bisque-fired pots. Fired at 11000C or more, hotter
than liquid lava, Grandad said. Laughed at how Hornsea’s clever
resist print was discovered by some fluke, how the glaze
had rolled and pooled in driblets and globs like some Plinian eruption,
produced a glaze-resist invention deep in the craw of the tunnel kiln.
I claimed the hoard of mismatched Heirloom, teak-lidded jars,
spray-glazed dinner plates, stackable cups, a D-handled coffee pot.
The greens, the blues, the browns, rich and dark as the earth they came from
throbbing with glaze and metallic oxides –
red iron, cobalt, celadon, antinomy, chrome.
Mary Aherne writes poetry and short fiction, and her work has been published in various anthologies and journals including Hull, City of Poets, South, Grindstone, High Wolds Poetry Anthologies and The Critical Fish. She has edited and contributed to a number of Humber Writers’ collaborations including Hide, Postcards from Hull, Under Travelling Skies, Slipway and Incoming, commissioned for the Humber Mouth and Beverley Literature Festivals. She taught Creative Writing at the University of Hull. Projects include Shards, a collection of poems celebrating Hornsea Pottery, a number of which have been included in a public art trail, and The Beauty of Indifference, a response to the work of Marcel Duchamp, a commission from Fountain17 as part of Hull City of Culture 2017. Mary has given readings at the Humber Mouth and Beverley Literature Festivals, Fountain17, Hornsea Regeneration Project, the University of Hull, and international events in Romania and Kyrgyzstan.