Prizewinning poets transform train journey into cultural happening

Martin Shipton

Passengers travelling by train between Cardiff and Ebbw Vale on Saturday March 22 may find themselves immersed in a cultural experience they hadn’t expected.

Poets Zillah Bowes and Jonathan Edwards will be reading their own poems on the 17.06 service from Cardiff Central to Ebbw Vale Town. It will be the culmination of a project centred on the rail line that they have been working on after winning a Literature Matters Award from the Royal Society of Literature.

An audience will be travelling with them and others on the train can join in too.

Ebbw Vale’s steelworks

After arriving at the destination, Zillah and Jonathan will give a performance at the Ebbw Vale Works Museum from 6pm. Before it begins, the Chairman of the Museum, Simon Gregory, will give a short introduction to the heritage of Ebbw Vale’s steelworks.

The pair have been writing poems on and around the rail line, documenting people and places. Their project is being supported by Transport for Wales, which will launch some of their poetry on World Poetry Day, Friday March 21, on specially designed banners in Cardiff Central station.

RSL Literature Matters Awards are given to projects that help connect with audiences or topics outside the usual reach of literature, as well as those that generate discussion about why literature matters.

In their application for the award, Zillah and Jonathan wrote: “The Ebbw Vale – Cardiff train line has a key role in the rich history of the Valleys of South East Wales. Traditionally used to service the heavy coal and steel industries, it re-opened as a passenger line in 2008, having been inactive since 1966. Its journeys say so much about the current socio-economic position and experience of living in this area today”, with work in the previous industries of the Valleys transformed, among others, into commutes to the city.The project is designed to celebrate the experiences – “joyful, miserable and everything in between” – of people travelling on the train line.

Community

Zillah said: “We’ve travelled on the line quite a lot and have come to see the passengers as a community in their own right. All sorts of people use it, and a warm sense of community spirit is generated that is typical of Valleys life.”

Jonathan said: “I use the line to commute to work at Cardiff University. I’ve been inspired to write poems by journeys on the train itself and by the places we pass through.”

Zillah Bowes is an artist, filmmaker and writer. She is currently a Future Wales Fellow with the Arts Council of Wales. As a poet, she has won the

Wordsworth Trust Prize and Poems on the Buses Competition, and was shortlisted for the Ginkgo Prize/Best Poem of Landscape, Manchester Poetry Prize and Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize.

She has also won a Creative Wales Award and was a Hay Festival Writer at Work.

Her photographic work Green Dark won the British Journal of Photography International Photography Award and Museum Wales Purchase Prize. She uses poetry in her work as an artist including her film Allowed, listed for the Aesthetica Art Prize, which won Zealous Amplify: Environment, and her digital work Gwawr / Dawn, commissioned for the Senedd, which won Honorable Mention in the Alpine Fellowship Visual Art Prize. Zillah lives in Cardiff and frequently works in Mid Wales.

Jonathan Edwards’ first collection of poems My Family and Other Superheroes (Seren, 2014), received the Costa Poetry Award and the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award. It was shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. His second collection Gen (Seren, 2018), also received the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award, and in 2019 his poem about Newport Bridge was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.

His poems have won the Ledbury, Oxford Brookes, and Troubadour Poetry

Competitions, appeared in The Guardian and The Poetry Review, and been filmed by the BBC and the Poetry Society. He has been writer-in-residence at the Dylan Thomas Boathouse and at Gladstone’s Library, and a judge of the Wales Book of the Year and the National Poetry Competition. Jonathan lives in Crosskeys, which the Ebbw Vale line passes through.

Their current project also promotes the train as a sustainable mode of transport, and the value of celebrating a train line in the context of the climate crisis.

Zillah and Jonathan hope to share the poetry project further in the future, along with a selection of new photographs by Zillah, and have widened their focus to include other aspects of the area.

Free tickets for the Saturday evening event at the Museum can be booked via this link, as well as details of how to join the poetry train journey beforehand: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/words-at-the-works-tickets-1246172618849.