Catherine Smith: Selected Poems E-Book

Catherine Smith

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

Seitenzahl: 73

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Catherine Smith's first acclaimed collection The Butcher's Hands was a disturbing and exciting book. Lip moves on from its grotesqueries and grand guignol to a fierce, often frantic eroticism, seen, as in the earlier book, through the language of the human body; clothed, stripped, skinned, examined with forensic detail. As in Heckmondwike, a litany of dangerous pleasure, in this book there are no safe words.

Leseprobe

C A T H E R I N ES M I T H

S E L E C T E DP O E M S

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

www.poetrybusiness.co.ukCopyright © Catherine Smith 2014ISBN 978-1-910367-11-7

Catherine Smith 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 generated by alancoopercreative.co.uk

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

The Poetry Business is an Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation

Contents

fromThe Butcher’s Hands

The Butcher’s Hands

Uncle Aubrey

Hen Night

Waiting For The Foot-Binder

Infestation

Hover

Monopoly

Australia

Kingfisher

Stornoway Harbour

The New Bride

Poecilia Reticulata

Pastoral

Calculation

Soul

The Amputees’ Race

Cast

The Real McCoy

Feral

Marcus

Postulant

fromLIP

How It All Started

Snakebite

Losing It To David Cassidy

Smoking And Reading Nietzsche in the Kardomah

Stitches

Back

Temperature

Ascension

Cut

Hero

Eve To The Serpent

The Fathers

Colin Pepper I Luv U

The Ewe

Night

Picnic

The Biting Point

Heckmondwike

Sleep

Request

The World Is Ending Pass The Vodka

Lapse– Twelve poems

Blue Egg

Crochet

Metal

China

Le Petit Mort

Seahorse

Sancerre

Succulents

Simulacrum

Stubble

Lapse

Jasmine Tea

fromOtherwhere

Drought

Blobs

Daughters

Fall

Fireflies

Helium

Mussolini

Sparrows

Look

The Poacher And The Hare

Vegetarian Hangover

The Set Of Optics You Wouldn’t Let Me Buy In Portobello Market, September 1984

The Mushroom Season

The Pianos

The Sanctification Of Clacket Lane Services, Westbound

The Lip Stitcher

Mary’s Ear Explains The Immaculate Conception

Beginning Her Sentence At Holloway

Attending Adam’s Funeral

Retirement, The Paradise View Rest Home

Otherwhere

Story

The Lump

Afterpains

After A Saturday Teaching Nine-Year-Olds To Write Poetry

Intimacy

The White Sheets

Prayers

Stalled

fromThe Butcher’s Hands

The Butcher’s Hands

A stripped sheep

sags on its hook

behind the butcher.

This one’s new.

a pale, eager boy

in a smoothed apron;

hands freshly scrubbed,

nails bitten to the quick.

He’s learning the patter,

recommends lamb chops

and grips the knife; cuts

precisely between ribs,

then both hands on the hacksaw -

I watch his bird-bone wrists,

his muscle and sinew,

his blood and meat

beneath the skin.

One slip, and he’ll spill open.

Twenty years on, he’ll be

a family man with three prime kid,

their photos over the till;

his knuckles shining,

palms red as mutton,

the tip of one finger, missing.

Uncle Aubrey

Uncle Aubrey is dying. On the line,

pummelled by freezing winds

night-clothes bluster and bulge.

Talk to him, cheer him up, says Olwyn,

so I tell him I have walked on the moor,

seen hawks hunting mice.

Hands pared to bone, he twists fingers

and remembers dead cousins

dead drunk at Christmas.

His head is too heavy for his neck

and his eyes are too clotted

to take me in.

He is dying in Welsh. It is part of me,

singing somewhere in my blood;

voices of sickness and rain.

Hen Night

By her fifth Bacardi Breezer, she’s sweating cobs,

her L-plates have come askew and her make-up’s

gothic. The stripper’s a big disappointment;

puts his back out giving her a fireman’s lift

and ignores her mate asking to squeeze his hose.

By midnight her guts are growling

and, crouched by the bog in The King’s Head,

wave after wave of rice and peas

leaping like salmon into the bowl, her head pounds,

it hurts to breathe, and she knows

when the ring slides over her knuckle, there’ll be

this sour taste, still, this bruising on her knees.

Waiting For The Foot-Binder

The last evening of toes. She flexes them

so they splay in the dust like stunted fans.

Dusk thickens over the village. Chickens

worry the dirt with their staccato beaks;

she chases them with her younger brother.

He laughs. He is too fast for her.

Tomorrow the foot-binder will sing as she

holds her down, and folds each foot into a fist.

Infestation

You hear them before you see or smell them –

their bald feet pattering under floorboards.

You listen for sudden thumps, muted squeaks,

knowing they’re growing fat on crumbs

they’ve foraged. Your crumbs. Think of them

sleeking their fur with sandpaper tongues.

You know they’re breeding down there –

the females swelling in the dark, like bread,

and imagine them curled asleep together,

all those bodies in one soft, breathing ball,

their babies naked and blind,

while the house ticks on above them.

You open a cupboard and find

their tiny black shits, the stench of their piss –

through a hole you spot a brown face,

luminous eyes. You know, then,

they’re laughing at you, they’ve taken over –

and you sweat, believing

they’re chewing through wires,

that your house will burn down in the night,

the smoke will fill your throat before you wake,

you’ll be found too late, blackened to a crisp,

and tell yourself, as you lay down poison,

they won’t feel pain, after all,

it’s not as if they’re human,

and there are so many of them,

with their dirt, a few less is a blessing,

and you sleep better, knowing the bodies

will rot quietly, out of sight.

Hover

Over the runway, the Fairey Swordfish hovers,

the pilot shrunk to a dot. Propellers

churn the heat, sting our ears.

It stays up there by some collective will,

and if we stare long enough

the engine won’t sputter into silence,

we won’t freeze, like extras in a wartime film,

as the plane unravels through slow seconds,

lurching towards us. We won’t

gather our kids, cover their heads

as the fuselage splits open,

sends fire singing through the crowd,

whose skin chars, peels and flutter off,

like papers on fortune cookies.

These things won’t happen. The Swordfish

will stay suspended in the present.

Its shadow will darken each of us

for a moment, and we will keep it

far enough above us

so the pilot remains a god,

his engine running, his face invisible.

Monopoly

Almost bankrupt and only recently released from jail,

she owes her ten year old

four hundred quid in rent.

for landing on his new hotel in Bond Street.

He owns most of the West End

and several public utilities.

She pleads poverty. He points out

she could give him Leicester Square

and they could come to some arrangement

over her arrears. She thinks how

this is what capitalism does to children –

brutalises them, makes them worship

five-hundred pound notes, little red boxes,

encourages them to sniff out the weak

and charge them exorbitant rent,

rob them blind, make them beg.

She watches his fingers fatten on his stash

and she tells him, No. She’ll take her chances,

and hangs onto Leicester Square. She likes

the Japanese men with their cameras,

their perfect hair, their busy hands,

She likes the pigeon shit, the café

with the gilt-framed photo of the Queen

where the waiter gives her extra chocolate

on her cappuccino, no favours asked.

Australia

We reached the earth’s core by lunch-time.

Blistering molten rock, spewing upwards,

and heat that seared eyeballs and lips.

More digging, and by mid-afternoon,

sweating, we knew we’d arrived.

Light dazzled us; we knew the meek

bleating of sheep, the shock of scorched air.

You promised me the first kangaroo;

like a brown dog, you said, only bigger, and I

could ride in its pouch drinking Kia-Ora

and you’d throw boomerangs which would

flash like fish, and in Australia you must

keep walking or running or you’ll spiral

off the surface of the earth. You can crunch

red ants, sweet and gritty as sugar.

No-one makes you eat beetroot or mince.

By tea-time, they drew the curtains in the room

where you lay, mouth open, not talking

and only I knew where you were; thousands

of miles away, with your voice upside-down.

Kingfisher

You split the frozen water with your boot,

disturb the neat shuttlecock of green and blue

lodged in the black. Under a mercury sky

we ask ourselves, did it freeze down there,

excited by a flickering fish, did it

swoop, pierce the surface, drown?

You toe it over, and its chestnut belly,

its lucent greens and blues smash home

like the icy shock of drowning.

I remember when we

coloured up for love.

These days we’re drab, polite, though

nothing changes the freckles on your belly,

the piston of your throat,

the way you peel fruit.

The sky tears, peppers us

with freezing rain. We take shelter,

suck our fingertips back to life, ignoring