Jeff Cloves

Sheila – a doughty campaigner against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – is currently in hospital in London. She had a bad fall in a departure lounge and misaligned her spine. She is paralysed for the time being; her holiday ended before it began. Her friends in Stroud visit when possible and others write. A letter sent on her behalf in the first week of November, asked us to send her a white poppy.

If Sheila is able to watch TV from her hospital bed she will have observed the…

You think sometimes you’re beyond being shocked any more by anything and then you are. At 8.30pm yesterday (9 September) I listened to the news on BBC Five Live. It’s a sports station so the lead stories concerned sport and corruption I think – I didn’t pay much attention – and then came this bombshell: the Commons had voted overwhelmingly in favour of keeping British troops in Afghanistan. Only 14 MPs voted for their removal. The newsreader stated this was the first time they’d had a chance…

As deaths – and casualties – mount in Afghanistan and crowds turn out to greet the returning coffins and TV stations show bereaved families united in grief, I imagine the conflicting emotions I feel are shared by most PN readers.

We know exactly how many British servicemen and women have been killed in the prosecution of this war, yet we have no idea how many enemy combatants have been killed. In fact, we have no idea who they were or if they were actually combatants.
…

This column purports to be a review of PVT West’s poetry but it requires confession. Pat was a friend and poet/performer with whom I worked from time to time for over 30 years. Take this into account.

When Pat died I wrote of her here. Two years on, a new book of her poems has, to my chagrin, made me realise I hadn’t appreciated how significant she was – and is. I knew she felt under-valued and I realise that I under-valued her too.

In her beautiful poem, “Lament”,…

The greatest pleasure in writing for PN has always been that its editors let me write about whatever catches my fancy. And my fancy is to write about anything I fancy will interest PN readers.

However, my piece on cowardice and bravery is currently on PN’s website and exemplifies how the net has changed my notion of “PN readers”. I used to regard them as comrades-in-(harmless)-arms; now they could just be serendipitous surfers.

It’s too late to change my writing…

I read, with uneasy and strongly personal interest, the discussions in September’s issue. For the whole of my conscious life – or so it seems – I have been confronted by this question: “What would you, a pacifist, have done in the Second World War?” For years, my feeble cop-out was to say: I wasn’t even two when it started so I’m concerned with now, not then.

However, the question is a valid and proper one and, if it is posed by someone whose father fought and died in the Second…

There was a letter in October’s PN headlined: “Research on Reading”. I missed the capital letter and found I was reading about Reading and the impact of the cold war on this town. In the way of things, everything seemed to connect with one of September’s Peace Week events in Stroud.

Bruce Kent and Kate Hudson were to speak at a public meeting, and Dennis Gould and myself had been rowed in as “peace poets”. An odd thing to be; a “peace poet”.

I’m no more a peace poet…

During the Second World War, BSA Cycles made folding bicycles for paratroopers. Thus, the machines descended into occupied Europe attached to the backs of terrified soldiers suspended beneath graceful silk canopies.

It’s hard to imagine a more surreal conjunction of mechanical ingenuity, inspired sewing and blind trust in morality. Mortality, though, would be a better word and ironies abound. BSA stood for Birmingham Small Arms, which manufactured Lee-Enfield rifles for the “poor…

Not many people know this: the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) is 75 this year. I only know because a woman stopped me in Stroud High Street and told me. Her name turned out to be the same as a poet whose work I know and he turned out to be her father: Ian Serraillier (1912-1994).

Then it turned out he’d written an acclaimed novel for children, The Silver Sword, which has never been out of print in over 50 years. He was a Quaker, a conscientious objector in the Second World War…

When the Ministry of Defence decided that the only way of defending the UK from annexation by the Communist Hordes was to threaten to blast them to Kingdom Come with an atomic bomb it knew just what to do. It practised a bit of annexation itself and reactivated the RAF base at Greenham Common (enclosed for military purposes during World War II) and handed it over to US Strategic Air Command. Here in Stroud, our wonderful Rodborough Common has not been so annexed and rightly remains a Stroud…

My last column was in praise of our dear departed peace poet and friend, Adrian Mitchell. Happily, this time, I’m celebrating the lasting creativity and indefatigable spirit of the American poet, novelist, publisher, and painter, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferl was – unbelievably because he seems to me forever young – 90 on 24 March and his continuing presence is a blessing on us all.

Back in 1952, Peter Martin opened a paperback bookstore in San Francisco and named it after a Charlie…

When our friend Adrian died on 20 December 2008 a miracle occurred; the word PACIFIST appeared in newspaper headlines and on radio news programmes. How he loved this despised, forgotten word and how his work proudly championed and broadcast it. One way or another it informed most of what he wrote. And what he wrote made him Albion’s greatest living poet. His passing leaves an achingly painful void: personally, collectively, privately, publicly, politically, nationally, internationally.…

Back in September eight short video films were shown in Stroud to mark World Peace Day. Collectively the films tried to answer this question: what does it take to build peace? The screening of the films was followed by a discussion with some of the film makers on the subject “Can Art promote a culture of peace?” Heady stuff and around 30 people attended and took part. I attended too and found each of the eight films powerful in their various ways. The film that most touched me, however, was…

In the current edition of the always interesting Fourth World Newsletter*, there is a page which brought me up short.

Titled A Bill of Rights for Future Generations, it originates from Adbusters** – a Canadian “radical arts journal” – and something about the directness and simplicity of its composition lifted my spirits during a bleak spell of unrelieved wind and rain.

Its authors may be radical and arty but they’ve pleasingly compressed their thoughts and feelings into…

We – Pat V T West, Dennis Gould, Jeff Cloves – first performed together as RiffRaff Poets in St Ives in 1970. The reading was in a pub where Pat’s performance was sexually provocative, verbally explicit, and unfazed by boozy male hostility. In short she was sensational and no one who was there that can ever forget her. So, it was with great sadness we learned of her anticipated but precipitate death in a Bristol hospice on 14 June. Our friend and companion poet at so many RiffRaff gigs has,…