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New Poetries VI
An Anthology
By Michael Schmidt, Helen Tookey Carcanet Press Ltd
Copyright © 2015 Michael Schmidt and Helen Tookey
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78410-038-4
CHAPTER 1
Judith Willson
I am fascinated by the ways in which silence and absence are not voids but textures; by the insistent, unstable presence of the past, and by the languages which transform how we understand these things.
I write slowly and revise repeatedly, listening for the point at which ideas cohere into shape and rhythm and the poem finds its direction. If this works, I know something new when I have finished.
I have adapted several details in 'Some favourable effects on bird life ...' from E.M. Nicholson's Birds and Men (1951). Nicholson was an ornithologist, and a civil servant during the Second World War. The italicised lines in stanzas 1, 3 and 4, and the last line of the poem, are direct quotations. 'The alchemy of circumstance ...' takes its title from Tacita Dean's description of photography in her Analogue: Drawings 1991–2006. Phrases in brackets and italics appear in Dean's artwork Blind Pan; some are themselves from Oedipus at Colonus.
Noctilucent
We cross the garden: slant sun, slack tide of shadow.
He is remembering woods below San Pietro, the ragged end of a war.
Soldier and red-cloaked shepherd on the road,
the old man stilling his dog, waiting in the white road.
He watches now: his stumble down, wading knee-deep
through tangled nets of dazzle, spills of shade,
to the soft chalk curve between the trees,
the red cloak burned in his eyes. His hand, unsure.
He says, If a person walking raises his hand
he sees the shadow of each finger doubled.
Trees slide down to lap us, attentive to our solitudes,
until the hollow dark is filled with memory of light –
fluorescence, phosphor glow, poppies' slow burn;
ghostlights to guide our double-going.
All this
This is where it all comes home to us, in the fetch of light
crossing the mirror line and only a bank of concrete blocks
grounds us here in the level give and take of the estuary now
the machinery miles down between Stavanger and Bergen
begins to heave the whole weight of the sea round; long rigs churn
back over the Blessing of Burntisland, heap into the firth
in a shining skim that hauls its undertow of sky across the silt
buckling the mudflats open; we are dissolved in this now
our edges bloom underwater and the sanderling livewire
at the lick of foam sheer away in scuds of grey-white
white-grey, wheel back, a shower coming in off the sea.
All this. And sea urchins, Echinocardium, blown from the surf
like bubbles of bone, the amazed O of all we could lose.
Our weightless luck. Our brittle, spiky hearts.
Hushings
hushing: to silence; to wash out mineral deposits by releasing a torrent of water
Clough
Up on the tilt where the moor begins its slide into Lancashire
and the village shrinks back at the sour peat out past the turbines
we're trying to make sense of what isn't here:
a clean sweep of mountain wasted sheer into wind,
glaciers that snouted down from the north in a roar of rubble and sinkholes,
burst open, sluicing green meltwater, drifted off into hag fleece,
goits and headraces, limekilns, the yellow drench of their smoke.
There's a whole phantom moor in this washed-out clough
and we're feeling our way by echo location
towards a hurly of diggers and carters, stokers, women hefting picks.
Every winter the light falls more thickly, layer upon layer.
The hushings are deepening by one millimetre a year.
Ore
There are things we remember only because of their absence,
like a word I need for the light that blows in from the west
after rain, or the hollow house in a field of bleached grass
we walked to one hot afternoon – and now we've both lost the path back
you think I've imagined the moment we pushed open the door
onto summers of butterflies faded and heaped like old letters,
their dry sift over the floor, their tiny stir in the draught.
My father once told me a secret he'd learned as a child:
the exact spot on the pavement where, if you stood very still,
you could hear the river running beneath the street –
a trap opening onto something implacable that would always be waiting.
He remembered that all his life, but not where to stand.
Snow
after Salvatore Quasimodo, 'Neve'
Evening gathers into itself the earth and all its dear ones:
gaunt men pulling military greatcoats round their narrow bodies,
women wrung dry with crying. It dissolves trees into wind;
it hollows us out to starved shadows dragging our heels
over the fields of a planet lit by snow-shine.
It gives us to our dead. We do not howl into the dark
as we should. We do not beat our fists against the iron-black rim
of this white sphere where our people lie buried around us.
We give them the angry pulse in our foreheads, our heartbeats.
They take the shape of breath from our mouths. We walk in silence,
and in silence snow and night enfold us all, so tenderly. So tenderly.
Some favourable effects on bird life of the bombardment of our cities
Wrynecks were constantly heard around British Headquarters
during discussions of aerodromes. Swallows looped over the lake.
I watched the salients of their swerves, scribbled on a memo
The destruction of the human population
is no longer such a remote contingency as it used to seem.
There's a blackbird and a throstle sing on every green tree
I never discuss Allocation of Tonnage or movements of ships
outside this room. I trace the perfected migrations of swifts,
flight patterns of lapwing, scan winter skies for starlings, wait
for the rolling thrum of their sideslip over ministry buildings.
I follow dancing parties of goldfinches on frivolous excursions.
and the larks sing so melodious, sing so melodious
I do not entirely trust the Civil Service. Shortages of bacon and milk
may have caused a curious habit newly observed in bluetits –
papers shredded, notices ripped. Bombing, favourable effects of,
I slot into the card index, between Birmingham and Bradford.
Starlings are roosting now among the anti-aircraft guns.
and the larks sing so melodious at the break of the day
I write The disappearance of the human race from these islands
would perhaps most inconvenience the lesser whitethroat.
A blackbird clamours brazen, jubilant, jubilant,
fireweed and cinders, a shattered hedge.
I shall persist in calling the song thrush a throstle.
Amateur magician
Learn these tricks for an amusement, but do not carry them into your everyday life.
– J. Theobald, The Amateur Magician
I studied how to cut the Princess of Thebes into nine pieces
and pluck the Lady of Karnac to hover at my fingertips
over a pit of flames. They'd have danced back every time,
those flexuous girls, to catch the paper bouquets
I'd whisk from my gloves.
And then, Swallowing the Needle, the Knife through the Heart –
the trick is to leave no visible traces. Palm up palm down
here's a coin in your ear, here's your purse in my hand
before you knew it had gone. Your ear-ring?
Watch me cut open this apple.
What followed came easy: the Riffle Shuffle, the Faro Shuffle,
the snap and fan of Lost Queens descending a staircase again, again,
all the false cuts, false dealing, the Criss Cross, the Switch.
I mastered the Ambitious Card; fumbled the Finger Break.
It would always be Double or Nothing.
And look, there's nothing between my hands, nothing up my sleeves –
only a length of silk ribbon I'll walk through, without a cut or a knot.
It's Expansion of Texture, that trick that makes nothing appear.
It's my gift.
I've left you my Vanishing Card.
The alchemy of circumstance and chemistry in five photographs
Tacita Dean's Blind Pan
[Exile, no sun]
This is a photograph of twenty years. There are no people
in it, and no shadows. He carries this famine
on his back; he carries his country in his mouth
and it has no word in it for home, no proverb of
forgetting.
[Antigone leading, dark clouds]
Walking under rain. Who was your father? Gunfire in villages,
dogs at the gates. What does her voice look like?
Like the weight of her coat. Like bread. Like Take my hand,
walk in my footsteps. No. Who was your father? Like rain.
[Furies, 'your steps are dark']
Forests run howling for water; air shredded, wingbeats.
She cannot look into the burning, curls under herself
as if she were unborn. Walk in my footsteps. Her hand.
He leads her over the border, into dark, out of sight.
[Colonus, just out of frame]
Halting, lame. Halt where a spring overflowing a basin
returns his face to him in silver and sunlight slipping over the brim
through wet, open hands, into black earth. He sees the place
when he knows it. No one can look direct into the sun.
[Light. End here]
It begins, no way back, in a dark room, something taking
the imprint of light. In this photograph are constellations,
musics, scribbled maps, our chancy travel across peopled time,
and there is no exposure long enough to make this visible.
James Turrell's Deer Shelter Skyspace,
Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Temple, lake, deer shelter triangulate arcadia's vanishing point.
Leaves skitter in the empty summerhouse; beyond the sliding water
shadows herd beneath the arches of the deer shelter.
* * *
Walk into a concrete silo open to the sky.
There's nothing to see here.
What does nothing look like?
Flying over the curve of the Painted Desert, air opening like water,
barrel-rolling over fathomless sky in Pyramid Lake; farm lights at night far-flung as stars.
At dawn, the hangar shining: a memory of sunlight on a wall.
* * *
7.30am: mussel shell; split of gold; skirl lifting and spilling,
1pm: ragged pennants; vapour swags; sting of rinsed shorelines,
5pm: damson stain; smoke feathers; ink.
That this is nothing – how do we live with this?
We stare like deer into the event of light.
The years before
That time my grandmother went to the sixpenny hop
in the years before they became the years before
Tom Baxter and Rabbity Dixon played through the roiling night
of longways and hands across down the middle back again and
turn and K-K-K-Katy and Haste to the
Wedding
and oh how
Tom could play the birds out of the trees with that old concertina
pouncing and bucking high jinking over the honk and growl
of what moved in the forest at the edge of the tune
Rabbity sharp and quick as his traps to snare the beat
sending the tambourine's silver starlings whorling
over and over
towards a room she walked into one afternoon
when Will ran into the kitchen come down to the shop
you must come and see this there's a man here says he's a
and there among boxes of collars and gloves resting palm to palm
the day quietly folding its hours away she shook hands with a
lion tamer
and heard again
all that wild blaze reeling and swooping
heel and toe stamp turn about and
Goodnight Ladies and oh The Girl I Left Behind Me
somewhere out in the forest rough music rising
in the year that was becoming the year before
Watching a nineteenth-century film in the twenty-first century
Adolphe, Mrs Whitely and Harriet wait in the garden
still in an angle of sunlight
that will never fall across the bay window
or slice the mottle of summer-weighted shade.
They take four steps to turn into the shadows
at the edge of their afternoon;
four steps wheeling past us – skirts swinging, coats flapping –
a breath's length away as we watch in their dark.
Their bodies are a shower of particle-scatter,
their footfall a trick of snapshooting time.
They flicker to the edge of the frame at twelve frames a second
for two seconds for ever
through a speckle and grain of sound too distant to reach us:
Adolphe counting their steps – and turn –
a neighbour's shout, a laugh, a road beyond the hedge spooling out, out
into the smash and roar of the world that's falling towards us.
In the jagged months
In the jagged months when you lost even lost
and knew it, you gave up arguments and grievance –
those intricate machines you had built for years,
their ratchets kept oiled and sharp to run sweet –
and broke glass. Your hand was a wrecking bar
smashing ice on a pond, you splintered yourself open
to haul down through a mulch of black leaves for what lay
in the sump of winter's slow bruising.
You had seen them, bent under four o'clock dark
throwing your box in the pond, the box that held your streets,
your tools, the white leaves of your books, your days of the Arno –
days when green branches swaying upside-down in a pool
rose like a promise through the pliant skin of water
which opened to your hand, and was whole again.
Eric Langley
I am trying to pay attention.
Attempting to tenderly attend.
In writing these poems, I wanted to take the time to become fully attentive to a chosen word's extended meaning until perhaps, by playing on its sense and sound, and enjoying its possibilities, I could somehow tenderise each word, release its etymological potential, make it more malleable through this application of my tender attentions. Hopefully, as the connective tissues of sense get tested, heated past 55°C through the quick frictions of rhyme, the word's semantic fibres, its collagens and collocations, start to loosen and get tastier. Sense extends; new meanings are tendered up: poetry becomes tenderness.
And to be attentive is, as the word's origin suggests, to stretch out (tendere), to go beyond one's confines: so these are intended as tender poems, stretching across interims, sending out words into the spaces between people, trying to connect. They are a bit bruised in their encounters, often a bit wayward, and always feeling tender: but as Judith Butler admits, 'one does not always stay intact. [...] Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something.'
Of Those From the Ships
Ptolemaeus the king of Egypt was so eager to collect a library, that he ordered the books of everyone who sailed there to be brought to him. The books were then copied into new manuscripts. He gave the new copy to the owners [ ...] but he put the original copy in the library with the inscription 'of those from the ships.'
– Galen
So you can come along and you can scan it:
come along the docks, as are your curious customs,
and you can move among my spread
among my freight my cargo.
And you should catch a draft to drift
to drift from crate my love to crate
my love through freight my lovely argosy.
So you can leaf your dusty tips through wheat and chaff
and riffle out each inky index
through all the silken slough
of all my gaudy textiles.
Flick through it, resort it, recall it
to recount and to your count enlist
my disembarked, my unencrypted holdings.
And so, ascribe each part, just so,
inscribe each piece, just so,
describe each Hippocrene flask, just so,
each cask, just so: of all my all content.
To each a place in place to place
in your exact accountant call
of row by rolling row anatomies.
Now as you go, steady
my dizzying inventories, steady
my whole to holed in hold and steady as you go.
Until amongst the richer sort, my finer stuff,
my love, my weft, my warp, my woof, my loom,
you come across, you chance upon
my books, my textured library.
Like Antony, enlisting scrolls for Egypt,
I've weighed up with ranks of primed romance,
rows of charged letters, waxed flattery.
Please read them quick; respond at length but
on the instant, as each squeezed line tips
tight up on the grazed edge, squeaks 'come!'
and soft speaking means the softly same.
Pinched, each plundered volume plumbs
your depths of cheek of face of front.
The bitter gall of it, from row to row
shelf to shelf and decimal point to point.
You and your low-toned underlings, sotto voce,
unstack, stack up, pack up and off
with those, all those from my ships.
Your tough customs, your officious vandals,
all horn-rimmed reading glasses
all hob-nailed boots spectacular
along my aisles, through my stacks,
scrawling down my gang-planks.
So silence please. And no talk back to back
to no recourse to no redress to silence please.
You rogue librarian, filling packing cases;
you rough justice, packing shipping crates;
you vile bibliophile, stealing a borrow;
you unrepentant lovely lender.
Fingered, found red-handed
shameless-faced, each fly defaced:
of those – you wrote – from the ships.
You with your hollow whispers
of silenced, pleased apology,
towing away my textures
of those from the ships.
You book thieves pirates book robbers;
you book thieves collectors borrowers lovers
of those from the ships.
Of course, I knew your Alexandrian law.
I knew you'd come, and knew you'd take them.
Of course, I brought along my best materials –
first editions, originals, manuscripts –
and must have hoped you'd steal them.
This is the hope, of course off course,
of all those from such a stricken ship
of all those from the ships.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from New Poetries VI by Michael Schmidt, Helen Tookey. Copyright © 2015 Michael Schmidt and Helen Tookey. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
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