in its cells. No such urgency
is found in a vase, though there may
have been a hope in giving,
in the short brightening of this room
where a corolla frowningly describes
a person’s heart.
JAMES LEO MASKILL
These selected poems have some features in common. Perhaps immediately obvious is their occasional use of the two-line stanza. This form gives the poems a uniformity of appearance yet it is put to different use in each. ‘Days’ utilises the couplet’s ability to create comparison. Two seemingly disparate images side by side in a repeating process. Since these images and events, which cover the historical, social and personal, are all given in the present tense, the effect is to condense time, to remove from it a linear progression. ‘Coming Thunder’, a loose sonnet, plays on this form’s inherent capacity to create and emphasise the notion of coupling. Its effect is visual as well as symbolic. In ‘The Norseman’s First Summer’, a poem which mixes plain English and fragmentary Old Norse, the form is used to control the poem’s pace, something crucial when two languages are in balance. And lastly in Labour, a poem exhaustively taxonomical, the form shapes the poem into a kind of ladder, each stanza break aiding the reader’s descent as well as their re-ascent after the poem’s final couplet.
In other works, such as ‘Coffee Morning’ and ‘from Lasts’, form is less fixed. ‘Coffee Morning’ tumbles from its initial conversational beginning, getting curt and sudden by the close. ‘from Lasts’, being an extract from a longer work, has a narrative drive, so follows the nature of that narrative. In ‘Odessa’, the first section of the poem, the narrative voice uses stanzas and stanza changes to progress, invert or encase individual thoughts and moments. Whereas later in the poem, in ‘Vicissitude’, each stanza exists to present complete or incomplete acts, a kind of poetical to-do list.
Thematically these nine poems are a somewhat broad nonagon held together by common concerns such as time, image and speech. There is a certain consideration for history as well as for the contemporary; with how things are said as well as how things are seen. Yet, perhaps most significantly, they are as different as they are similar, and are meant to be read as such.
Days
They are cleaning the bells in Viterbe.
The bus is near Urbino.
The oak-green cascades are falling in the North-West.
A sheep is watching the sea hit the rocks.
Rick is doing his loft in the sunset.
Brown clouds are above Nantong.
Justinian bathes, and drinks the water he bathes in.
A film projector loops Gone with the Wind.
Coventry is twinned with Dresden.
Sarcasm is invented, then contravened.
The fish eat at a shipwreck of fingers and gold.
A century turns to another.
Laura never looks the same in any two pictures.
Hiro and his wife are at a weighing.
The unpeopled earth is illuminated by a billion stars.
The toes are going through the grapes.
Nobody ever bothers to call.
The people in the rainforest have never heard of the Portuguese.
Usman is feeling tired but doesn’t know why.
They make the area into a national park.
A child’s clitoris is removed with a piece of glass.
Gin is invented.
In the basement there are things no one should see.
Something is shimmering on the water, in the air.
Charlemagne regrets his trip to Rome.
Natale can only see his kids at weekends.
Women and Men rebuild the cathedral at Chartres.
They go out on the water in the rain.
What his father tells him, he tells his son.
The plane crashes in Munich in the snow.
Her waist bends to the will of her clothing.
The wanderers arrive at Skelig Michael.
They wait and wait but he never comes.
People scatter determinedly around the continents.
Ira wakes from a confusing dream.
The ancestors line the longhouse and sing
sing
sing.
Coming Thunder
When we stole the eggs from the barn that June
you said we held life in our hands.
Untrue I said as I carried a near score
in my upturned t-shirt.
And even if I could hold one
it would never get born
not in those hands that you let
be put on you
or in the grass nest we made
smelling of piss-yellow sunshine
or by us two, old enough to ourselves
be parents
but still going around like foxes
wasting things other people might like to use.
Joke
for C.C.
I said I was
nella Campagna, nella campagna
that was my joke
as you took the car off the road
and wordlessly through green branches
to where wide earth
was silent by vines and horse houses.
You put me inside you
under your skirts
and that’s when I thought of my joke.
Sometimes the simplest way is silence
the car so hot I could only make out
horse sounds in the back
our two bodies moving beyond a joke.
Coffee Morning
What a perfect morning you say
the milk’s gone bad.
I smell it because I want to know
how bad
Very you say and we are
wrinkled noses and frowns
and black coffee drinkers now
I choose a path that goes far down
that does not reek
nor connect to home
to bury
what will grow white
soft and wet
yet I reach a stump
full with ants and dry
and spill its top with our milk.
The ants sail and roll.
This is their problem now.
Baghdad
What words come from jealousy?
The walls of encircling palaces
and a barely traceable line.
The market became many markets
as the Prophet became many men,
and, at the hand of the cloth seller,
the Caliph whispered
I am not he.
The disguise of a distempered Araby.
The world from Cairo to Bukhara.
At the highest point,
the stone heart of the city,
the richness of a religious heart
turned.
The Norseman’s First Summer
Fok-pykkr, in rás sæti
the leave-gone from water mountain
day, day, day, black-day, ne slæpe,
see dust yellow, push, push, live,
vision, ne boll, kið, geit, geit-punnr, live
tree small, mansize, unstrong
green maker yellow oil and hot, beard
and wine hot. Kið, geit, tree-small
unsnowed, unvile land, fok-punnr
wifmen-light, light wimmen, housers
uncolded, unfat, black, dark-soft
yellow-oil wifmen in this tree-small.
Fok leg-spread by skeið, vǫlvur
in song-lag, ear-turners dream
in day-passion, skeið to edgewater
to vǫlvur, fok-pykkr and slæpe.
Radix (Augury)
The future is tomatoes
you know will grow fat
red and different
on the budding vine
you lace yourself –
a spider lacing a trap –
to catch the future
tense. All else is now
perp
etually, the tomatos,
too, are now
as you throw
what was once
going to happen.
Labour
They say it is the oldest profession.
Older than the sea-vacuuming fishermen;
the proverbial sheep-and-goatherds;
the sweat-faced smiths and smith’s apprentice
unable to find a girlfriend on an unsalaried
internship, sharing a room south of the river;
the milliners; the winemakers; the builders,
dragging slop mud into squares of dry mudbrick
for a mosque and a house and a brothel;
the accountants; the taxmen; all those
of jobs immoral enough to bring about
religious conversion, a change of heart,
hold a burgeoning civilisation together;
the cross-makers; the athletes;
before the Romans; the transubstantiationists;
the producers of religions and religious stories;
the road-footed messengers;
the breakers of horses and donkeys;
the finders of navigable routes over mountains
through seas and forests and marshland;
the stalkers, approachers and fellers of deer
elephant, buffalo, whale and whale shark;
the singers; the incorrigible upright walkers.
Well, with all this work being done
why shouldn’t a woman have a job?
from Lasts
I. ODESSA
I have memories of the day I knew my future
that I would marry a soldier
in the wax-fizzing shapes
you cannot read yourself –
premonitions are for someone else
to see – and I balled all night
at the certainty of my sleeping
curled around a rifle
a horse and sword at the breakfast table
his steady hand decapitating my egg
with the functional twitch
of putting down bodies not yet dead
yet it’s a growth industry
and sure to keep me good and safe
and clothed in the modernest ways
women and men at the tea trays
day and night performances
all the staples house and life require
unsnowed hours in the pleasure grounds
mind-projected flowers in the rush
a finger to my mouth to hush
my breathing words of all the planted names
and patterns of pine shadows
that never go out of leaf. And when my daughter sleeps
to her ear I will sing
the sound the water makes in Odessa
each note a star in the star-ecstatic sky.
I am sure I know how I will die –
when all the people of the world come to Odessa
filing secretly, secretly to themselves,
down the Potemkin steps, idempotent
and glad toward the sea, to wash there,
to feel how good cold can be
when you have no cares for drowning
nor deep water’s charming
murmur of mouth-bubbling water.
I will tell these moments to my daughter
when drip drop they all go over
the great populations in coats and hats
deliberate dress for deliberate acts
bringing the water back.
He was thin and cautious as a cat
surly behind a baroque moustache
spine like a brushstroke
and when he spoke
all good and hiding complexity
I waited
for the day he walked me round by the arm
the ocean horse-kicking itself calm
and black
as such days.
He was quick to talk of love
and not shy to reach
his body up and over me,
waves reaching out above the sea
and sand-plumes of wind
below my hands.
He fascinated in the salon
walls clad with conversation
a nice line of argument when asked
of bears he killed
in the north
in the past
leaning in the inside fire shine.
The pleasure it seems was only mine
half a season of love shaped with time
as a bad cold.
I will tell my daughter this when I am old.
II. LAKE CHAD
Bedoved above the silent water
there are nonagons of vulture
sense-hovering, escaping the wetlands
and current social limitations, for Niger,
for the Air mountains, for bones to pick.
V. VICISSITUDE
In chintz along the San Martine she promised
she would be back
when all the death-houses were hotels
and each new language
from the inflowing people
was prismed into a single tongue
when the one-eyed boys joined hands
and shared the job of seeing
heavy changes,
the repeating apocalypse of Tuesdays
when all we had to do
had been done.
The waist-high water split her like a question
to an answer I had already begun.
VI. SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE
I showed her the emptiest half of the world
islands snow-curled in white sand
whales filling whale throats
time-old fishing and freight boats
lungs of wind below the world ceiling
we made good our living
two stones anchoring beach towels
head-flipped centimes for dolmades
taro and manioc soft
salt lips drunk of kava
laplap in the nakamal doorway.
We spoke much of the night and looked across the islands
to Menelaus in his war-fond tupenu
tattooed with all accompaniments of rank
the top half of his body big and out
lumping his man-breasted power all about
ready to launch a thousand-canoed assault
as though to peg a hurricane to the ground.
Each and every night behind the sound
of men in low-lying warboats just because
he couldn’t fight a war for only love.
I showed her the emptiest half of the world
festooned in rare birds and space
half her face
upon the pillowcase
the backward moving ceiling fan
reflecting helicopters on the divan
to all the tired nights –
to all the tired nights I prayed
as in São Cristóvão, as in that golden glade
of tired nights
of carrying her upon my back, sleeping
in the angled mountain rain
in a house of mud-daubed walls and skin
and llama in the drunken mist
of names of rain and words for raining
and ancestors vanished for never having lived.
The ever-forest canopy dropped our eyelids
till all the hours and all the days reversed
and all the warboats journeyed back in time
and Qusqu raised its blood hearts to the fire
and green in golden magic gods returned
and tapestries of spiders reeled and burned
to celebrate the world-destroying world.
We know now what we never learned, how
expressible in her throat were lyric words
she heard each night from song-wing birds
who fly and fly sunlight arou
nd the world
till inexpressible in her throat we heard
the brown voiced Ucayali
the infinity of trees where no one ever dies.
ROWLAND BAGNALL
Many of the these poems are constructed from the bits and pieces of experience – loose words and phrases, persistent images and thoughts – that decided to stick around, for whatever reason, after the party. Eventually, a group of them will draw together and become a scaffold, which can then be used to make a poem. I’m interested in glitches, particularly when language, sense, and memory go wrong, and in the different ways of using/abusing these malfunctions. I also think a lot about the images we keep, and how we can’t really control the way those images relate, or what can happen to them once they’re set loose in the Jungle Gym of our imaginations. It’s possible that my writing has something in common with collage’s particular species of vandalism, although this hasn’t been a conscious choice. I do find lots to write about in visual art and film, however, which I suppose will be apparent here. More often than not, the shape of a poem tends to determine itself, so I usually end up paying closer attention to its sounds, its rhythms, and its repetitions. Occasionally, during the process of writing, a poem will begin to feed upon itself, biting off its fingernails, which I expect relates to glitches, too; something like this is happening in ‘Hothouse’. I like to think of these poems as having nothing to do with me personally, but get the feeling this is not the case.