New Poetries VII Read online

  The surprises that recommend a poem to an editor and then to a reader, and are often its occasion, are identified by Rowland Bagnall. He’s ‘interested in glitches, particularly when language, sense, and memory go wrong, and in the different ways of using/abusing these malfunctions’, and in his anarchic but curiously ordered studio he declares, ‘It’s possible that my writing has something in common with collage’s particular species of vandalism.’ He adds, with a touch of rueful realism, ‘I like to think of these poems as having nothing to do with me personally, but get the feeling this is not the case.’

  What the poets tell us about the occasions for their poems illuminates not only their work but the art more generally, even (or especially) when the information is most particular. Lisa Kelly describes herself as half-Danish and half-deaf. The consequences of the latter are not quite what we might expect:

  I have to work hard to listen and this requires me to place you to my right side, to watch your lips, to watch your hands, to watch your gestures. How can form not matter? To understand what you say, I must attempt to control our interrelated physical space. Of course, I often fail and confusion, mis-interpretation, annoyance, as well as humour are by-products. My poems reflect my obsession with form and the physical space that words occupy on the page.

  Isabel Galleymore works in what may seem an unusual way. ‘[M]uch of my writing starts with research. “Kind” [p. 308], for example, emerged from a day spent at an owl sanctuary where many owls have become “imprinted”: a term used, in this case, for animals who become so familiar with humans that they begin to take on certain human behaviours.’ Katherine Horrex is similarly particular, and then earns the right to generalise: ‘I wanted to acknowledge a set of grim, but interesting environmental truths. Microclimates. Unhelpful forms of education.’

  More up-beat, with a strong narrative instinct, is Neil Fleming: ‘Also there are stories. Some with pirates in.’ Stories are his metiér. His ‘Clock with Brass Winding Key’ (p. 289) concludes,

  But really it’s about explaining what happened once,

  And about what will happen later on, long beyond

  Anything we might guess now. About the hours till it’s day.

  NEW POETRIES VII

  LAURA SCOTT

  Sometimes images get stuck in my head. They lie across my mind for days, sometimes for weeks and months. And when I try and brush them away they just stay there, like threads of cobweb you can’t quite reach that hang from high ceilings. They won’t drop into that place of knowledge and recognition where they can be slotted in and understood. They don’t want to go there. Instead they stick stubbornly to their own luminous strangeness, refusing to mean. All I can do with them is put them into poems because they will go there. So that’s what these poems are – images that got stuck. And sliding them across involves accepting that they will behave in pretty much the same way inside the poem – they won’t suddenly sit up and start to mean. They’ll just lie there.

  So the act of making these poems is also an act of submission. To put it schematically: the image has authority, and the writing must defer to it. The poem has to shed some of its busy self-importance, to lose some of its intention, to go quiet. All the poems do, all they can do, is circle the image, go around the outside of it so that it can occupy the space in the middle.

  And once I’d realised that, the actual writing – about a fence, or a man dying in a field, or the sound of a song – was easier than I’d imagined. I’m not saying that writing these poems was easy, but that it was important not to try too hard. Ease is an essential part of it. If the image is there, at the centre of things, then after that it is just a question of detail, of registering it as minutely as I can, bit by bit, so that it can be seen by somebody else. What these poems are, I hope, is a trace of that ease, because without ease there wouldn’t be a poem.

  If I could write like Tolstoy

  you’d see a man

  dying in a field with a flagstaff still in his hands.

  I’d take you close until you saw the grass

  blowing around his head, and his eyes

  looking up at the white sky. I’d show you

  a pale-faced Tsar on a horse under a tree,

  breath from its nostrils, creases in gloved fingers

  pulling at the reins, perhaps hoof marks in the mud

  as he jumps the ditch at the end of the field.

  I’d show you men walking down a road,

  one of them shouting to the others to get off it.

  You’d hear the ice crack as they slipped down the bank

  to join him, bringing their horses with them. You’d feel

  the blood coming out of the back of someone’s head,

  warm for a moment, before it touched the snow.

  I’d show you a dead man come back to life.

  Then I’d make you wait – for pages and pages –

  before you saw him, go to his window

  and look at how the moon turns half a row

  of trees silver, leaves the other half black.

  Tolstoy’s Dog

  What is it about the lavender-grey dog

  hanging around the men

  playing with a piece of straw

  as if it were a stick

  while Moscow burns behind them?

  What is it that makes her lie

  across my mind as if she might be

  what all those words were about?

  and Pierre?

  With his ripe face like one of those pale freckled pears

  you hold in your hand and his mind shuddering across it

  like a bruise – he’s legible to all the world. With his great legs,

  broad and strong as the trees, he walks in and out of chapters

  smelling of eau de cologne, or an animal that sleeps in a barn.

  With his long fingers running across the stubble on his jaw,

  he listens to the black Russian rain before he picks up his pen.

  With his eyes so blue you’d think he’d drunk the sky down

  with all that champagne, he watches the soldiers (red epaulettes

  and high boots) drag that boy to the place where they shoot him.

  He watches the boy pull his loose coat tight before he sags and slides

  down the post. And when it’s all over, he watches them roll him

  gently into the hole with the others and before he can look away

  he sees, there in the earth, the boy’s shoulder still moving.

  Fragment

  How can I forget the feel of her ribs

  under my fingertips,

  the thump of her slow heart

  into my hand? I will be the frost

  running silver threads through brown leaves under her feet –

  The Singing

  I heard it in that weirdly wintery room where the velvet curtains

  fell in liver-coloured scrolls and crept out from the walls

  when they found the floor and the dark wood cabinet waited

  in the corner. That was where they sang for us, or for each other,

  or for Greece. I’m not sure who – all I know is the sound of it,

  its swell and its swoon, the swerve of it as it left their fingers

  and throats and pulled the air into new shapes around us.

  And if I circle it, slowly, with these lines, go round the outside of it,

  some of that sound might slide into your ears. If I told you

  what they looked like, the three musicians, the fat one

  in the middle with his bald head and his great belly

  arranged over his thighs, more like a butcher than a musician,

  and the other two sitting impassively on either side, as if they were bored

  – then maybe you’d see them sitting there, with the windows

  and the velvet curtains behind them. You’d see me in the front row,

  shifting in my seat, wondering when they were going to start.

&nb
sp; And then you’d watch the bald one thread his hand under the neck

  of his guitar and lay the other over its body and start to play

  and the sounds of those notes, higher and faster than you’d expect

  would fall into the room like leaves as he moves his fingers

  quickly over the fret board. And that would be enough, easily enough,

  you could sit and listen to the sharp sounds of the strings

  climbing the air forever, but then he’d give you his voice as well

  and you won’t be able to believe that such a voice could come

  from such a source. And some bit of you would back away like a horse

  rearing up on its hind legs, troubled by something its rider can’t see

  because you won’t know where to put the sound, what to do with it.

  And you’ll wonder why the other two are there, they’re not doing anything,

  just looking at the floor but they don’t look bored anymore. But then

  the old one with the slicked-back hair will start to hum, and the sound

  will be as deep and dark as the lines on his face. And when the song starts

  its ascent, the other man will come in and the three voices will plait

  themselves together until the tune is so strong you could climb up it.

  And the air will be so taut, you’ll hear the breath caught

  in the back of your own throat. And then the song will swerve downwards

  in its layered refrain and the audience around and behind you

  add their voices to the musicians’ and all the voices will go down together

  as if the song had stairs and they were made of stone

  and the voices were like the soles of thousands of shoes lapping away

  at the stone year after year until there is a dent in the middle of the step.

  And you’ll follow them, wishing you knew the words, willing the song

  to go on pouring itself into the room. And that layer that locks you

  into yourself will fall away and you’ll remember Caliban, crying out

  when he wakes from his dream and longs to hear that song again.

  a different tune

  oh my heavy heart how can I

  make you light again so I don’t have to

  lug you through the years and rooms?

  Shall I make a sling for you of silk and fingers

  in a blue that brings out your bruised red?

  I could hang it from the bony strut

  of my collarbones to hammock your sad weight.

  Would you soften your walls and open

  your dark chambers if I did? I’m the one –

  the only one – who really loves you

  so be light for me, light like the bird

  perching on the rose stem, its pronged feet

  threaded through the black thorns —

  so light the stem barely moves.

  What I know

  is this this

  is what I really know, this is what tocks

  and ticks inside me, this is what seeps out –

  my signature scent, the one that catches

  in the fine hairs of your nostrils so you can sniff me out in a room full of people.

  This is what paper-cuts my throat and clouds the trees

  that grow in the soft bed of my lungs.

  This is what I know and what I know is this —

  you’ve watched me and clocked me and found me

  wanting. That’s where I am

  caught here in this smear with you

  running your cold carp eyes over my words and recognising their lack,

  my lack, my heaving lack, the one I carry on my back —

  that’s what I know that’s what I write

  while others tweet and fleet in a silver shoal up to the light.

  Lines on a broken statue of Iris

  What are you

  a goddess or a servant forever

  tied to their purpose?

  Iris of my eye you must be more than that.

  I only saw a fragment of you

  caught mid-leap in the stone’s soft lip

  the ripples in your robe

  blown against your thighs,

  your wide stride

  spanning

  all possible worlds.

  Did they make you to embody

  their thoughts, to carry their desire

  through air and water, to fall like a stone

  down a well to the unseen face waiting in the dark

  to sound out their message?

  Or do you sometimes

  slip your reins

  and turn your body away

  from their intention?

  What the trees do

  They play with us

  they want to be us

  they once were us

  a long time ago

  one of them

  caught the heel of a girl

  in the crook of its branch,

  snagged it like a bird

  caught in a bush

  flicked her

  up into its leaves.

  She cried and the birds

  scattered so no-one heard

  and the tree pushed her

  higher and higher

  up to where its branches

  scratched the sky

  and the wind blew her

  hair into the leaves,

  up to where the tree

  thrummed under her

  and the birds’ throats

  quivered next to her and her ribs

  opened and softened

  and their tips pushed

  through her skin into the bark

  and the tree grew around her.

  And sometimes you hear her

  tapping her fingers

  against your window.

  They play with us

  they want to be us

  they once were us.

  Turner

  His father saw it before anyone else,

  the boy could paint light, could take the sky

  into the bristles of his brush and lay it flat

  like ribbon around a haberdasher’s card.

  He could take the curl of cloud, the line

  of sea, and drop them on to canvas

  pinned and waiting for him like a spider’s

  web on a window pane. He could make

  colours his father had never seen appear

  in white china bowls, grinding red lead

  and smalt, madder and green slate

  while his father washed bundles of hair

  ready for the next day, rolling them

  between finger and thumb, smoothing

  the shafts flat as fish scales. In the morning,

  when the light was at its sharpest, Joseph lit

  the colour with water and gum, stirring in

  honey so the Prussian blues and milky greens,

  the scarlets and viridians, could breathe across

  the hatched threads of the canvas. And while

  his father knotted and threaded the hair

  into silken caps, weaving it into clusters

  of curls, the boy split shafts of light

  until they shimmered on the tip of his brush.

  And for a moment, the father looked up

  from his work and was scared by the boy

  who could paint God’s light across the water,

  the air’s joy at being empty handed.

  The Dogs in Greece are different

  Rumours buzz around them like flies. Some say

  they’ve taken over the old airport in Athens,

  roaming its runways, loping around

  the abandoned planes, cocking their legs on the clumps

  of grass growing through the cracks in the tarmac.

  Somebody has actually seen them, sleeping

  on the unmoving baggage carousels and chewing

  the dead cables, howling under the announcem
ent boards

  proclaiming flight details of planes long gone.

  There are stories of them guarding the Acropolis at night

  in return for scraps of food, of thousands of them

  being rounded up and driven away in lorries

  before the Olympics, and poisoned or released into the hills,

  depending on who you’re talking to. They say the ones

  in the towns are fine, they spend their days lying in the shade

  and their nights strolling around the bars and restaurants.

  But the ones at the edges where the roads turn into motorways

  and the grass grows tall and thick, they’re the ones you have to watch.

  They have started to pack and someone has drawn black lines

  around their pale lemon eyes. The bitches are always on heat

  and the litters are getting bigger. The pups with the soft pink

  paw pads are the first to go and soon their own mothers

  will be breaking their necks before they’ve opened their eyes.

  And one day a man will come home, dressed as a beggar,

  a man who has been travelling for years and years but this time

  there will be no dog flattening its ears and thumping its tail