3Therefore, although Liz Berry’s poetry is distinctly grounded in her native Midlands, and particularly in the Black Country and Birmingham, we are interested in demonstrating how emotional intensity is depicted in her poems as centrifugal movement: as a flight away from the industrial past, away from the strictures of motherhood, away from received pronunciation. The becoming-animal which recurs in so many of Berry’s earlier poems becomes a search for out-of-body transcendence in her motherhood poems, which in turn manifests itself in the ‘winglet words’ which populate her live performances. To trace this thematic trajectory, the three authors have employed a deliberately multifocal strategy, combining concepts from our respective fields in order to approach Berry’s poetry from different, yet converging directions.

Moving Landscapes

4While North, South, and East do not loom large in Berry’s works, the back covers and biographical sleeves of her collections all mention she is a native of the West Midlands. In her case, the insistence on geographical location is more than a bit of trivia or a selling point, as the region has shaped her language, her perspective and her poetry. The titles of the poems included in her four published collections map out the physical region she writes in and from—Birmingham, Dudley, Glasshouse Bridge, Gorsty Hill Tunnel, Monmore Green, Princes End, Tipton-on-Cut, Wolverhampton Railway Station, Wulfrun Hall . . . from the local names of residential areas to the second largest city in Britain, these toponyms draw up a more restricted map than the West Midlands though, one that does not include Coventry or the Malvern Hills for instance.

5Berry’s poetic map covers an area that escapes Land Registry, one that is steeped in history—namely the Black Country. This cultural area earned its name either from the dark clouds produced by the heavy industry that dominated in the long nineteenth century or from the coat of coal slag deposited on the surface of the landscape by the mines, up until the last ones closed in the 1960s. In The Old Curiosity Shop, Charles Dickens used the Black Country as an inspiration for the heavily industrialized town where the novel’s main character, Nell Trent, spends the night by the furnace:

On every side, and far as the eye could see into the heavy distance, tall chimneys, crowding on each other, and presenting that endless repetition of the same dull, ugly form, which is the horror of oppressive dreams, poured out their plague of smoke, obscured the light, and made foul the melancholy air. On mounds of ashes by the wayside, sheltered only by a few rough boards, or rotten pent-house roofs, strange engines spun and writhed like tortured creatures; clanking their iron chains, shrieking in their rapid whirl from time to time as though in torment unendurable, and making the ground tremble with their agonies. Dismantled houses here and there appeared, tottering to the earth, propped up by fragments of others that had fallen down, unroofed, windowless, blackened, desolate, but yet inhabited. (Dickens 338–339)

6The seamless movement from the proliferation of the machine (with the plural forms, the repetitions, the use of present participles) to the dehumanization of the landscape (with the passive forms) tells a story of alienation in which the frontier between the human and the mechanical is blurred through a series of transfers and hypallages. Dickens uses the grotesque to criticise the Victorian ideology of laissez-faire capitalism which transforms men into machines. Some 150 years later, Berry takes another transformative look at the Black country that takes stock of its industrial past only to transcend it—just like the narrator in Dickens, she walks through the landscape (‘on every side, and far as the eye could see into the heavy distance’) only to take a bird’s eye view that will change the perspective on the region.

7In ‘Bird’ (Berry 2014, 1–2), the very first poem of her first published collection, the poetic I is progressively transformed into a bird. In spite of the strong Ovidian echoes of such a metamorphosis and the possible nod to Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Little Red Cap’—the opening poem of The World’s Wife (1999) which begins ‘at the end of childhood’ and ends with the speaker ‘singing, all alone’—the poem enacts a ‘becoming bird', which requires the speaker to move past her self as a subject and to enact deterritorialization (Deleuze and Guattari), to escape fixations through territorial shifts. ‘Bird’ is a poem of (trans)formation and a dawn chorus. As the night recedes, ‘black on gold', the speaker hears ‘throstles, jenny wrens, / jack squalors', local names for local birds, calling her out. She is transported by her fellow creatures before flying solo and finding her own voice, ‘black upon black.’ Her metamorphosis, based on the deconstruction of her identity, does not mean she leaves the Black Country behind, but that she is ready to take it with her everywhere she goes.

8During her first flight, she takes a bird’s eye view of the Black Country: ‘as they lifted me up from Wren’s Nest / bore me over the edgelands of concrete and coal.’ During the workshop she gave at Université de Lille (18/10/2023), Liz Berry explained that the aptly named ‘Wren’s Nest’ does not refer to the nearby National Nature Reserve, but to the council housing estate in the North of Dudley, which, in the 1980s, when she grew up, was still a squalid area of crime and unemployment. The word ‘edgelands’ might sound somewhat ironic in ‘Bird', as it is traditionally used for the liminal space between urban and rural areas. The bird-poet ‘loop[s] / the infant school and the factory', another Dickensian shortcut reminiscent of Mr M’Choakumchild’s school which manufactured children.

9Even though the industrial nature of the region seems to have been indexed in literature, the poet suggests a line of flight through her intimate knowledge of the territory. The images of the birds chorusing ‘in [her] mother’s voice’ and ‘the grandmother waving up from her fode’ both suggest a matrilineal heritage, based on transmission and transformation. The language she inherited from them is imbued with the sounds of the Black country: the poem has four dialect words, the birds speak the local dialect and the next poem onto which ‘Bird’ opens (the last line reads ‘and this is what I sang. . .’) is in dialect too. Therefore, even though she adopts a bird’s eye view that allows her to map out the geographical and cultural area she writes from, Berry still considers the area as the source of her poetic voice. Her becoming-bird is a becoming-poet.

10Berry also probes the landscape of the West Midlands to unearth its historical past. The eponymous poem ‘Black Country’ (Berry 2014, 6–7) is a case in point as it tells of the apparition of one of the Iron Horses, an installation made of twelve cut-out metal horse sculptures situated along the railway between Wolverhampton and Birmingham by Kevin Atherton in 1987, and which is an overarching presence in the collections. The poem is an ekphrasis of the artistic mise-en-abyme of the industrial past. The speaker describes how the survivors of the mining community react to the symbol of their history, as it ‘haul[s] the past / from the dead earth.’ The sculpture’s outlandishness is emphasized by the opposition between indefinite articles used to describe the iron horse turned mythical (‘a wingless Pegasus', ‘a black shadow', ‘a gift from the underworld’) and the definite articles used to describe the industrial surroundings (‘on the scrub', ‘the gates / of the derelict factories', ‘the pits', ‘the winding gear’). While the horse, which ‘fac[es] East', ‘galloping', larger than life, ‘mouth parted as if it would / swallow the sun that rose', is embodied through possessive adjectives (‘its flanks', ‘its mane', ‘its ear’), the place becomes more universal due to the use of zero articles (‘where houses / still collapsed into empty shafts / and hills bore scars’). The men’s emotional response is described in physical terms, but nowhere is it interpreted. The past remains open for interpretation and the encounter reads like an epiphany.

11Besides upwards and downwards movements in space, there are also horizontal ones. In Berry’s four collections, many poems recount a journey through landscapes and cityscapes, ‘in unlooked for places’ (Berry 2014, 17). These include, to name but a few: ‘The Red Shoes', ‘Tipton-on-Cut’ and ‘Goodbye Irene’ (Berry 2014, 9, 11 and 51); ‘The Republic of Motherhood', ‘Sky Birth', and ‘The Spiritualist Church’ (Berry 2018, 1, 8, and 19); ‘Secret Garden’ (Berry 2021, 11); ‘Wandering’ and ‘Come on, he says’ (Berry 2023, 47 and 92–93). The many verbs of movement and the prepositions used while the speaker paces her environment up and down have nothing pedestrian about them—‘We’ll glide along', ‘we’ll trot in on an oss', ‘we’ll goo straight to', ‘we’ll nightowl away’ (Berry 2014, 11–12)—as they blur the frontier between human and animal, and play on the polysemy allowed by dialect words. ‘The Red Shoes', based on the eponymous fairy tale by Andersen, does not end in Christian redemption through death but, more like the Footloose movie (dir. Herbert Ross, 1984), in a pagan life-affirming dance in which the tapping of the shoes dancing through the street may be a metaphor for a poetic rhythm that escapes the regularity of metric prosody. Berry’s speakers are walkers who transform and are transformed by their environment. What fellow Midlander R. M. Francis says about the canal (the cut in the local dialect) in her poems is true of all the places through which the speaker journeys:

It’s everywhere and nowhere—perfect territory for Berry, who leads us, through her poems, into these haunting sites and to experiences of transformation or epiphany—often preceded by passing through something mucky, animalistic, feral. (Francis)

12‘The Secret Garden’ (Berry 2021, 11) begins with ‘There’s no map. Forget that.’ and invites the reader to follow a butterfly (and even to become one). The sonnet is reminiscent of the passage in which Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles walks through an overgrown garden to listen to Angel playing the harp in his attic—images of ‘larvae’ abound and ivy is described as ‘Clingy, luscious, misunderstood', the qualities of the vegetal, mineral, animal and human worlds blurring the map to create a territory where everything is interrelated, becoming what is essentially an ecosystem.

13The Black Country may never be luminous but it is always numinous—it is a sacred centre, an omphalos; to paraphrase Seamus Heaney in ‘Mossbawn', it is the navel of the world found outside your back door. From a map with placenames that work like geographical coordinates to a territory where the becoming-animal raises the question of how the speakers can inhabit the Black Country’s ecosystem today, Liz Berry’s poems blur the frontiers of the West Midlands and deconstruct regional identity, which is in turn reterritorialized in her experience of motherhood in her second collection.

The Affects of Motherhood

14Liz Berry’s second collection of poems, The Republic of Motherhood (2018) is centred around the ‘becoming-mother’ experienced by the poetic persona. The experience of motherhood is painted as a deeply disorienting, even alienating one. The relationship to space and place is completely reconfigured by the reality of motherhood, and although the combination of horizontal and vertical movements that could be found in Black Country is still present in this collection, it takes on a completely new meaning. In the poems from The Republic of Motherhood, the horizontal wanderings of the mother poet are associated with the aimless and repetitive roaming of the exhausted new mother pushing her pram around. This movement is portrayed as precarious and fragile, and is on occasions brought to a halt by the reality of illness or exhaustion. The solution to the threat of stasis is found in an aspiration to transcendence, portrayed as a vertical movement of the soul ascending above the body, a movement from the material to the immaterial.

15Unlike a poem like ‘Bird’ in which, as we have seen, the poetic persona was able to fly above the streets of her hometown and was able to appropriate the map by naming its places, the poems from The Republic of Motherhood replace the map of the Black Country with the territory of maternal emotions. The places mentioned are generic, but they do not belong to any recognisable area and often become symbols of moments in the poet’s life. This is particularly the case in poems which portray the experience of childbirth, such as ‘Horse Heart’ or ‘Sky Birth.’ In ‘Horse Heart', the poetic persona appears bedridden as she waits for the contractions to start. In order to stave off the anxiety of stasis and silence, she takes a flight line by following the sound of the baby’s heart through the monitor, which becomes akin to horses’ hooves galloping through ‘the high wet grass of their lives’ (Berry 2018, 5). In ‘Sky Birth', the poetic persona’s labour pains are described as the ascension of a mountain. The landscape is an intensely private one, as in this poem, the hospital setting completely disappears, to be replaced by a desolate wind-blown peak which stands for the climax of the pain of childbirth. Once again, the poem ends on the possibility of the soul leaving the body, which is shed as a mere envelope: ‘I would have gladly left my body / on that lit ledge for birds to pick clean’ (Berry 2018, 9). In these poems, the mother poet can roam through her own private landscapes in order to explore and appropriate the extreme sensations associated with childbirth instead of remaining bed-ridden and voiceless. The poet Rachel Bower uses a similar kind of imagery in her own childbirth poem entitled ‘Stones', in the collection Moon Milk, which was published the same year as Liz Berry’s The Republic of Motherhood: ‘and wish for alpine streams / to smooth our stones / for ancient women / to trample moans / through sweet grass / and gift us maps of crags / trace the way / pebble paths to guide us’ (Bower 2018, 24).

16Yet as she becomes a mother, Berry’s poetic persona realises that she is not as free in her movements as she used to be. The opening poem in the collection, eponymously titled ‘The Republic of Motherhood’ represents the poetic persona entering motherhood as one would enter a foreign territory: ‘I crossed the border into the republic of motherhood’ (Berry 2018, 1). The metaphor aims to convey the feeling of the Unheimliche, the impression of displacement from one’s home, which the poetic persona associates with becoming a mother. One such description can also be found in Rachel Cusk’s motherhood memoir, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, in which the narrator recounts the impossibility she experiences of connecting with the world around her after she has become a mother: ‘We meet at the uncrossable border between the free world and the closed regime of motherhood’ (Cusk 90). Like the narrator in Cusk’s memoir, the poetic persona in ‘The Republic of Motherhood’ has stepped into a foreign, dystopian world from which there seems to be no coming back. In the poem ‘So Tenderly It Wounds Them', the mothers cherish objects and memories from the time before they were mothers, which becomes ‘the old country’ (Berry 2018, 13). While the experience of childbirth was located in a natural landscape, which stood for the animal-like emotions of bringing forth a child, the experience of day-to-day mothering is located in a nondescript urban setting. Stripped of her former identity, the mother poet is now made to roam the streets of the new country that is Motherhood without a compass or a map: ‘Each day I pushed my pram through freeze and blossom / down the wide boulevards of Motherhood’ (Berry 2018, 1). The mother poet has arrived in a place where the streets have no name, and where she has lost any sense of place. The usual landmarks of her familiar territory have been replaced by generic place names, which she is unable to invest with an emotional connection: the factory, the municipal baths, the weighing clinic, the supermarket, etc.

17Lisa Baraitser, who has written about the phenomenology of motherhood, explains that the experience is characterised by encumberment and repetition (2008). In ‘The Republic of Motherhood', the mother’s movements become impeded by the paraphernalia of motherhood, symbolised here by the pram, which needs to be pushed around. She is also stuck in an endless cycle of repetitive actions, described in the poem by the aggregate of gerunds: ‘Feedingcleaninglovingfeeding’ (Berry 2018, 1). In poems like ‘Marie’ or ‘The Spiritualist Church', the mother poet is still pushing her pram through the streets but she is looking for a place where she would be welcome, where she could anchor herself. In both cases, that place happens to be a church where she is hoping to find, not so much religious solace, but a place where she can rest from her aimless wanderings. In ‘Marie', she recounts the experience of how her soul was ‘saved’ by the virginal figure of ‘Marie, with your black hair', whose presence structures the poem like a refrain. The poem reads like an ex-voto in which the poet presents her gratitude to a saint-like figure who has rescued her from drowning: ‘you made a wave of your body, / and like a gasping fish / I was borne upon it’ (Berry 2018, 18). The ambiguity of ‘I was borne', which is made to echo with ‘I was born', evokes the possibility of a spiritual rebirth from the relentless materiality of motherhood.

18In ‘The Spiritualist Church', the poet is threatened not by drowning but by being buried under the snow. The traditional associations of winter and death are literalised throughout the collection with references to the winter which followed the birth during which the baby and the mother both became sick and needed to be hospitalised. In ‘The Spiritualist Church', the mother poet once again goes through death and rebirth and is saved by her proximity to a church: ‘Every day that first winter, / the winter I thought would bury us both, I walked past that church in sallow light / carrying my son at my chest, / my bones luminous with tiredness’ (Berry 2018, 19). Her salvation comes specifically from the inscription on the church’s gates which reads: ‘Light Nature Truth.’ These words function as a promise of transcendence and elevation beyond the physical reality of illness and the materiality of mothering, symbolised here not by the pram but by the baby attached to the poet’s chest. In the last part of the poem, the mother poet fantasises about being taken in by the congregation in the church and being allowed to rest. Just like in the poem ‘Marie', she wishes to be allowed to die in order to finally get some rest and to be reborn as a lighter, ethereal being:

and someone gentle would rest their palms on me,
touch me with a light so staggering
I’d be opened up, my soul rising
from the x-ray of my skeleton
like a white-veined moth, my body below.
(Berry 2018, 20)

19The aspiration to transcendence is also an aspiration to poetry and the winter of the soul also symbolises the extinction of the poet’s voice. As Susan Rubin Suleiman in ‘Writing and Motherhood: The Mother Tongue’ and Susan Stanford Friedman in ‘Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor’ have demonstrated, the experience of motherhood appears in our culture and in the literary canon as the antithesis of artistic creation, for material as well as symbolic reasons. While young mothers are often too tired and wrapped up in the everyday necessities of taking care of an infant to access the mental space necessary to write poetry, they also have to battle society’s expectations that they devote their entire lives to their children and give up their creative ambitions. The desire to rise above and beyond the material reality of motherhood is reminiscent of Sylvia Plath’s later poems, and particularly ‘Ariel', in which the poetic persona decides to ignore ‘the child’s cry', allows it to ‘melt into the wall’ while she pursues her ‘suicidal’ flight into ‘the red / eye, the cauldron of morning’ (Plath 239). Both poems portray the mother poet’s wish to escape the materiality of motherhood and gain access to the more spiritual dimension of poetry writing. Yet in Liz Berry’s case, the aspiration to poetry serves a more collective purpose. The body she wishes to rise above is the body of the individual mother, untethered from the community. As her soul ascends, it reaches a vantage point from which she can speak, or rather sing, for all the other mothers like her. The mother poet wishes for her body to become ‘hollow as an instrument, humming / with voices’ (Berry 2018, 20), an echo chamber through which she can channel the voices of other similarly forlorn women, to form a chorus.

20The desire to take a bird’s eye view of the travails of motherhood can also be found in the poem ‘So Tenderly It Wounds Them’ in which the poet allows her voice to wander ‘through rain-rattled streets', picking up the thoughts and images that run through other mothers’ heads. At the end of the poem, we find the mother poet lying in her own house with her own child, yet mentally roaming the streets in search of a community of voices: ‘I hear them / I hear myself our dark soft moans / animals waking in a starless country dawn’ (Berry 2018, 14). This is in keeping with the desire which animated Liz Berry when she wrote the collection of poems, which was to gather together the experiences of other women who had shared her plight. In an interview with Andrew Forster recorded for the British Library in 2019, she states that the collection was meant to pay tribute to the community of other women who helped her get through the first months with her child:

I was kept afloat through that lonely, difficult time by the support of other women: in clinics, playgrounds, church halls and messy living rooms. We shared our lives. The stories were beautiful, raw, heartbroken, joyous, deep beyond reckoning. But when I looked at poems, the place that had always comforted me, that experience was hard to find. It made me feel very lost. So I wanted to create a little book that would contain those stories, those longings and fears. (Berry 2019)

Not Keeping Mum: Mapping Melodies in Liz Berry’s Readings

23This is demonstrably true of women who speak with West Midlands accents. When the MP for Birmingham Yardley, Jess Phillips, tried to persuade the compilers of Hansard to correct their mistranscription of her speeches about moms, by replacing the (denaturing) spelling ‘mum', she was met with a mixture of incredulity, intractability and condescension. Phillips’s habitual reaction to the mansplaining about her supposedly faulty pronunciation of this crucial word is typical of a combative Brummie mom: ‘It’s literally my name.’

24Liz Berry’s assertion of the sounds of her motherly voice, while sometimes disarmingly frank, tends to be less adversarial. She leans towards the upbeat, even when reflecting on adversity. In terms of prosody, however, Phillips and Berry share a characteristic tendency to express emotional emphasis—be it empathetic or combative—by accentuating what is perhaps the best-known feature of the accent of a West Midlands woman: the so-called ‘Brummie whine’—the upward curve of pitch on or after the nuclear syllable of a tone group in declarative statements (Malarski). When Phillips says ‘my name’ like this, not only is the final diphthong broader and more open in comparison to English received pronunciation (RP), but, unlike RP, the musical pitch of her voice veers sharply upwards across the vowel glide, sounding a minor third glissando, describing a curve like the raised wingtip of a modern jet, known as a ‘winglet.’

25The term ‘winglet words', will thus be adopted for the remainder of this article in reference to words containing syllables pronounced with a pointedly rising intonation, in any context in which an RP speaker would be unlikely to perform this rise. An apt example is the way Liz Berry says the words ‘beat like a wing’ in the recording of her reading of ‘Bird’ at the Ó Bhéal Festival in Cork in 2019 (fig. 1).

26As such, ‘winglet words’ is being employed primarily (but not exclusively) to refer to what Alan Cruttenden says is:

the most noticeable variation within British English[,] the more extensive use of rising tones in many northern cities. This phenomenon is reported for Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow, Belfast and Tyneside . . . It is not reported for rural areas of England or Scotland, nor does it occur in Edinburgh. (Cruttenden 133)

28However, the term ‘winglet words’ also echoes the Homeric formula, ἕπεα πτερόεντα [epea pteroenta, or ‘winged words’]. Theories abound as to what was meant by this stock reporting clause in Homer—including ‘swiftly delivered speech', ‘words as significant as [those of] Hermes', ‘words that fly [and strike home] like feathered arrows', ‘words that soar like birds', or simply ‘here comes some more direct speech’ (Letoublon). The parallel drawn here with the rising tones of English dialects clearly supports a prosodic explanation for Homer’s term: what Cruttenden might call a rise of key height (i.e., of the upper limits of pitch in nuclear tones), and what in ancient epic performance might have involved a literal melodic shift. This reading of epea pterogenta might make it an example of what Nicholas Royle would call ‘veering’ (Royle).

31In performance, however, they are compelling. The tendencies, mentioned above, for her poetry to figure displacement and vertical elevation, often involving transcendence of the human/animal divide, are clearly relevant to the insistent vertical displacements in her prosody. This nexus is best exemplified by her most regularly performed poem: ‘Bird', which habitually prefaces subsequent poems at a reading with its open-ended reporting clause at the cadence: ‘this is what I sang. . .', suggesting that everything that follows is spoken, as Homer puts it, with ‘winged words.’

33So, in terms of prosody, the overall value of this poem is twofold. Firstly, it encapsulates the mimetically transformative effect of Liz Berry’s ‘winglet words’ (her rising tones) in readings. Secondly, being so regularly performed, it offers a stable corpus of multiple recordings, across a number of years and in various contexts, which can be used to analyse the evolution of her melodic performances over the period of early motherhood in which her career took off.

35So, if the coincidence of motherhood with the development of a broader public profile has led to an attenuation of the dialect features of Liz Berry’s poetry in print, the transition from page to stage has clearly shown the opposite tendency over the same period. This assertion of the prosodic features of her accent not only embodies the exhilarating transformative escape of bird-like flight, as her voice takes on the literal features of birdsong, but it also draws the speaker northwards, by melodic, sociolinguistic association.

36The quasi-cartographic aspect of her early poetry—echoing the youthful excitement of maps that was so influential on fellow West Midlands poet, Roy Fisher—has perhaps given way to a more problematic, defamiliarizing relationship with urban landscapes, especially when seen as aspects of motherhood. But the drive for her voice to soar ever higher, and for her accent to rise further north, has never been stronger. This mom is not keeping mum.

Conclusion

37Liz Berry’s is a poetry of movement around, above, and beyond the Black Country, a poetry that never takes a shortcut but goes all around the Wrekin, a poetry in which the urban, post-industrial landscapes and their communities are transfigured by imaginative journeys that often focus on the experience of becoming-animal and assert the primacy of natural ecosystems in the built environment. The defamiliarizations wrought on these poetic cartographies by the experiences of motherhood—sometimes bewildering, exhausting, and constraining—have made a yen for transcendence of the confines of human physicality seem all the more urgent as it has become less attainable. Meanwhile, the prosodic landscapes of her spoken performances have increased in altitude and range, accentuating a natural feature of her Black Country accent, such that this desire to soar above and beyond is enacted melodically in her readings, almost reaching the heights necessary to transcend the language itself. As she says (or sings) in ‘Bird', ‘my voice / was no longer words but song’ (Berry 2014, 2).