Notes

‘Mare Island’: a naval shipyard in California from 1854 until it was closed in 1993.

‘Views in a landscape mirror’: ‘This peaceful nature reserve is not natural’ from Cumbria Tourism pamphlet Heritage Walks in the Western Lake District. ‘Gliding in silence with unfettered sweep’ from Wordsworth’s sonnet sequence on the Duddon estuary. ‘A nice sharp boy’ is based on the inquest into the death of Richard John Welch as reported in the Whitehaven News, 8 October 1903.

‘The invasion of China’: the penultimate line echoes a line in a poem by a seventeenth-century poet, Wang Chi-Wu, which itself draws on an earlier source (trans. Robert Kotewall and Norman L. Smith in the Penguin Book of Chinese Verse, 1962).

‘Neither near nor far away’: the poem draws on Pascoli’s imagery and is loosely based on his life (1855–1912), in particular the defining events of his childhood: his father’s unsolved murder and the death of his mother. The epigraph from his poem ‘In the fog’, reads ‘ [I could only hear] on that sea without waves or beaches, / footsteps neither near nor far away’.

‘Deer Shelter Skyspace’: a work by James Turrell at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, created from an eighteenth-century deer shelter. The poem draws on Turrell’s account of his experiences as a pilot in ‘Greeting the Light: an interview with James Turrell’, in Works and Conversations (www.conversations.org).

‘Extracts from three humorous stories’: inspired by text in the Crocodile Album of Soviet Humour (Pilot Press, 1943).

‘Some favourable effects on bird life’: some details adapted from E.M. Nicholson, Birds and Men (Collins, 1951). Italicised lines in stanzas 1, 3 and 4 are quotations from the book.

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