Pete Green, "Hemisphere"

Pete Green is a poet and musician who writes about place and identity, finitude, coastlines, cities and landscape change, trains, birds, and sleeping on someone's floor after playing a gig in another city. Their new short book Hemisphere and pamphlet Sheffield Almanac are published by Longbarrow Press, and their poetry has also appeared (or is scheduled to) in Under the Radar, the Fenland Poetry Journal, Stand, Anthropocene and elsewhere. Pete was longlisted in the 2020 National Poetry Competition and shortlisted for the 2019 Brotherton Poetry Prize. They live in Sheffield on the side of a very steep hill. Visit Pete's website at petegreensolo.com and follow @petenothing on social.

About Hemisphere, by Pete Green

Hemisphere is a long poem in a short book, telling the story of a circular voyage which proceeds from the Hebrides around the north Atlantic, Alaska and Siberia, then finally back to Europe. Along the way the protagonist visits a doomsday seed vault, a giant qwerty keyboard, a boundary between Tuesday and Wednesday, the world's largest island on a lake on an island on a lake on an island, two pubs and an Arctic coffee bar. 

These are all real locations on an impossible journey. Ultimately Hemisphere is a sort of meta-travel narrative which poses questions about who has permission to practise place writing, and explores the power of imagination to push back against our ongoing personal lockdowns. 

You can read more about Hemisphere on the publisher's website here. You can watch a short trailer for the book here:

Below, you can read an excerpt from the book.

From Hemisphere

Vladivostok

43°06’43”N 131°52’55”E

Was it a crash or a signal failure? Was it

the whim of some fastidious ambassador

that bore you here? Was it that metallic

clang, unexplained, that rang out between

the islands at the Bering Strait’s midpoint

like the song of a valley floor steelworks?

A deleted vault at the radar’s perimeter

fence? Whatever. Your hand is returning

to your jacket’s inside pocket, where your

ticket radiates assurance. Steel blue-clad

officials have already trooped the length

of your carriage several times; their gaze

interrogates the space you occupy, as if

you are not there. Across the aisle, though,

a woman’s complexion is fresh snowfall;

her eyes are feline, opalescent, much like

Kate’s, and they watch you checking out

the space. Your seeming aplomb prevails.

Your research’s thoroughness outweighs

all the Transsiberian-based thrillers where

naïve westerners are doomed to succumb

to menace or the mere threat of menace,

but you were caught out by the railways’

adherence nationwide to Moscow time

which, at this longitude, gave seven hours

to contemplate the famous hipped roof

of the station, the massive red characters

of its Владивосток sign, their unwieldy

ornateness, the earthenware flagstones

brought from Japan, painstaking mosaics

of berries, fruit and horsemen – all of it

biography of Russia, layered narratives of

regimes, of reinventions and revisionisms,

the wool that’s tugged down over eyes,

the emollient layers of pearl that cancel

disagreeable grains. You know the power

of opalescent eyes, of vodka, of people’s

own readiness to swallow what is served.

For you the cracks appeared back when

the bankers tanked the whole shebang

and chancellors and governors discreetly

summoned bailout billions from the ether

with mouse clicks and commands while

the clinic closed its doors on you during

that fragile first trimester. The ticket man

comes through from the first-class coach;

with him the notion of an upgrade, using

a little quantitative easing of your own.

You imagine requesting the kitten-eyed

woman to join you, knowing full well

that for better or for worse you will do

no such thing – and that’s one more life

thrown under one more cancelled train

of thought. So was it a crash or a failed

signal? Was it one more hardware glitch?

Your vigilance will bear you on through

Khabarovsk, Irkutsk, the room’s perishing

cold account for Omsk, Novosibirsk, and

the frustrated force of all your bloody-

mindedness can see you through the rest.