William Letford: Poetry on the Roof

An artist called Liz Skulina got in touch with me in March. She was responding to certain poems by creating a series of chairs. The sculptures were to be part of the ‘Art in Unexpected Places’ exhibition at Stanza and she was interested in using one of my poems.

I didn’t make it to Stanza but Liz kindly sent me images from the exhibition. One of the images was a close up of some nails she’d hammered into the chair. They were old, and cracked, and rusted. The poem she’d used was a roofing poem so the nails, I thought, were perfect for the sculpture.

Old roofs have horsehair felt beneath the slates. The nails on these roofs are wonderful. I have to prise them out to replace slates. Every nail has been hammered into place by someone that’s long dead but I can look around and get an idea of what they saw as they worked. Same hills, same garden, same crow step gables.  The tools and materials have hardly changed, slate, lead, batons, roof irons, a sage, a hammer. And I often wonder about the person that’ll come to a roof I’ve worked on.

I began to write poems onto roofs. On the sarkin beneath slates, in the void beneath tiles or on underside of a flat roof, anywhere I thought the poem might survive. Maybe the person that comes to the roof next will find it. It’s not impossible. Maybe the discovery will bring something different to someone’s day, and maybe not.

The nails Liz had hammered into the chair sparked a short conversation through e-mail. I told her about the poems I’d written on roofs. She asked if I’d taken pictures, of before and after, or if I’d taken a note of the poems I’d written. I hadn’t, but made the mental note that I would. It’s interesting that a poem can come off a page and become a chair, or part of a roof.

William Letford received a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2008.