Bearings E-Book

Isobel Dixon

• Herausgeber: Nine Arches Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 44

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

In her fourth collection Isobel Dixon takes readers on a journey to far-flung and sometimes dark places in poems that are vivid forays of discovery and resistance, arrival and loss. Bearings sings of love too, and pays homage to lost friends and poets – the voices of John Berryman, Michael Donaghy, Robert Louis Stevenson and others echo here. And there is respite for the weary traveller – jazz in the shadows, an exuberant play of words between the fire and tremors. As Dixon explores form and subject, conflict and the self, she keeps a weather eye out for telling detail, with a sharp sense of the threat that these journeys, our wars and stories, and our very existence pose to the planet.

Leseprobe

Bearings

Also by Isobel Dixon

Weather Eye

A Fold in the Map

The Tempest Prognosticator

The Debris Field

(with Simon Barraclough and Chris McCabe)

Bearings

Isobel Dixon

ISBN: 978-1-911027-02-7

ePub ISBN: 978-1-911027-13-3

Copyright © Isobel Dixon, 2016

Cover artwork © Lynne Stuart

www.ideainaforest.org

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Isobel Dixon has asserted her right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published April 2016 by:

Nine Arches Press

Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,

Great Central Way, Rugby.

CV21 3XH

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Printed in the United Kingdom by: Imprint Digital

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

For my fellow travellers

Contents

Finsong

Messenger

Dream Song for John Berryman

“A Part of Me is Gone”

Pinball Electra

In Which I Am Urged to Let Myself Go

In Which Things Go Too Far

In Which We Pack It In and Shut Up Shop

In Which Dogs Feature Only Metaphorically, Alas

Treasure

Dubai Creek, Ramadan

The Town Hall Passion

Seville Yellow

In Which I Am Given a Very Wide Berth

In Which It’s All a Jolly Fine Mess

In Which You Feel the Scorch of Industry

In Which the Amazon Does Not Appear

The Cock-Eyed Southern Cross

Late Knowledge

The Other Cheek

Pickings

Trade Matters

Women at a Christmas Party, Robben Island, 19th Century

Truths & Reconciliations

In Which It Will Go Heavily With You

In Which the Air Misleads

In Which the Organ Speaketh Well

In Which the Heavenly Lights Descend

DARK MATTERS

Reading Cosmology on the Cherry Hinton Bus in Spring

Homing

Materiality

Learning

Presentiment

Why?

Economy Cosmology

In Which We Scat, Tra-La, the Last Vibrato Of A Single String

In Which the Walls are Closing In

In Which You (Too) Could Give a Hoot

In Which, More Jazz

Jerusalem Stone

The Occupation

dead siege

Gaza

Nouns

Spare Us

Where on Earth

In Which the Traveller Despairs of Art

In Which I Understand the Seedpod and the Rock

In Which the Trees Agree

In Which, as Henry Knew, the Books Are Cooked

Deliver Him

Beyond the Fragile Geometry

Japan Notebook, December 2004

Ikizukuri

Spew

In Which I, As Befits a Lady, Glow

In Which Bad Dancers Hold No Sway

In Which, the Switch

In Which a Flower is a Loaded Gun

Doppelgänger

In Which Fine Feathers Fetter Us (I)

In Which Fine Feathers Fetter Us (II)

In Which I Learn to Hold the Pose

In Which, the Gram that Crackt the Globe

Ellon

Holyrood

Always Leave Them Wanting More

Wake

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the author and this book

Finsong

Alphabet of breath

and fish and fowl,

words the gills and wings

of the world we love and suffer in.

Kingdom of mackerel skies,

the cloud’s anatomy,

glottal branches of sense,

beautiful trachea, click-locking vertebrae.

We husband our resources,

tend. O tender emperor,

your cheer a mute command,

more subjects than you dream unwind

the bandages. The curling scrolls,

inscrutable cells. The dorsal fin

of fortune flicks, scales flex.

Mutable, curious, entire,

unfurl in the flux,

the deep, beyond-breath alphabet.

i.m. James Harvey

Messenger

Russet and frost

roadside fox

surprised

to be sidelined so fast.

Stop press

on the early news

he was delivering

tip-toeing across tar –

Abuja, Tripoli,

Hurricane Irene,

and the sky’s

new supernova –

Now his ankles

are delicately crossed

but he’s sidelong

on the grass.

Mercurial reversal,

the still-fine feathers

of his bushy tail

ruffled by wind

but his grin’s

the giveaway,

a Janus mask.

His ear is snicked,

a young buck’s mark.

He is beautiful.

Whose job is it to bury

a dead fox? you ask.

Dream Song for John Berryman

She sets her wineglass delicately down

and Henry harrumphs inwardly

at all the world’s geometry and fission nuclear

in thát. Then smitten, smarting

from her wide indifference, he spills

his own. Hubbub and salted tables

and the stain admonishes all night. A map,

lost territory. Will they, reproachful hosts,

invite him back, or shoulder coldly to the C-list?

Calmati, Henry!

O, Mr Bones I knows the score.

Henry must tame the lust-quest –

knees, whiskey phantasies, the conscience

unappeasable. Wreckt, wracked, there hover

over Henry hummingbirds, flown in

from gentler climes. Henry slo-mos their wings,

the flexing tints. And sips. But can Henry write it?

Reader, he díd, and was desired.

“A Part of Me is Gone”

It’s not just twins, identical,

who feel this way

(thinking as one),

same-egged, conjoined,

deep life-long linked

till hit and run –

or old age in my case:

not twinned, but fathered,

equally bereft.

Death, it seems, the fiercest

raider of identity,

for the survivor too – self’s theft.

Once genetic double,

mutual-celled;

equalled, answered, met –

you were almost only goodness,

I’m the damaged bit that’s left.

Pinball Electra

You and your robot bride, I scoff

(the sport of waking her, waking her),

cold metal clattering to fleshen

out the supine girl, evince

that throaty laugh’s ideal

appreciation of your skill.

You ribbed me back –

how I, Electra-like, keep

harping on my theme.

And I dream a dark arcade,