Crowd Sensations E-Book

Judy Brown

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 48

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION "Crowd Sensations is a careful probing of the distance between the Self and the Other." – New Welsh Review "Opens with all the fascinations that the book is filled with. Instances, objects and colour are carefully peeled back and looked through towards other ideas, often building to breath-taking surprises." – Jazmine Linklater Poet Judy Brown's new collection, Crowd Sensations, is a worthy follow-up to her Forward-prize nominated debut, Loudness. Brown is a poet of dazzling contrasts, of thoughtful paradox, intimate confidences and precise evocations. Her titles and first lines both draw you right into a poem and then quite often surprise you with a narrative that you hadn't quite expected. 'The Things She Burned Last Year' references a past both remote and near, like multiple reflections seen in a mirror. Brown is a poet of profoundly unsettling domesticity as in 'The Dehumidifier', which unravels the metaphysics of damp and 'This is Not a Garden', which is a cool summation of a failed marriage. We frequently imagine an uncomfortable intimacy: 'Poem in Which I am Not Short-sighted', or are given a scary anecdote like: 'The Post Box in the Wall'. There are serious poems that lure you with humorous titles: 'Poem in the Voice of a Dead Cockroach'. A key theme is the contrast between living in the city and the countryside. The author has lived in London and Hong Kong and has recently had residencies with the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere and at the Gladstone Library in North Wales. Her spin on landscape is original and characteristically unnerving: 'Elterwater Rain', 'Dove Cottage Ferns' and 'One of the Summer People' reflect on nature and the place of the traveller, the incomer, the tourist. 'Green Man' also imagines a historical/mythical character and has him walk through a busy city street, shunned and unrecognized. Her memories often focus and celebrate pivotal moments of change: the move from city to country, the release from a doomed relationship, and the discovery of a new street or landscape. A fascination with artistic technique also features in a number of poems: 'After the Discovery of Linear Perspective', 'On a Woodblock Prepared for an Engraving'.   Such is the author's skill that these poems can often be said to be about more than one thing at a time. They unfold themselves upon the page in concise forms and with considerable flair. Judy Brown's Crowd Sensations will be a joyful discovery for the intelligent reader.

Leseprobe

Crowd Sensations

for NBB

Seren is the book imprint of

Poetry Wales Press Ltd.

57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3AE

www.serenbooks.com

facebook.com/SerenBooks

twitter@SerenBooks

The right of Judy Brown to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

© Judy Brown 2016

ISBN: 978-1-78172-315-9

ebook: 978-1-78172-316-6

Kindle: 978-1-78172-317-3

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

The publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of the Welsh Books Council.

Cover Artwork:

Sam Smith, Untitled Pour Painting no. 15, 2015.

courtesy the artist and Project Art Works.

Printed in Bembo by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow.

Author Website:www.judy-brown.co.uk

Contents

After the Discovery of Linear Perspective

The Astronauts

This Is Not a Garden

A Trapped Rat Finds Another Kind of Freedom

The Unbeliever Speaks to God

The Street of the Dried Seafood Shops, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

The Dehumidifier

Just About Now

The Imposters

The Dive: Town End, January 2013

Skymap Says We’re Nowhere Near Home

Poem in Which I Am Not Shortsighted

Where to Begin a New Life

The Prodigal

The Third Umpire

A Preparation for Loneliness

Umami

Long Range Forecast

The Things She Burned That Year

The Green Man

Songs from West Cumbria (1) –

The Corner House B&B

Unsafe Harbour

Songs from West Cumbria (2) –

The Leaks: The Golf Hotel, Silloth

One of the Summer People

Dove Cottage Ferns

Was This Review Helpful to You?

Poem in the Voice of a Dead Cockroach

The Post Box in the Wall

Prescription for a Middle-Aged Reader

On a Woodblock Prepared for Engraving

Three Lessons in Ignition, 1 Sykeside

On the Last Evening We Watch Movies in Bed

The Hostess

The Piñata

Temptation

Songs from West Cumbria (5) –

Room 204 (Double for single use)

The Madonna of Oxfam

The Knowledge

Exit, Through the Museum Shop

The Corner Shop

Elterwater Rain

The Evacuees

Antidote

Memorial

Coal

King Tak Hong Porcelain, Queen’s Road East, Wan Chai

We Prayed for a Man Without a Beard

Sweet Sixteen by a Cold Wall

Songs from West Cumbria (7) –

It Is Harder to Leave Sand than to Be Left by Sand

Praise Poem for the Urbanites

Acknowledgements

Crowd Symbols: Fire. The Sea. Rain. Rivers. Forest.

Corn. Wind. Sand. The Heap. Stone Heaps. Treasure.

– Elias Canetti, chapter heading from Crowds and Power

... the effort needed in order to see the edges of

objects as they really look stirred a dim fear ...

– Marion Milner, On Not Being Able to Paint

After the Discovery of Linear Perspective

You gave us new places to hide. Arcades and piazzas are excavated

from your backgrounds in diptychs and altarpieces, just for the hell.

Some of our local heroes turn out to be smallish men. They whisper

to their spotted hounds whilst the eaves of their homes recede. Stairs

strut and coil like tempters behind the colour-coded Holy Family,

the bishops, the patrons, the endlessly-bystanding centurion. We all

toe the lines, the vanishing points, the black-and-white ostentation

of floors. Perhaps the molten paint matters more than what’s painted:

this has become one of your tools, a closeted flourish of show and tell.

Yet I miss their warmth: the maidens and saints twisted to press

at the picture plane, all breathy frottage, and damp like flowers under glass.

Come, technician, let us brush past the samey glamours of Joseph

and Mary. Christ, there is so much gorgeous air explaining itself

in the back of your painting! Let’s inhale its new space, shout

merely to gather echoes, make gestures that astonish us.

The Astronauts

Hey, we missed the whole thing.

– Buzz Aldrin to Neil Armstrong after watching videotapes of press coverage of the moon landing

Each one of us was a firstborn. It was winter

then, cut-glass solstice daylight. The stars

were just holes in some sky. The baby’s room

was the study re-emulsioned in pastels,

its ceiling hung with the low fruit of mobiles.

We were the first to come close to the moon.

Family was learning to read the horoscope

of your worries: Herod’s fingerpaint never far

from the door-jamb. We came to want to tip out

into thin air, to follow no one, crouch in capsules.

But the real action was back in the living room:

you, poised in your Dralon recliners; the show:

our stumbles in big shoes. So it came to pass.

The nursery light left on over the blue planet,

we fell home, boxed and bouncing in titanium,

re-entry just a sizzle in the Gulf of Mexico.

This Is Not a Garden

This garden, in fact, may not even be entered.

– fromA Guide to the Gardens of Kyotoby E. Marc Treib and Ron Herman

This is not a yard, this is a garden:

new decking slatted over a tumble of roaches.

This is a yard full of potted tropical flora,

the lotus swimming in its own pool,

mosquito-eating fish guarding its stem.

I can’t know whether this is a yard

or a garden, though we ate out here last night,

the iPod snicking in its dock, soft lighting

making silhouettes behind the trellis.

This is not a garden, this outdoor, hosable sofa

or this bed where we never both sleep well.

It is a sort of park, public in places, this marriage

where amusements are scheduled and planned.

This garden, this marriage, is divided into rooms.

In some, others are welcome, like yourself.

This yard, this marriage, this bed, should be

like a garden – so many topics victim

to the secateurs. It should pass like a wave

through the seasons, appearing to be young