Helen Harrison: A Northern Voice with National Reach
There’s a moment in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark when the character Thaw delivers a line that lingers long after the page is turned: “if a city hasn’t been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.” It’s a sentiment that lands with particular resonance when thinking about the towns that sit just beyond Liverpool’s gravitational pull – the Prescots, the Kirbys, the in-between places that rarely receive their due in the cultural conversation. These are towns that hum quietly with history, yet are too often dismissed as peripheral, overlooked in favour of the noise and luminosity of the big city.
But Prescot refuses to be overlooked.
In recent years, the town has stepped forward with a kind of quiet insistence, reminding us that its connections to Shakespeare are not merely incidental but foundational. As the third point in the so-called “Shakespeare triangle,” Prescot’s links to the Earl of Derby – patron, supporter, and sometimes whispered-about collaborator of the Bard – have given the town a renewed cultural momentum. Its story is no longer one of the margins, but of rediscovery and reclamation.
It’s this lineage, this intertwining of local memory and literary heritage, that informs the new poem from Liverpool poet Helen Harrison. Drawing on her own experiences of growing up near Prescot, Harrison explores the connective tissue between personal geography and artistic inheritance – how a place shapes us, and how we in turn reimagine the place through our own creative lens.
Harrison is no stranger to the UK poetry landscape. Her work has appeared in The North, Ink, Sweat & Tears, The Interpreter’s House, Black Nore Review and many other respected journals. She has served as artist-in-residence with Lime Arts and Manchester NHS, and contributed to the Home from Home anthology. With publications spanning Axon and Shorts Magazine, her voice is one shaped by lived experience, sharpened by craft, and rooted unmistakably in the North West.
In Prescot, Harrison finds a muse – and perhaps, a homecoming.
Fairyland
My Midsummer Night’s Dream starts and ends in Prescot at a bus shelter advertising sandalwood wash powder.
Underneath my feet the weeds have made a pact to push past paving flags and clamber over one another.
I’ve heard Shakespeare’s been in there for years, hiding in the undergrowth, unnoticed,
scribbling down the next generation’s dramas.
He wrote about me, Helena loved by Lysander. He was besotted on a love potion, until it dissolved in his system and he went back to loving Hermia.
I fell for Demetrius in Adidas and gave-up the others, giving them the elbow, the heave-ho,
especially King Oberon who’s away with the fairies.
He prattles on about goblins interfering with screens, repeating, I will release the Fairy Queen.
I will release the Fairy Queen (I think he means me).
The No’10 bus finally arrives, but I don’t get on, it’s standing room only with all seats taken
by forest nymphs and peaseblossoms.
HELEN HARRISON
