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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781847776297 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Carcanet Press, Limited |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
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Clive Wilmer: New and Collected Poems
By Clive Wilmer
Carcanet Press Ltd
Copyright © 2012 Clive WilmerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84777-629-7
CHAPTER 1
The Exile
I threw up watchtowers taller than my need
With bare walls the enemy could not scale,
I wrenched stone from the near countryside
And built my city on the highest hill;
Over the land I scarred I reared
Impenetrable the walls and citadel.
Then to approach the city from afar
All you could see was soaring, there was such peace
Knowing the city mine I lay secure.
My own, one night, woke me – every face
A jutting rock relief in glare,
The torchlight that illumined new distress.
They lit me into darkness. The harsh sun –
My understanding dazzled when it dawned –
Disclosed me vulnerable. I stumbled on,
Till blown, a sterile seed, by years like wind
Indifferent guidance, I am set down
Among familiar stone in a changed land.
Now it is only details I perceive:
The towers lopped, stone interspersed with weed
In patches; a deeper speckling seems to give
Form to the complex of decay, but is fled
With a lizard flicker. Poppies revive,
In the wall they spatter, spectres of old blood.
Chiaroscuro
Chiaroscuro: abandoned dark
Falling back before the advancing light.
If the room I live in were not so vast
The light I hold would cancel the black
Out there, that dissipates my range of
sight.
To banish darkness, first you must plumb
The darkness' depth – and nothing known
more deep.
I know true darkness is much more
Than interrupted light – shadow clung
To the thing's edge – or the domain of
sleep.
I have known times when the mind cracks
before
The force of its own thoughts. With those
Moments in mind he has taken a lamp
To cast a light on the future's flickering floor;
Behind his back, the gates of darkness close.
Behind his back, the gates of darkness close;
The leap he takes is into light's abyss,
Knowing that at the brink one never knows
Whether it's darkness that encloses
Light, or the light darkness.
He takes a chance on what may lie in store
For him in landscapes where the objects glow:
In my world where the darkness breeds around
me,
Light may open up a world beyond me.
Opening outward, opening more and more.
The Invalide Storyteller
Lace, we remember, faded lace
To filter light and veil the panes
Against the external day.
The light was intermeshed with lace
Upon the wall, fastidious,
In patterns subtle as decay
And intricate as pain:
Like pinks and greens on carcasses,
Like wrinkles on an old man's face.
Beyond our reach, above the veil
Where knowledge knit with pain and death
Shimmered, the sun's rays
Burst through the panes and cast a pale
Rectangular frieze upon the wall,
Whose colours told of summer days,
Whose pallor told of death;
Where he could watch what he recalled
Advancing, as he told each tale.
The Sparkling of the Forge
Stiffened and shrunk by age my grandfather
Leans forward now, confined within his chair,
Straining to raise a finger to point back
Over his shoulder, scarcely able to look
Over his shoulder through the darkening window
At the road behind him and before me where
The mailcoach ran just seventy years ago –
He suddenly tells me, reaching to capture one
Glimpse of the road where memory finds its form
And in whose lamps so many memories burn:
The armed guard in the rear, behind bars –
Changing the horses at the road's end inn –
And where we buy his tobacco every day
Was once the blacksmith's forge. I watch him
stare
Into the crumbling coal and feel the blaze
Flare in the ancient forge and his childhood-
eyes;
And whether the shoes were hammered on red-
hot
Uncertain now, he recollects their glare.
His words uncertain now I watch him see
Bright in his mind the sparking of the forge,
The monstrous anvil and the sizzling steel,
The raising of the hammer high to feel
What once he had of muscle in his arm,
The hammer's beat sounding his deepest urge.
Each time recalled another fragment lost,
Still his past seeps back – with broken breath –
Continuous in a stream of memories.
I pick up only broken images:
Confined by time, as he is by his age,
My own time's loss I find in his lost youth.
An old man's death becomes a young man's
rage;
I seize the coal-tongs; now the blacksmith's clamp
Shadows my tiny room with smouldering giants,
An arm is raised to fall which, falling, hurls
Hammer-blows forward rung with resonance;
And, shod with steel now, hear the hard hoof
stamp.
East Anglian Churchyard
for Robert Wells
The land low-lying – the fen drained –
Still partakes of the flood, and the soil
Of this green graveyard still has the swell,
The broken swell, of a calm sea, beneath which
Graves are submerged.
And this church – dateless, its wall at a lean
And no tower – is a beached ship,
Perhaps of northern pirates who having no more
Rich coastal abbeys to fire, settling,
Passed from the blue.
From the deep half-salvaged, there is one
tombstone
That rears above the surface where leaf-light
swims
In the shade of an oak-tree, ageless, ivied –
The stone entwined by the same ivy, its name
Blotted by moss.
Beside recent deaths, no other stone
In sight – though here and there, a vague swell
Covers a forgotten life. This
Particular spot in the shade, he must have
Chosen for memory.
Genealogy: The Portrait
Born in India where the sun glared
at the stoical English; his father's lip
stiff under the huge moustache, knit
with grizzled whiskers over the stiff
gilding of his red coat's collar; his mother,
haughty, decked in imperial silks,
her boned collar; the father's hands
so massive, sinewed and scarred and no
soft lulling at the mother's breast:
a Victorian childhood, steel grey.
Sent back home to England: for hard
study and games under threat of the birch,
the runs before breakfast, the cold baths:
to make a man of him.
And in his manhood
(before the Depression's grime, old age
and death) unfit for the Great War, tall
in Edwardian grey, a slight physique;
and his pale, melancholy, liberal eyes
fade from the picture looked at two wars past
by his son, who has no children, and remembers.
Victorian Gothic
for Dick Davis
Blackened walls: a Gothic height
Crouches and does not soar, locked
To the earth like slabs of outcrop stone
That touch no God; they imitate
Monoliths of the moors. Smokebound
Maze of streets in a northern town,
Low-skied misted marshland: ghosts
Haunt him, a grave imagination.
Mist merged with industrial smoke
Where the ghosts swim:
Their scrawny bodies topped with blackened
heads
Like those that peer through jungle leaves.
Manufacturers, poets, moralists, colonisers, all
Engendered empires of despair
Built on blackness in the grey air.
What does the grey stone mask? Such
battlements
Attest obscure defence.
His mind draws
Close to its melancholy: as
In dank winter to the heaped log-fire
Of a Saxon hall, beyond whose walls
What lurks in greyness?
Castles from dark days his reason
Girdles like siege but preserves,
Long years of siege that constitute defence;
Renascence ghosts, dark blood
Steams on the axe – industrial fumes
Dry the blood of the starved worker – marshland
Dank at sunset the sky bleeds
Pillarbox red.
The Ruined Abbey
And now the wind rushes through grassy aisles,
And over the massy columns the sky arches.
The monks who built it
Were acquainted with stone and silence.
Knowing the grandeur and endurance
Of isolated winter oaks, of rock,
And the hard rhythms of moors,
They retired here and reared it
From the crust of the north, moulding this form
Around their core of silence.
Their minds were landscaped.
Not with summer gardens that give sense ease
Nor beaches that lull questionings to a doze.
Their landscapes asserted agonies that
Probed them to the nerve;
The hardness of rock and the stream's ice
Formed a resistance they learned to resist,
To subdue, till it yielded
To silent movements of joy –
To the penetrating warmth of a mellow sun,
Its venerable eye.
The streams locked by ice,
The rocks, and the edged wind
Resisted their cowled will to define.
But resistance tautened questionings whose
sinew
Shaped understandings.
The moor's silence snowed meanings,
And they knew that, while ice melts or cracks,
they
Could endure like the rocks.
And so from the stone of landscaped minds, they
fashioned
A form for those meanings, a form
That arched over meaningful air.
According to their time they shaped it
With massive grace.
And in the face of evil, weathers and decay
Its essence constant in the shiftings of ages.
And now the wind rushes through the grassy
aisles,
And over the massy columns the sky arches.
In ruin, the form remains;
When the form falls, there is stone;
Stone crumbled, there is still
The dust, dust ... and a silence
The centuries bow to – a silence
Lapped by the speechless howl of winds.
Yorkshire, the West Riding, 1965
The Long Climb
not that run
into the candled darkness
with light enough for you not
to see your sins by –
light enough
to daze you with a beauty that does not speak
of the long struggle, but rather
climbing winding stairs
to the top of an ancient tower, so tall
it seems to have no end –
and less light there, the turning
in narrowest confines, and
asperity of cold stone –
where the small light calls to a search
for the more there may be, the climb no
perversely tortuous
fascination lit with glimmers –
abrasion, this is it, you can
crack your skull in the dark on stone, graze
blood-points from the skin, fall even
in sprawled confusion, but this
is where life touches – where blood
run to the head, the heart
beats to its peril – and there is for you
(unable to see round corners)
no end
to the long climb
unless you should reach the top –
from the start your aim though lost
often enough
when your only thought was climbing –
and from it see
spread out before you the whole of it
when the eye goes journeys
league upon league over land
in the clear sun, light that
hardens edges yet
infuses all with itself
is strong, this
(if at all you reach it
if it be there)
this is the vision
Florence, 1968
The Well
All day to gaze down into a well
as into yourself – as through self
to the blue sky fringed with green
of the world; and at length,
through a tunnelled forest of fronds that grow
from the mossy walls, to perceive
only your own face against the sky,
eyes glazed in contemplation, staring back
through a forest: is at large
to behold and desire to behold –
through foliage and from beyond darkness –
always, as in a well, meeting your stare,
your own face afloat on the surface,
with your thoughts bubbling from the deep
spring
and your voice, reverberant, echoing response;
and to forget how without it
there is only the old perspective into endless
dark
with silence at the source.
The Dedication
E.W., 1882–1948
It was your room they moved me to
(I, not yet four the year you died,
Not grasping how I might have cried),
Dear Father, whom I hardly knew;
And your great, polished chest-of-drawers
Was all that I inherited
Besides: it loomed above my bed:
Dark in the wood-grain still there pours,
In memory, vast, the gathered deep –
Huge waves that surged, curded to foam
(In the security of home),
And broke, as I sank into sleep.
Clearing the drawers out, now a man,
I came upon your photograph:
It seemed a visual epitaph
To one I'd never thought, till then,
I'd loved or feared. Now time had blurred
Your placid features, void of care,
Who died, as if you had no heir,
Intestate: so on me conferred
No such authority as dressed,
In my conception, all your acts;
Mere rooms to occupy as facts –
No freehold rightfully possessed.
Moreover, childish hands, untaught
In every art but innocence,
Had scribbled into radiance
The aspect which the lens had caught
And overlaid its sepia hue –
Your clothes now black and gold, your face
Crimson, the sky (your dwelling-place)
Empty but touched with purest blue –
As if a fatherless naïf,
Dreaming a different element,
Within the oval frame had meant
To translate his confused belief
Into pictorial commentary:
This was the palimpsest I'd scrawled
Glimpsing a King, beyond my world,
Who governed from across the sea.
Your power you held but to resign –
A rationally gentle reign;
I see you smiling, mild again,
Whose failing life engendered mine;
And through my childhood dreams, that face
Taught what a child could never see:
That I must never hope to be
The master of my dwelling-place.
1975
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Clive Wilmer: New and Collected Poems by Clive Wilmer. Copyright © 2012 Clive Wilmer. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
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