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The Strandperle Notebook

The Strandperle Notebook is a long poem which tells the story of a contemporary return to the city of Hamburg by a former expatriate resident of the city. The male voice meditates: on political and emotional events of his past; on the city as a stage for those events; on the marginalisation of ideology and conflict; on the idea of urban regeneration as creating a different kind of wasteland; and ultimately on his own impotence and paralysis. The poem evokes the city’s landmarks and political ennui, in a way which both answers and echoes Sheard’s earlier Hamburg-based long poem (‘Scattering Eva’, 2005); but whereas that work dealt with the Hamburg Firestorm Raids of the Second World War for the perspective of a contemporary return to scatter the ashes of a survivor of that cataclysm, this poem rejects the larger historical scale to illuminate something of a post-historical state. The poem is re-contextualised by its placement in the LRB, a literary-political publication which often explores ideological states through essays and criticism; here, that exploration is effected through a literary text. The poem’s formal elements – an uncertain series of stanza-chapters written in rhyming tetrameter, the form of ballads - is informed by Tony Harrison’s ‘V.’, an 1980s long poem of reflection on past and current states of culture and nationhood. Unlike that poem, however - and in homage to a redundant modernism – the form breaks up under the pressure of its material, and is ultimately fractured by it.