‘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.
