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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781784106928 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Carcanet Press, Limited |
| Publication date: | 07/08/2019 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 496 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
1.
Elder blossom with its stench,
strict reek of geraniums,
fair are the insouciant drapes behind which creatures scoot.
Lightning anneals its cleft air,
there can be no ambiguity;
wine is tapped from blossom,
fecund sun must cast light.
Be as the unread blood insists,
as light-sensitive cells,
rents in the rose scent tagged by twitching skirmishers.
Lip-scanners, touch parsers,
catalogue the sunshine's mottle;
deer hid in the complex,
fragrant streaks, act petrified,
being cognisant, nerved to bolt –
their patchwork awning, air's now fitful cries, scarcely shades the panicky creatures.
Piece them out. A loaded runic yearns to kill, and its dire stalking, night-time creeps of purpose scope and dissect.
2.
Squint chisel pares to the quick,
blocks of music in the ear stay inert until time's rush from bloated gutters, lash
against storm windows, slew through veined clerestories,
sheets of water, living torrents o'er-brim the cistern –
are you composed still, are you hungry still at your plate,
do you select an automatic flower from its braced stalk,
dreamer whose fluidity shifts the block of Lyonesse?
Beyond its portals lies a forked infarct once was twitching,
latterly a table laid with tables where a head betimes lay,
trig points punctuate its slope-
aspect, fields of soft 'x's
won't be pledged or disavowed,
suppliance has at it, heads nod and bury in that erstfluting marsh, serrated beaks
prod the verges drying bated sense harsh scour, last efforts brace palings kissing numbers open each as Jesse's
rod fluoresces over its parallels.
Rails stretch, planks climb,
bars curl at access points.
Number-franked fleeces spoil
pegged out stiff as a board.
May domains a dreamer spills shawl earth with spheres,
melt solids, drench accord.
3.
Where did the despoiled invest time clung to, to resettle haunt workings? Squatters riddle at the grate, disfiguring
its chrome with hurried embers,
cumulus in puffs of palest blue is forcing through sectors,
white stone is seething,
smooth white stone is seething as a circular saw bites,
iconoclasts trim an alabaster nimbus, dismantle.
What of the silica cues forwarding to their devices,
fingers catch on winking stars –
what of graphite grass square
or storms of bells crossing slate and clay tablets, aggressive trees and virulent entabled mosses? Now traffic lights
at named intersections take aim, 'Do Not Enter' boxes fill with caustic, lenses zoom,
the safe vacuities of recall
drift in stone cisterns imageless and drained, rue stains the borders dreamt touch suffices to corroborate;
the bled will take their time literally, express the juice from marrowbones, papyri,
lathering over unburied names.
4.
Dissolve a stain impress a tadpole grid
prevent belligerent frogs from slithering foam ladders, clench
hypothesis of day or fibreglass Parthenon, slot stone by stone
to face a blue imperative façade,
held back by a fretful lightweight
summer force, a failing state,
clapperboard soon trounced in disarray
to fault that perpending Hebrew, Aramaic star, its earth-lit
psalmody first greeted them in pause halfway, where each explores
his body lit on a target screen,
a selfie in a failing state articulates
through its positions, army veterans click heels, occupy the leaden
bearing set and biocast, diecast in miniature, a clatter from the
medium now more specified investigated life-forms, spasms of a
green too eventful and a red back to base, a rucked cloud drops
hollow rounds on a signaller squats low, who wriggles into mud,
braids lines that click and pop,
fendillates before the wires, death
on his crawl board, cellulose ladders roll in front of cloud and clod.
Menhirs grow exacerbated shadows
thrown across the barbed wire like pads of ticking I swarm over.
5.
Fracturing while desert wind is veering
sand in wadded streams, an evermotive idol's craquelure moves to speak:
Lava bulges, rock waves, sand's shrill
deliverance, skirl of seed strews a swept floor, bends oaken stands.
Your model God may fix his steroid face on blank despondency,
whitewashed Eden and the pews levelled, noble truths smash images
smitten into unreflective marvellous lofty, struck eyes blanked
girls amid their downtown valediction, glaze a solstice hollowed
for its rubble, cratering the siren murk, spawning into gaped pent-
vocatives loofa car, full-page sheds and shacks, roofed slalom
custody behind-the-scenes sandstone brows bullets furrow, hew
to horizontal rungs, vapour tray wasps and dayflies get sorted,
rack of heaven, brilliant contrails marking up the blue, their payloads
crash down on cracked cheeks,
stretch to this, stretch to children
huddled in such famished state goaded over canted splurge of chalk
towards their image blank-eyed.
Motivated impact prints the preacher
on his blanks, he self-prates blank sheet, a clean start, a ruled page.
6.
Invite the details, detail found missing,
give more details, bunched flies combed apart, toil in furrows
hunched under crows' avidity spilling out on space, for space
has enticed them, no bread to eat or clean water, fragile backs braced
against the curve of rarefaction lever blocks and ties of marble or jarrah,
memorialise or making tracks bruise the open source so as then gush,
thus will a corporate raider keep his promise, thus will he certify
larders of stiff worms, and at a v bidirectional but snapping-to
on the elusivest charge, this way or that laying out in dot dot dot
the pleonastic offer yet more brought to the table free of regulation,
snuff this haunted air, decrying air that cannot guide or train an
eye that needs its sight lines or ear that wants air transposed:
The pilgrims while diminished choose trekking over flat bright
faces, clinging to the handholds,
slopes of carrara slide them to a drop
dizzy can't avoid the gaping gorge of a server keeps in its domain
all detail, hutch of secret names.
Risen effigy, worked from clitter strewn
in your wake, attract sunken stars, abstract the geode fists upwards.
7.
Stone supplants a breathing pasturage,
boughs droop with heavy lambency, a circlet of silver water knots.
Stone lays its shadow under elevations,
shadow for a populace to settle,
in their settlements the earth warms,
lungs quake, a heart judders.
Streaks of mitosis took the strong path
of oversight might have felted fruit flies into galaxies so thick
their lope vastness would have birthed between species, brought close
in humming birds and lemurs, sneak prions, brilliant cars
condensed to their one flock,
piped into projected stainless channels
rampant throughout abattoirs,
while on its steel circlet rows back
the devastated ark, up shit creek without a paddle, choked with mists,
where still are promulgated variant gaseous bodies, oscillations
a domestic slave harkens to,
no quittance other oboe double reed
curls out of sighing, dying strings recombine in sudden surge: arise,
a puff of vapour, an explosion might have been a theatre, stain
mayhap auditorium, shadow creeps above a warm still convivial fold.
Universal droplets and thunder writing chewed into pellets fall
upon a stone cascade, birthing,
blast the heads off birdseed stalks,
sodden match heads, figurines.
8.
Aggressively its digits blanch through
tarry billows, bold bollards rot,
cuttlebones, feathers, polystyrene
feign to swim, fly, hover, weigh,
and the reserved space disintegrates
to flotsam. Having so been buoyed,
life rapid as a switching current tip-
tingles. Inventory of light-blocks tumbles on the film set like Nimrud,
avalanching extras upward once disposable they made their stand
shadow wash across each others' imprints, such as they, faint,
and in their superimposed breasts expressive light shows through a pulse
of one dense proposition, n,
this note scored for true temper or a
quantity precisely tuned degrade ladder upsampling, scrabbling angels
sprawl across each other's entrails exposed as a shrimp's guts,
anteing until the last, anteing funicular to ride the swaying marble,
ocean sectors split out of a glacier, how will a smashed statue
in 3D restoral count its beads,
failing state divided by a grid coalition,
gnomonic map projection grips over tribal lands, ice fields loomed on
by an idol's shadow swept away.
A yellow butterfly visits heavy blossom.
Bees rise and fall on airy plummets. Tables of law flit cancelled.
9.
Haul down ladders, sure larval pulses
flush cells dying bleed colour out of brain and distant colonies.
Deep in the trenches music fails,
mud submerges herds of intellectual
dapple. What of the living stone in that? whips, fans and feathers stirring
damselflies and spermy bloom on airways chamfered overhead,
knit bones to keep aloft our necks;
foresight of enduring lizards
threads through vertebrae with fovea-to-finger optic spasms,
grinding out old tunes. Earth mutters in her mine workings, angry
ocean growls back and forth peopling reefs, reefs which blanch,
stone deprived of thought decays,
feldspar disintegrates, half-vacant
palaces of column coral, gonad pebbledash engulfed with needles,
nautilus armadas wake to goad thunder-struck clocks, to spawn at dusk.
Weigh on these, white grass pressed by human biomass, pressed
by dream excrement, a grassy arborescence but whose splayed roots
soaking on the pavement of grey postwar precincts, presses down,
shellacking hard floating cysts, insects and our stray thoughts,
coral cities decompose to sand flush with sunset and what once was.
10.
No clean slate although wiped with microfibres, shadow writing will persist – no clean slate we can indict: day
cracks its bland blue mouth,
and on the fresh sheet bulletholes,
addresses glower,
deeper grooves continue under
new-twitching tendrils, lit ploughlines left by conquerors.
In empty courts yells echo,
stone splits into lancets,
insect squadrons are glancing off windows that explosion cured restless sand into,
re-inscribing hieroglyphs,
rotted pearls, translucent china,
imitation gems, gold chains,
saturating tissues carmine,
tapers of our human wax.
All may dream of wipe-out,
dream impeccable scrubs,
dream an undegraded skin, fingers yearn to look into,
serpents slither out of nostrils,
curl on smashed arches,
hiss in niches eyes introduce –
no clean slate, no clean slate:
Tyrian red will be extracted out of murex, carmine smashed from cochineals,
concentrating blood and nerves,
black manganese in circuit,
channels sooting thick blue assumption, YInMn sky powdered, aniline blue WS.
11.
Tuned uniquely for near field,
no depth, minimal throw,
this source for colour splinters into cats-eyes, orb artefacts:
purple flares, soon to fringe apparent black and white,
cut blocks are molten. Stock having been prepared, press
where spangles, this patch of tissue on the roughened silver bark, on first approach speculative – chances are
accepts the graft. So nerves send their unsheathed, disembodied fibres arcing through air's warmth, signals
tightly packed in carbon tubes,
which crude daub, blanco,
vantablack will slather,
straying from receptor sites.
Brutally you rasp the stock,
cut to insert a wiry stem.
Blips cascade, hair's-breadth lines are crossing. 'The drops
are insular', but insularity breaks and re-sets figuring light, sends viral ducts threading into gratings.
12.
Churning cloud, a wafer screen froze but its prolific snipped threads dangle summer-
long through blue distress;
billowing holds blue at bay beneath slomo streamers,
shallow moor that staples down convulsive, combative earth,
sends tillers and tin miners flush from moor to inlet,
where loaded waves are cupped between steep-sided jetties
clouded over; although stars lose their likenesses, they spill from every mouth unheard,
long sigh, a body's blue vapour.
Colour-cast disintegrates, sticky tar thins out: deep-down optic tentacles had writhed,
paths would skirt full brooks
through holly, mint, adderstongue and fern, negotiating beech and hazel copse: chancery of winds had ruffled and the
stands of mallow softly swayed,
fish skittered between sandy melts – such lather fades,
abandoning the field to blue.
Skimming the surfactant,
consciousness gives up a ghost,
blue guzzles the moon jelly,
blue vaunts its own incipience.
To Coralize
What more than winter hath that dire art found, These purple currents edged with violets round To coralize, which softly wont to slide In crimson wavelets, and in scarlet tide?
richard Crashaw
1.
An oil of a kind invents a sky over this obdurate surface.
Once again to enlist the chattels. Pooling half the kingdom cloudily concealed then made visible
expels these from their caves, cold water flats, jail,
winkled out of tins. Lining up for judgment, authorised or damned, fitted to their faith cloud while carnival
decorates the streets, the almost gendered word stops,
rocking on a tongue. Time to redeem. Cheers,
yet contemplation fails the rumpled and more beautiful
shot silk. Through storm shall whirl quicken and all sorts were sheep and goat triage. Quietly though tip.
Oil pools on granite, proof against the lithic standstill.
Epiphyte! Blaze on the arm! Lacklustre your scaly trunk!
Sprout madly his incisions. Shower scent on forest floor needle-packed, over circling animals,
tuft magdalenic boughs with rose and cabbage mutants colour-drained. This is not equivalent. Scorned every high-sided cot, their slop chest flashes midday.
Is that how you like it, gaping from mere gravity,
blow-up hanging out to dry? Flip phantom on his heels,
tainted to the uppers, kicking through base clouds.
And this again. God-given and our pre-approved,
its vestments drag upon the present peg and so lacerate.
Blood requires no lesion, evidence no spurt wounds,
choice point ladders, eels and frogs break surface wrinkling screens in loud celebration, pooling round his shoes whose carnal contents are made visible.
2.
Such was red tide the crested masters of the town rode,
proudly on their stakes hammered down, silvering
with dawn-effect, the helms of gulls and pelicans,
'wrong thoughts', they taunt,
repeat their gagging order,
stultify the deaf music, call this luminescence gilds a seamy underbelly,
tracks and restores shoals'
steel-locking manifold; such instruction at the harbour leaks its fine slick oil,
to back-flow over mewling
green carcass. How it shakes silently and eloquently,
turned over to expose a universal deep structure
surfacing that now congeals,
lurid lunar rides thick microorganisms. Blot:
a trustworthy linear supply ?
Smudge: complex circuit.
Cries twist among the poles,
painfully responsive to red shadows' draw and lure.
3.
Some lose the stomach, sick glow wans them in the face slowly lapping; at the quayside pluck and vorticle
get ironed out, classical once broken from the mouth,
pockmarks of desire less compelled yet further lessen;
surface tension shatters into swirl by use of a deciding stake – corruption subteraqueous might shoal.
Is that the basal boom I hear?
Is that Caliphate?
The Thousand Year Reich,
G7, where it convokes?
Stability they seek is staring back tantamount,
will not pacify the face cross-sectioned for analysis –
the spirit dies in lithographs stacked in microns-deep wafer over wafer, revives dint of turbid squall:
what else but usual rain published on the closed sea,
eliciting its opposites in bubbles clustering like roe,
spits on airy counterparts,
resolves into one form,
shapes into a looming kraken between sea and sky.
4.
You get this call cuts its auger flight: pigeons amble amid mirages and poke sunshine limescale,
one flurrying at sight of its own shadow, hears polar earth attract. Sediment plugs whizz between macrocells.
You get this follow-up:
heaps of chain along a quay run through human lading,
'stay on line,' 'don't pull out'.
The sea is turning in its sleep,
dawn copies, copy that.
Its reconstructed shrilling net covers Portland ME.
5.
They're going belly-up, glow with putrefaction, their stink torments neutral air wrapped round the quay,
as though a taproot, dragon-
tree whose function crusted with dry heaves,
thrusts prismatic out of shale,
its flame throws out opal,
opal seeps milk, milk welling eyes with opacity, one opal eye mirrors one diaglyph –
it stinks totally. What wind will blow off vapour, catch petrol winking rivers dressed in peacock foulness,
blow pink, yellow and blue obsolete paper records sorted in a ladder system?
The ladder lays down flat,
angels flash activity lights,
rungs activate like sound bars laying out their falsehoods for roads to cross marsh,
carbon on their underside,
their upper sides of crimson reek with fevered volatility from stage to stage:
up and down, down and up,
governed by the return pump which from below supplies brackish sink holes.
6.
Convolvulus or auger twist for their little plugs of euphoria – triple hissy fit will spark their fire,
after-shave, sal volatile,
vodka fire that rip through lamp/ temple/ grove,
licking at the deckle edge
enveloping the slick seen blistered on far ocean,
to glint in Freda's circlets up her arms – infant tendrils
etching little curls in sand,
breeze in convolutions thinking fits right into,
circles would pin down.
Twisting bodies draw home her breath, crunch animal swarf submissively,
uplifted by their psalms
say what they have to say:
Mouths foam at metal bars,
clips, hair-slides, roses twitchily let loose
so as to finger amulets,
bloom where anti-mother freed from her blood,
invites with reek and fire.
Excerpted from "My Reef My Manifest Array"
by .
Copyright © 2019 John Wilkinson.
Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Acknowledgements,
ON THE DESTRUCTION OF TEMPLES,
TO CORALIZE,
CHYSAUSTER IN MIST,
BODRUGAN'S LEAP,
Again at St Juliot,
The Island of Love,
Ward Round,
Self Defeated,
June Bug Versus Hurricane,
Central Park,
Remote Song,
Burning Water,
Early Evening Programme,
Tunnel Collapse,
The Dripping Wall,
Down I Come,
Facing Chesil Bank,
So Far and No Further,
Devoran,
Dressing-Up Box,
Unclassified Road or Track,
Base Camp,
Expected News,
The Systematic Beds,
The Cloches,
Behaviour of Starlings,
Wapping Steps,
Second Building,
Out of the Blue,
Café Terminus,
Again at St Gorran,
Lonely Women,
Run Sheet,
The Law,
Bodrugan's Leap,
The Immaterials,
Schlummert Ein,
BIRTH SPASMS,
Entablature of Mud,
Celandine,
Thrift,
Sea Aster,
Blindsided,
Pinks,
Magenta,
Alizarin,
World of Sentient Beings,
Sea Holly,
Hinges,
FUGITIVE SHEETS,
Stone Aperture,
Liquidation,
Airstrip Returned to Grass,
Meigs Field,
Fuchsine,
Circular Quay,
Loss of Focus,
Airside,
Still Life,
Sub Rosa,
Against Sleet,
Different Strokes,
Storm Window,
Ways to Get about Busan,
Stopover,
Speechless When It Comes to It,
One—Nil,
Silent as Despairing Love,
Air,
About the Author,
Copyright,