12,47 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
A Poetry Book Society Winter Recommendation 2023 A Sunday Times Book of the Year In Child Ballad, David Wheatley's sixth collection, he explores a world transformed by the experience of parenthood. Conducting his children through landscapes of Northern Scotland, he follows pathways laid down by departed Irish missionaries and by wolves. He maps a rich territory of rivers, trees and mountains. Also present are histories, some evidenced, some no longer visible and yet to be inferred. Stylistically, Child Ballad is multifaceted, drawing on influences from the Scottish ballad tradition and the Gaelic bards, on French symbolism and on the American Objectivists. Wheatley is an Irish poet living and teaching in Scotland: as a cultural corridor, his Scotland is a space of migrations and palimpsests, different traditions held in dynamic balance and fusion. Writing across geographical and historical distances as he does, Wheatley develops an aesthetic of complex intimacy, alert to questions of memory and loss, communicating the ache of the here and now. He sees through the eyes of young children and the world looks very different in its gifts and threats. Wheatley provides intimate descriptions of parenthood as well as of a Northern Scottish natural world. He deploys an ambitious range of poetic styles and forms. His poems put deep roots down into history and geology, and with translation into other languages. Themes of migration and politics are never far away. Child Ballad sings of midlife, of resettlement and marriage as well as of parenthood.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Ähnliche
Child Ballad
David Wheatley
CARCANET POETRY
Contents
for Felix and Morven
Child Ballad
The Companions of Colmcille
If I never go home it is because
the tides, I have noticed, flow in one direction
only. With Viking anger the North Sea
snapped at my heels on the foreshore as I
marvelled at its circling, patterned collapse,
the golden spiral in my Euclid turning
before my eyes. When the Covenanter
who led me arrived at the city gates
he would not pay the king’s penny
to cross the bridge but stood transfixed
by those swithering waters. The road was closed,
he told me, we would have to go back.
I saw the long-beaked oystercatchers gazing
down from their nests along the flat roofs
and knew this for the place where Devenick,
Ternan and Drostan had passed before me, drawn
ever further north and east. I swore an oath
at the mercat cross to a man who answered
to the Earl of Montrose, and a prayer-book
was placed in my hand. Much later, when
the peace was won, bodies decently buried
were exhumed and despoiled, marking
an end to it all. I attempted to read the psalms
in the vernacular, but did not know
what language that was. If you throw out a hand
in the dark of the chapel a door to the bell-tower
will be there, and a view from above that promised
once, not now, to make everything clear.
1644
Bucksburn
Or: the hired box down a lane. You
could walk to the airport for coffee
or wait for the new conference centre
that duly, out of nowhere, arrived –
that or the pub on the hill lit
like an abattoir. I’d come back from work
to find you in the ruined cottage next door
stepping out of/into the pages of Sunset Song,
the Scots words seeding on your tongue
with every turn of the harrow in
the neighbouring field. The deer
came to our window and the siskins
came through the cat flap – bite-sized
portions of wilderness here at the city’s edge.
Of an evening we sat on alphabetized
book boxes, our steerage fellow travellers,
never unpacked as long as we stayed.
To use the phone you had to stand on a table
in the corner, reaching absurdly upwards.
Children, here we first knocked
on your door, with no reply. The grass
grew over our ankles and we fled
to the country in time for the summer, west
and north where the mountains have girls’ names,
where the harvest comes late and heavy.
Stay
1
Baby of mine descending
from the nurse’s arms
into your mother’s like
a heron approaching its nest
2
and unpacking its legs
baby born to a creeping
autumn hungry for dark
you kick your heels in the gap
3
of light where dawn and dusk
rub backs in the trough
of winter and son of mine
silently mouth your name
4
with fluttering tongue
after so long in the pulsing
tunnel all walls
are theatre curtains parting
5
between one breast and the next
you defy with a fallen-
limp fist the single
bedroom that is the world
6
and here is the tree whose shadow
passing over the bed
will trace like a blind man’s
hand your features and here
7
a single tear of milk
lining your cheek until
when I look away it is
only to reenter
8
the moment from the echoing
shell of its promise and will
it stay now you child are
the lamp and you are the genie
Go Down Easy
Too long I
waited for
the name of
the flower
I did not
know to show
itself at first
light & now
though nights
are days &
days are nights
I wake to us
a room with
you in it
companionable
form our spoon-
faced dollop
served up hot
I feel our
breath re-
circulate from
mouth to mouth
as the morning
digger in the
back field paws
at the moon
but the moon is
yours and the
mirror laughs
before you do
so let me sing
the things you bring
your mother’s
face swum
into the light
while a frisky
ghost cat’s
tail brushes
your middle
name & your
pointed finger
points at itself
Brush
Assisted
first steps on
the mountain
feet brushing it
sideways like smooth
jazz drumming
carry you never-
theless to
the threshold of
our grip
beyond which for
the moment
there is nothing
you understand
nothing
