I’m pleased to learn of another writer on the topography and people of the Potteries, via stumbling on a new book with poems about Stoke-on-Trent. The poet Jeffrey Wainwright had a 2020 collection from noted poetry publisher Carcanet, As Best We Can. Wainwright was born and schooled in Stoke (specifically Sandford Hill, Longton) in the 1950s. Then went to university in Leeds and took his first job on the Welsh coast. Local poems, of Etruria and Longton, in his new book include…

* “”Crockery”, a sequence of six poems […] on the products of Josiah Wedgwood’s factories draws in history, politics, class, art and aspiration.” The lustrous products of the factory are contrasted with the imagined lives of Etruria’s workers.

* “”Who Was St. Chad?” evokes the Anglican church my mother attended as a girl. She was part of a strong religious culture, mainly Anglican and Methodist, that existed in Stoke-on-Trent in the first half of the 20th century and has all but disappeared in the course of my generation and since.”

* “”Dreams of Lennox Road” [memories of] the street where I spent the first 18 years of my life.” The top end of Longton, shading into Florence / Normacot.

* ““The Prims” [on] the austere and charitable Primitive Methodists, who emerged in the early 19th century, often drawn from the poorest workers.” This originated on Mow Cop and… “had strong popular appeal in the Potteries up to the mid-twentieth century when Wainwright was a boy”.

The last quote is from the Times Literary Supplement review, which wrongly guesses “The Prims” is set the “Victorian Black Country”. The poem’s use of the word “potbanks” in describing the topography places it rather in North Staffordshire. There are big bottle-ovens (for glass, rather the clay) in Wordsley, in south Staffordshire at the far semi-rural south of the Black Country. But they are not there called “potbanks”.

Possibly there are other Stoke poems in his earlier collections. Would there be enough for a dedicated book of the Stoke poems, one wonders? Perhaps illustrated with new pen drawings?