Nicholas Hogg

postcard from blackpool

Got here this morning. Lovely drive up, with the motorway
framed by a blaze of turning leaves. The Premier Inn
looks like any other Premier Inn, but the people on the street
look like time travellers from the 1980s, when I was here last
actually, dragged to see the lights by my mother and her man,
who knew a bloke here he used to play darts with. His mate
ran a guesthouse, where the bacon floats on chipped white plates,
and the sausage is a sea wall holding back the grease.
I shared a room with my sister, who begged to ride a donkey
on a windswept beach. I imagine the donkey is dead,
now, like Alan Bradley, the psycho who stalked
Rita Fairclough, and died under a tram. It was Corrie gold,
from what I recall, which is more than a week on a half-term
break with a family in the rain. Still, we did see a show
at Blackpool Tower, and the might of a wave one night
from the pier, filled with neon. Wish you were here.

Nicholas Hogg is the author of Tokyo, adapted into the forthcoming Ridley Scott film, Berlin Nobody, starring Eric Bana and Stranger Things' Sadie Sink. In 2021 he won the Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Prize, and in 2023 the Liverpool Poetry Prize. Missing Person, his debut collection, is published by Broken Sleep Books. 

Nicholas wrote the following about ‘Postcard from Blackpool’:

A poem contrasting 1980s Blackpool with a trip back there in 2022 seemed ideal in postcard format, sending the memory from 'then' to 'now'. The nostalgia is not for the glitz, or any holiday exoticism on a trip away from landlocked Leicester, but the raw visceral experience of childhood in that era. Rain and wind. Arcades. The English breakfast as Proust madeline. Even if those memories are bound to unhappy days with my stepfather. Alas, I finish the poem — after the death of Alan Bradley, and the donkey (endings, perhaps) — with the ‘wish you were here’ calling.