Mr Fletcher the Poet


	poems reproduced below by permission of Paul and Clare Fletcher

Jeffrey Parsons Fletcher was born in 1907, in Ellistown, Leicestershire, the illegitimate son of a coal miner’s eldest daughter. At the age of 17 he was indentured to a local builder to become a plasterer rather than follow his mother’s brothers, father, grandfather and uncles into the pit. He had won a scholarship to a local grammar school but lack of means forced him to work. He was a stalwart of the LPS in its early decades.

His long sequence ‘Tally 300’ was published by the Hand and Flower Press in 1956. It is the story of a miner, identified only by a tally. Its opening section had won joint first prize in the Arts Council’s competition for the 1951 Festival of Britain and was published by Penguin in 19J.P.Fletcher died in 1988, and was comemorated by BBC Radio 4 in 1990 in a broadcast entitled “Mr Fletcher the Poet”.

They cut the straight tree down and briefed it to
These stumps of dead wood holding up the world,
And nonchalant we traffic through and through
The spidery-columned aisles. The sap which curled
In the leathern glove of winter hands of spring
Warm-fisted over blossom from the frost
Is all dry-whispered out and no leaves cling
To these tight props, not even the green ghost
Tale-bearing of a bud-time. They are so dead
That drunk light-hearted from a raining sky,
Inertly shoring the tumult overhead
Of living men, and even their graves who die.
Yet here as men who, boasting of no God,
Blandly as children trust these wisps of wood.

(The opening poem of part three of ‘Tally 300’)


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