Between Two Windows E-Book

Oli Hazzard

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 48

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

In Between Two Windows, his first book of poems, Oli Hazzard takes language out to stretch and flex and bend itself into new shapes. Into the formal straits of sestinas, sonnets and pantoums stray palindromes, mirrored poems, anagrams, allusions and curiosities. His lyrics and satires dance in the spaces that open up between intention and expression, the moment when the horse attempts to throw its rider.

Leseprobe

OLI HAZZARD

Between Two Windows

for Lucy

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications in which versions of some of these poems have previously appeared: Best British Poetry 2011 (Salt, 2011), Clinic II, Five Dials, The Forward Book of Poetry 2010, Horizon Review, Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam (Cinnamon Press, 2012), New Poetries V (Carcanet, 2011), PN Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Salt Book of Younger Poets (Salt, 2011), The Shuffle Anthology II, Warwick Review. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Arts Council UK for a Writer’s Grant I received from them in 2011.

I would like to thank Maria Hazzard, Robin Hazzard, Greg Normand, Mark Ford, Roddy Lumsden and Michael Schmidt for their encouragement, support and advice.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

I

Moving In

The Inability to Recall the Precise Word for Something

True Romance

Rule of Thumb

Mid-Air

Apologia

Entre Chien et Loup

Home Poems

A Few Precepts

Some Shadows

Pantoum in Which Wallace Stevens Gives Me Vertigo

Two Versions of ‘Fabliau of Florida’

Badlands

Four Landscapes

Glasnost

Solfege

A Week in the Life

Are We Not Drawn Onward, We Few, Drawn Onward to New Era?

Outside

Prelude to Growth

II

Sonnet

As Necessity Requires

Arrival

A Walking Bird

To Comprehend a Nectar

Carapace

The Asymmetric

Wyoming

In Absentia

A Later Stage of Discipline

With Hindsight

Three Summaries

Martedi Grasso

Manna

Old-Fashioned Uncouth Measurer

Sphinx

Leaving the City of Acupuncture

Kayak

Notes

About the Author

Also available from Carcanet Press

Copyright

I

And many standing round a waterfall

See one bow each, yet not the same to all

But each a hand’s breadth from the next.

The sun on falling waters writes the text

Which yet is in the eye or in the thought.

It was a hard thing to undo this knot.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Moving In

You take me down to the crease in the hills

Where the farm’s boundaries are smothered

By brambles and the dry stream-bed lies

Like a pelt – we follow it quietly, shoeless,

Listening to the waves at Calpe knead into

The beach, and reaching out my hand to

Touch your hair we are suddenly

Aware of the sensation that we are being

Overheard: yet all there is on this side

Of the valley is the fuzz of telephone

Wires overhead and darkness slowly

Encroaching behind the skin-pink clouds –

The orange trees, after all, seem to clutch themselves

Above the safflowers and alfalfas that

Spring from the ground like cocked eyebrows –

So, stepping onwards – stalking, by now –

Convinced that night is simply the folding over

Of fingers, leaned into a steeple – we hunt

For some burrow, some hood of earth

Where the sound of the sea is as unbroken

As it is within a coiled shell and build

A fire whose voice, like chicks-being-

Incessantly-hatched, will make our

Own seem all the more improbable. But

Now, as I sit alone, crumbling dry leaves

In my palm, it seems all I can dream of is

The onset of sleep. Really, I hardly notice

The rising heat of the circling brush fire that

Flays the whole sky of its stars.

The Inability to Recall the Precise Word for Something

All things are words of some strange tongue

Jorge Luis Borges

The first person you see after leaving your house

One who always wants to know what’s going on

To make money by any means possible

A surgical sponge accidentally left inside a patient’s body

Given to incessant or idiotic laughter

An incestuous desire for one’s sister

The act of mentally undressing someone

One who speaks or offers opinions on matters beyond their knowledge

A secret meeting of people who are hatching a plot

The act of beating or whipping schoolchildren

The categorisation of something that is useless or trivial

Belching with the taste of undigested meat

One who is addicted to abusive speech

The use of foul or abusive language to relieve stress or ease pain

The condition of one who is only amorous when the lights are out

To blind by putting a hot copper basin near someone’s eyes

The act of opening a bottle with a sabre

The habit of dropping in at mealtimes

The act of killing every twentieth person

One who eats frogs

The low rumbling of distant thunder

Someone who hates practising the piano

The practice of writing on one side of the paper

A horse’s attempt to remove its rider

The collective hisses of a disapproving audience

The sensation that someone is mentally undressing you

The act of self-castration

Being likely to make a mistake

One who fakes a smile, as on television

Counting using one’s fingers

The act or attitude of lying down

The smell of rain on dry ground

The space between two windows

True Romance

1

The window I saw myself in was a room.

The sun unpacked the buildings. On the deep table

An antique map, bleached of its colours, lay twitching in

The breeze, a drowsy mantis. I drifted beneath a honeycomb of balloons;

Mistook swans for dollops of cream; saw ghosts in

The white of Chinese-burned skin. Those people

Inside looked out at me strangely. They couldn’t

Believe it when I reached out to touch them. I said, We all believe

In the value of pretending one thing is another, don’t we?

We were all a little frightened. But I could not do what

I threatened. Something else was needed to secure it in place.

Said another way, maybe it could have happened.

2

Said another way, maybe it could have happened,

I threatened. Something else was needed to secure it in place.

We were all a little frightened. But I could not – what?