Blood / Sugar E-Book

James Byrne

• Herausgeber: Arc Publications
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Seitenzahl: 53

Beschreibung

This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here.Byrne's poetry sparkles with wit and irony, and Blood / Sugar is his long-awaited first collection. The editor of a highly-regarded poetry magazine, Byrne maintains great technical proficiency in his structuring of verse, moving effortlessly between the traditional and the innovative to shape poems that brim with lyricism and confidence."James Byrneís second collection, Blood / Sugar is packed, ambitious and absorbing... The comparison that comes to mind is with Christopher Middleton, with whom Byrne shares a restless hunger."Sean O'Brien, Poetry Review"His poetry is clean, clear and contemporary; it cuts to the bone of the beast every time."Keith Richmond, Tribune"In Blood Sugar James Byrne's fine poems explore a variety of themes, combining light and shadow, tenderness and wit."Wayfarers"The way the Peruvian avant-gardist poet Cesar Vallejo described language as being the ëdark nebulae of life that dwells on the turn of a sentence...í can be applied here to the irrefutable poetics of James Byrne. For he has constructed a collection of poems of considerable imaginative pressure, a vice-like poetical ethos... poems of such exactitude and accuracy that it is almost as if Byrne is attempting to replicate and reconstruct his own jaw at the potterís wheel of his imagining... According to Geoffrey Hill, 'difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings', and this can most definitely be said of the requirements of the reader facing these innovative poems."Paul StubbsJames Byrne was born in 1977 and is the editor and co-founder of The Wolf poetry magazine. His debut collection, Passages of Time, was published in 2003. In 2008 he won the prestigious Treci Trg poetry prize in Serbia. Since 2006 James has taught Wolf Workshops, which have helped many students with first book and pamphlet publications.

Leseprobe

Published by Arc Publications

Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road

Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK

www.arcpublications.co.uk

Copyright © James Byrne 2009

Design by Tony Ward

Printed in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn

978 1906570 28 6 pbk

978 1906570 29 3 hbk

978 1908376 43 5 ebook

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

The author is grateful to the editors of the following magazines and anthologies in which some of these poems, or versions of these poems, first appeared: Ambit, Cimarron Review, TheDelinquent, Fulcrum, Golden Boat, Jacket, The Manhattan Review, Openned (Anthology vol.1), Oxfam (CD: Life Lines 2), Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Salt Magazine, Times Online and Vair.

A selection of the poems in this book were first published in The Vanishing House (Kuca koja iscezava) by Treci Trg in 2009.

The front cover is an overpainted photograph, ‘18.1.89’, by Gerhard Richter. The author is grateful to Gerhard Richter for granting permission to republish his artwork.

Thanks to John Wedgwood Clarke, John Kinsella and Sandeep Parmar for reading different versions of this manuscript. Additionally, thanks to the Arts Council England for giving the author a grant to complete this book.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part of this book may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications.

Editor for the UK and Ireland: John W. Clarke

for my mother

Mary Shuttle

2009

Contents

Recovery

Apprentice Work

Air Terminals

Days of 1973

Sestina for R

A Private Garden

Widowed / Unwidowed

Two Phonecalls at 4 am

From the Sky Parlour

Dowry for an Aerophobic

Speed Date

Serapis from a Postcard

The Buddhas of Bamiyan

A King’s Faith

Chess in Kirkuk

Nightnurse

Sanchez de Aldama

14th April 1930

(Reverb) At the Scene of ‘The Earthenware Head’

Prospecting Several Instances of Active Imagination

Four Interpretations of Photographs by Claude Cahun

Five Interpretations of Overpainted Photographs by Gerhard Richter

Avoiding a Close Reading of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns

Three Presumptions Whilst in the Neighbourhood of a Friend

Voice Portraits of Uncle Patrick at the Reunion House

Not the Arm Wrestle

The Angel vs. Gabriel

Inclub Satires

Doctor One-Eye

Inviting the Ghosts

Thieves’ Society

To-tock-a-noo-lah

On Not Reaching a Summit

A Room in the House of Aries

Dragon Tree

Incest

Jackanoria

Entry (Cornwall 1991)

A Local Marriage

The Ashes

The Minister’s Daughter

What Remains of Old Addresses

Testimony

Notes

Biographical Note

Recovery

Let me imagine you coming home

from the dark, between body and mind,

making evidence of yourself

the way a tree waves up from its shadow.

There are dinner-halls you have silenced

with a single spark of wit,

there are men you have governed

through pure scent, pure posture.

Now for your most difficult trick:

to restart a life that ends by turning into gold.

In September (the month that tends to all others)

let me be able to conjure your best side,

to have some kind of grip on the intactness

of living, the way mirrors do.

Apprentice Work

i.m. Peter Redgrove

The lithic who makes a pal in death

teaches me not to die so slowly.

‘Many ways to become lineal’ he says,

‘to write The Sounding Book’.

Everything close as a finger thimble;

a lock of hair from Proserpine,

the tropics in Technicolor,

drumcliff tapped by a solitary cloud.

You lifted a finger over Gogol,

Little Russia droned bee-like.

And when they fired you up

Uhland took you in his colossal lung.

*

I’ve arrived late, apprentice imp,

to where you tripped out on yoga visions

and saw the 22,000 year origins of art

insetted by a single flint;

to the Gale Chambers of the Vast Nose,

Cornish galleons tucked under the ocean like rain.

Who’s to decide between glass economies

or the drowsy pulp of the sea?

It ties the forensic squad in knots –

the way groundswell fattens

from a single rock, remakes itself

into delicate gemstone.

*

These days The Book of Thresholds

fits firm for a pillow,

it wakes me with an empire’s relish.

No identity preference, no thumb guide.

Only scent variations,

each murmurous, each perennial.

The footnotes appear Pythagorean

cupid seminaries/vanity carnivals

vs. GIGANTIC LABOUR.

No monument decision –

nothing on the slumberous reek

of a salmon polished by the sun.

*

We apprentice poets need an innovator,

‘verbal haemoglobin’, not a casket key.

I repeat the only rule you knew as mantra:

everything is invitation.

Air Terminals

for Sandeep

‘…I dreamed

of a page in a book containing the word bird and I

entered bird.’

– Anne Carson, ‘Gnosticism I’

Reading how Mansfield claims the word air

is to live in it.

Pure scheme vs. science anxiety.

Not the duck of a boy emphatic

nor the rich-leaning Rosemary,

more a chance to inhabit

adrenal pressure –

six hours of braided sky

pushed through cloud braille.

*

How to steady up when all at once

air batches you out to crash phobias,

night after night,

wing tensions grazing your head?

*

Small curve of trust in a child’s joy at architecture.

At the terrorist check

threshold and counter-threshold –

a sparrow’s fear of total sunlight,

a studious approach to Boeing assemblies.

*

Carefully your ration array of clothes

checked in tight folds       touches

and is how air means,

clipped around the roots of a hand

as you look back gesturing –

once       twice       finally.

*

Air as the steadying of addiction:

how to breathe as the shadow dips?

Air-guides to breakers at the logic gate

the perfect crime, always getting away.

Evidences in landing vapour –

the movement of my hand on your back that says

‘go’.

*

The route I take I take on foot,

afraid and tenderly loyal.

At the ventilation tunnel

the smooth saturation of air vocals,

every tenor, decorous.

Your flaunting of altitude

is strictly west-hugging.

How the difference tells?

There was a cold bitter taste in the air

and the new-lighted lamps looked sad.

Days of 1973

‘The chambers of his heart filling with faces.

Mine. Yours. A stranger trails around a corner.

Fuming echoes circle over a pair who argue

In some fiery tongue…. A conversation

I broke off some years ago drifts up…’

– J. D. McClatchy, ‘From the Balcony’

‘Fear was my father, Father Fear’.

– Theodore Roethke, ‘The Lost Son’