Allison McVety: Selected Poems E-Book

Allison McVety

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

Seitenzahl: 44

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Allison McVety's first collection, The Night Trotsky Came to Stay (Smith/Doorstop, 2007), was the overall winner of the 2006 Book & Pamphlet Competition, and was shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection Prize 2008. Her poems have appeared in The Times, The Guardian, Poetry Review and Poetry London, have been broadcast on BBC radio and anthologised in the Forward Poems of the Decade 20022011 and The Best British Poetry 2013. A second collection, Miming Happiness, was published in 2010 and a third, Lighthouses in 2014. In 2011 Allison won the National Poetry Competition and in 2013 was recorded at the Southbank Centre for the Poetry Library's 60th anniversary.

Leseprobe

This ebook original Selected Poemspublished 2014 bysmith|doorstop BooksThe Poetry BusinessBank Street Arts32-40 Bank StreetSheffield S1 2DS

www.poetrybusiness.co.ukCopyright © Allison McVety 2014ISBN 978-1-910367-11-7

Allison McVety hereby asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this book.British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover design and ebook generation by alancoopercreative.co.uk

smith|doorstop Books is a member of Inpress,www.inpressbooks.co.uk. Distributed by Central Books Ltd., 99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN.

The Poetry Business is an Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation

Contents

fromThe Night Trotsky Came to Stay (2007)

Portrait

Telegram

How you can know a place

Swimming Lessons

The Two Times I Saw Your Penis

Women at their Gates

Boy on the Bus

Interiors

Helsinki

Still Life

fromMiming Happiness(2010)

The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra

Two Mugs

Town House, Tansley Drive

In Little Black Dresses

Offices

Offspring

Syrup of Figs

In the weeks after rationing

Whit Walks

Pathology

In a Northern Town

The Train Driver’s View

Urmston Brickworks

Like Coastal Houses

Family Trees

Ordnances

In the Reading Room at the British Library

fromLighthouses(2014)

To the Lighthouse

Finlandia

Light House

Drowning

Nureyev

Lido

Surgeon-god

Lighthouses

Honeymoons

Bombazine

Handsfree

Landings

Tightropes

Noise

Philomela

Dog

Afterwards

Coattails

Residency

Crossings

The Left-Handed Bride

The “Stradivarius” Tree

Not Speaking of You

Requiem from the steps at Pendlebury Station

Ivy

Pandemic: Incidents of Mortality

Man Engine

Notes

fromThe Night Trotsky Came to Stay (2007)

Portrait

My father carried his mother through Yugoslavia

and Greece. Stitched into the lining of his coat

and, against regulations, she kept him company

through the days he hid in back rooms and under stairs;

suckled him on nights huddled in churchyards,

with only the chatter of his pad and key. He folded her

into his wallet, where she rubbed up against

pound notes, discharge papers, a thank-you letter

from General Tito. Around her neck, in miniature,

her brother, on a row of cultured pearls: his face

crimped by the crease of leather. His eyes give no hint

of my mother, though he has her lips. He is his pre-gassed,

pre-shot self. And I am the daughter of cousins, a woman

with no children. I think of losing her in a crowd, slipping her

into someone’s jacket, an open bag, that sagging pocket

on the train, for her to live another life, our line travelling on.

Telegram

When it came, she put the envelope,

moth wings still folded, still sealed,

into a box too small to hold a dead-

not-dead man. The lid, worked

from the burl of an oak, is mortise

and tenoned, closed on a blind

hinge. For eighty years he’s been missing,

presumed dead, killed in action.

A telegram not read places him

in a war grave, on last parade

and in a field hospital on the fringe

of a battleground healed with grass,

his own scabs a knotty veneer,

his memory lost. This box, a trousseau gift

to tot up the cotton, linen, copper years,

not meant to end with paper,

is never opened, its dowels as raw

as when the bradawl, auger, granny’s tooth

had scrawled their marks, its lining spared

the fading light. Imagine a man inside

an envelope, inside a crowded box,

tired of being; imagine lives lived inside out,

of always being a hair’s breadth,

a paper-knife, a bayonet slit from fact.

How you can know a place

and not. How you can know it

through your feet, through the pitch

and crack of pavement, through games:

their stones and sticks,

through hopscotch numbers

scratched on flags with chalk or coal.

Through the clip of ropes on kerbs,

the tap on grids, through the clap of hands,

the toll of dustbin lids, the spark

of studs on boots. Through Messerschmidt

and Spitfire arms, strobed or flecked

with rationed sun. How you can see a thing,

defined through shadows,

the twitch of nets, the very thick of it.

Through the snatch and flare

of two fags lit with the same match,

through the warden’s bawl

to put that bloody light out,

to shut the flaming door. How one shell

can re-shape the place you know,

shift a shelter three feet north,

so you dig for the man in the tin hat

in the wrong place. And how

when they lift your father,

caked in dust, there are no cuts,

no bruises. This is how a man drowns

in earth, this is how you know a place.

Swimming Lessons

It rained the whole fortnight,

so my father got it into his head to teach me something useful,

like how to stretch my body out to crawl from doggy paddle,

how to cleave then palm the water, how to skim,

how to drive from the shoulder, the chest, the diaphragm,

how to breathe, regular, on the rim of each third stroke,

and above all how to keep going, to endure the cold,

to enjoy the loneliness, to think of other things besides the swim.

Some days we skiffed the surf with pebbles,

my father’s explanations muffled in the hood of a new anorak.