On its publication, critics were quick to heap praise on a volume that, as poet Alison Brackenbury describes, was unusual for showcasing the "wit, warmth and energy of the West Midlands" "Liz Berry is the Black Country’s shining daughter", she concluded. Prior to its publication, Berry won first prize in the Poetry London competition, and had also begun to establish herself as a winning performer of her work, combining an infectious enthusiasm with lyrical delivery of her lines.
Figurative language used in i loved her first by heartland full#
It marks the emergence of a compelling new voice – one that will continue to grow in range and authority." So it has proved.īerry’s debut full collection, Black Country, was published by Chatto in 2014. As Andrew Motion commented on The Patron Saint of Schoolgirls: "This short selection of poems is a completely satisfying achievement.
In the title poem, Berry’s interest in conjuring the transcendent from the everyday also emerges, as a school pupil becomes a heavenly spirit of sorts, unexpected leader of a cult: "The Head Girl / kissed my cheek in the dark-room, / first years wrote my name / on the flyleaf of their hymn books". ‘Trucker’s Mate’, for example, finds long-haul lorry driving as the stage for an illicit love affair, "the M6 toll, lined with two million / pulped Mills and Boons how love is buried / in unlooked for places, kept secret as us". In 2010 The Patron Saint of Schoolgirls, saw elements of Liz Berry’s fascination with ‘Brummie’ dialect and personal histories become evident, but it was the combination of knowing innocence, transgressive sensuality and a gift for the suggestive image that made the pamphlet’s poems stand out. She first came to prominence as a poet when publishing a pamphlet with Les Robinson’s enterprising Tall Lighthouse Press, a venture which had already first discovered striking new voices such as Sarah Howe, Helen Mort and Emily Berry. Liz Berry was born in the West Midlands in 1980, and continues to live in the region. This a poetry continually fascinated with the evocative potential of the art form it sings the Black Country so as to remember and preserve, but also, occasionally, to reinvent. And, of course, ‘bostin fittle’ – Black Country dialect for ‘great food’." Just as the Birmingham Roller is a symbol of hope and light amid the coal dust and blackness, then, granny’s homemade "faggots minced with kidney and suet" are a powerful, albeit nostalgic, source of commemoration and revivification: "I touched / my lips to the hide of the past: / salty, dark, unexpected".
As a review in The Guardian noted: "Here are Thomas Telford’s ‘fabled waterways’ and the swaggering Lady Godiva, the right hook of the ‘Tipton Slasher’ and the legend of ‘The Black Delph Bride’. Berry’s primary subject is the Black Country of her English West Midlands home, a heartland of iron foundries, coal mines and steel mills, and her language frequently draws upon the rich but lesser-known storehouse of dialect words from that region. This is especially impressive given the thematic focus and recurrent poetic diction that marks out the writing. Energetic yet deeply historic, wide-eyed but knowing, flighty and rooted, the poems seek to charm as much as challenge the reader, and are rarely predictable.
Like the tumbling pigeon of her poem ‘Birmingham Roller’, an ordinary-looking bird that turns out to be an "acrobat of the terraces", Liz Berry’s poetry is full of unlikely surprises.
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