The Pump
Peter Daniels, of North London Area Meeting, was awarded first prize in the recent Times Literary Supplement Poetry Competition.
What is the background to the poem?
The poem was triggered by a photo I took of the pump in the yard at Bridport Meeting House. However, the poem isn’t particularly about Bridport: it’s some imagined location with a pump like that.
There have been other pumps I’ve known, such as the one in the yard of a farm near where I grew up, already embedded in Birmingham suburbia but still a working farm, or another pump at a cabin in Wisconsin where I have stayed. There are plenty of pumps in other people’s experience, which helps the poem to speak to readers, and when I showed it to my mother she immediately thought of the farm where her grandparents lived.
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