Peter Appleton

Ely: An experimental dream-poem Peter Appleton

In this experimental dream-poem a famous European cathedral literally takes off and travels - as in a Japanese animated film - calling in at the Sargasso Sea, then the West Mariana Ridge in the western Pacific, and on to the Transantarctic Mountains. On board are a small band of people who happen to be in the cathedral when she takes off, led by a young and bemused cathedral canon.
The East Anglian Fenland - especially as it was in early medieval times - lies deep within the cathedral's sense of herself and her people as she travels the globe. But she isn't all local memory; her twenty-first-century almost-silent Octagon engyn powers her and her crew on a tour through geological and historic time.
In her newfound freedom the cathedral gets up close and personal with Archean grey gneiss, discovers eel leptocephali, finds magical ancient plants in her own transept, and welcomes a stowaway cat called Mrs Chippy.
Drawing on many sources of inspiration, including Geoffrey Chaucer's The House of Fame, this poem is surreal, intricate and sometimes comic.