A Foreign Country E-Book

Nigel Pantling

• Herausgeber: The Poetry Business
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 49

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

In A Foreign Country, Nigel Pantling takes us to some strange places - the exotic, the imaginary and the rediscovered past - and for each he serves up a heady local brew, equal parts memory, invention, wit and menace. Here, North Korean tourists rub shoulders with Syrian adventurers, the newly dead with a City lothario, Popeye and Olive Oyl with Cold War warriors. Surprising and unsettling by turns, these poems are a whistle-stop journey though different times, countries and customs, enriched by deep personal experience.

Leseprobe

A Foreign Country

Nigel Pantling’s pamphlets Belfast Finds Log (Shoestring Press, 2014) and Hip Hind Hook (Smith|Doorstop, 2018) relate the danger and human frailty he saw during Northern Ireland’s Troubles and the Cold War. His full collections Kingdom Power Glory and It’s Not Personal (Smith|Doorstop, 2016 and 2020) lift the lid on the secrets of Whitehall and the City, and on the eccentricities of work and the unpredictability of family, love and death.

Published 2025

by The Poetry Business

Campo House,

54 Campo Lane,

Sheffield S1 2EG

www.poetrybusiness.co.uk

Copyright © Nigel Pantling 2025

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

ISBN 978-1-914914-45-4

eBook ISBN 978-1-914914-46-1

All rights reserved.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Designed & typeset by Utter.

Cover author photo: Derek Adams.

Printed by Imprint Digital.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Smith|Doorstop is a member of Inpress

www.inpressbooks.co.uk.

Distributed by BookSource, 50 Cambuslang Road,

Cambuslang Investment Park, Glasgow G32 8NB.

The Poetry Business gratefully acknowledges the support of Arts Council England.

Contents

North Korea 2011

At the Airport

Pyongyang Metro

Panmunjon Demilitarised Zone

The Axe Incident

Meeting the General

The Birthday Dress

White Coats

Free Enterprise

Pit Stop

Ripley’s Believe It or Not 1937

Card Game

The Galérien

Choices

A String of Pearls

BAOR 1974

Marching In with the Regimental Quarter Master Sergeant

On the Young Officers’ Course

Dinner in the Mess

Night Reconnaissance

O Group

Tactical Exercise Without Troops

Witness Statement

Crossing Over

Sex in The City 2000-2009

Sexual Politics

City Lunch

City Dinner

Full Disclosure

Risk

Agency

Crib

Nepal 2007

Looking for Tigers

The Sway of the Elephant’s Shoulder

Trekking

Contrasts

If My Father asks to be Cremated in Kathmandu

Chester, Illinois some time in the 1990s

Newscast

Lady Pye has a Visitor

Back at The Daily Bugle

Olive Oyl

Bluto

Wimpy

Lil’ Swee’Pea

Linslade 2015-2020

Fireside Story 1

Fireside Story 2

Fireside Story 3

Fireside Story 4

Fireside Story 5

Early Warning

Not So Much

Taking Charge

Last Wish

Reading My Father’s Blue Notebook Stamped ‘Save the Rhino’

The Waiting Room

House Rules

Georgie Q

Beattie R

Margaret T

An Inspector Calls

Syria 2009

Damascus: The Old City

Damascus: The City Walls

Apamea

Bosra

Palmyra

Acknowledgements

For my father

The past is a foreign country; they dothings differently there.

– L P Hartley

North Korea 2011

At the Airport

We surrender our mobile phones

to be shrink-wrapped and secured.

Mrs Lee steps forward: she is our guide

and in her trimmed English she asks us

to confirm we have packed no drugs,

newspapers, books or religious tracts.

Mr O, beside her, grey suited, silent,

is always to be with us. We are warned

not to move away from our group of five

or to speak to local people unless invited

or to photograph without permission,

always to call Kim Il Sung “Great Leader”

and never to fold a newspaper across

his photograph or put it aside face down.

Mrs Lee explains that her people expect

these simple courtesies from their visitors.

She has a gift for us with compliments of

People’s Democratic Republic of Korea:

a selection of the Great Leader’s writings

about Juche, his philosophy of self-reliance,

which guides all people in what they do.

Later, there is karaoke: Mr O stays silent.

Mrs Lee sings “Juche iron is the strongest”

I sing “Let’s spend the night together”.

Pyongyang Metro

Rehabilitation’s escalators have up-lighters

like the ones on the old Northern Line;

and cheerful music – piped, not buskers –

and instead of adverts the platform walls

have massive multi-coloured tiled mosaics.

In this one we see the Great Leader,

back-lit by the fire of furnace and oven

and framed by pylons and chimneys,

giving on-the-spot-advice to attentive

miners, masons, munitions workers

and to young farmers, who stride past,

right, for a Morning of Innovation,

and return, left, later in the day

waving flowers and the national flag,

singing The Song of a Bumper Crop.

We are directed to the wooden-slatted seats

on the next train in, and arriving at Glory,

we find more mosaics, marble pillars,

stone arches and coloured chandeliers,

recalling the fireworks at the Great Victory.

Here too is music: now brisk and triumphal.

Mrs Lee says that no-one listens for long,

because the Great Leader has ensured

the on-timetable running of the trains,

for the greater convenience of the people.

At the surface, I find my camera’s faulty.

I ask if I can go back down the escalator

to take some of the photographs again.

Not possible, says Mrs Lee, looking at Mr O.

It is not permitted to change the schedule.

Panmunjon Demilitarised Zone

Weapons may not be carried here.

The arsenal of mutual choice is

propaganda and indoctrination.

The Parallel is a white line on tarmac,

running through the middle of the hut

and across the long table where they sat

each technically still in their own country

and agreed to move their machine guns

fifty metres back, onto identical towers,

where now soldiers barely out of school

watch each other for signs of aggression.

Somewhere over there, in the South –

here called Nam-Joseon, not Hanguk –

a tourist waves: beside me a soldier’s

arm responds, checks itself, falls back.

The Axe Incident

Mrs Lee tells us about The Incident in 1976,

when in an act of imperialist aggression

US soldiers entered the Zone to cut back

the branches of a poplar planted by Kim Il Sung.