Angela Cheveau – Where brick becomes wing and mourning becomes melody, “Liverpool Angels” finds the city’s soul in its women…
Every so often, a poem arrives that feels unmistakably shaped by the city it comes from —its accent, its attitude, its stubborn refusal to look away. Liverpool Angels, a work from Liverpool poet Angela Cheveau, is exactly that kind of piece: tender, tough, and deeply rooted in the lived experience of working-class women whose strength often goes unspoken.
Cheveau wrote the poem in the shadow of personal loss—the suicide of a close friend— and yet Liverpool Angels is anything but a quiet lament. It’s a rallying cry, a tribute, and a love letter rolled into one. She talks about “brick wings,” a metaphor that lands with real weight: the urge to fly, to dream, to escape, matched against the hard realities of inner-city life. These wings don’t always lift you, but they remind you that you were made for more than struggle.
What gives the poem its power is Cheveau’s refusal to let grief sit in isolation. Instead, she widens the frame, shining a light on the structures—social, economic, emotional—that shape working-class life. It’s a magnifying glass held steady, not to expose weakness, but to show the quiet heroism of getting on with it. In that sense, Liverpool Angels feels entirely of this city: defiant, compassionate, and unwilling to accept that the limits imposed from the outside are the only ones that matter.
Cheveau herself is emerging as one of the region’s most distinctive voices. A Liverpool native, a full-time carer for her mother, and a part-time MA student at Manchester Metropolitan University, she has already gathered an impressive list of accolades—from the Quiet Man Dave Prize to the 2025 Together in Verse award. Her work has appeared widely across Northern anthologies, and her debut pamphlet is now on the horizon.
With Liverpool Angels, she steps firmly into the spotlight, offering a poem that speaks not just for one friend, but for a city that knows both hardship and hope in equal measure.
Liverpool Angels
Hair scented with summer sunlight she squeezes
the last drops of the dying day, swills the sky down
the back of her throat, and her face is a boat
that sailed yesterday, prosecco popping
on poppy red lips she dips the pill
under her tongue she is young once more,
and she sprays a fine mist of starlight into freshly washed hair
while the moon prays there
at the altar of her eyes and the skies and the night
bows down at her crown, at the flick of her curls
and the click of her thigh high boots,
spiked heels pricking holes in the sky as she passes by,
light bleeds from the skyline as she snorts her next line
and she needs to forget who she is, what he told her she was,
when he found her, broken, and battered
with her wings torn and tattered, her dreams all shattered
and falling through the holes in her tights she still fights,
but she sinks into drink, so she doesn’t have to think
about drowning, and the Liverpool skyline is inked
on the sky and on the skin of her thigh a blossom sketched,
with this city etched in her bones she is home.
The grit of ground gravel flows in her veins, she is stained,
with the pulse of these streets in her feet she gyrates
as she dances, fluid and free, chiseled from concrete
she’s a carved slab of slate with a stone sculpted spine,
from the sinews and strength of the working classes
and the downtrodden masses she stands on the shoulders
of dirty faced deities and the daily grind of lives
poisoned by poverty, peppered with pigeon shit
Liverpool stands there hard faced- refuses to be brought to its knees
by politicians in pinstripes with paid for degrees
and the city skyline is pinned to the sky as she teeters
on heels too high to know better, her face a love letter
lips a smear of crushed raspberry kisses down the back alleys
where everyone pisses, girls with faces like empty taxis
staggering in short dresses, eyes all glassy
while eternity throws fistfuls of night at boarded up windows
and the streets are smeared with innuendos
and the silver street glitters with slivers of glass
from smashed windows, and smashed people
and it’s not only Eleanor Rigby who is lonely.
But she just keeps on dancing, she’s a goddess,
shadows shatter with the sway of her hips she is golden,
and the night will never end, even if the god’s stamp
smutty footprints across the scrubbed clean
dancefloor of the sky she feels high,
daylight will never come, and he will never reach her –
Here, on the edge of everything she is free,
a Liverpool angel, long lashed lipstick loving scouser
she is a curled cherub carved from the cut corners
of these city streets, she is the towering spire of the steeple
on the cathedral, a stained-glass butterfly spilling rainbows,
tottering on heels that shatter the silent spaces
she is the strength of this place.
Standing on the edge of the world, the slate grey sky breaks
softly, spills light over the sleeping city streets
as she spreads her bright brick wings wide open for flight,
because you can’t keep her down, you can’t keep her down,
you just can’t keep her down,
she is not yours to keep.
