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
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