Dad, Remember You Are Dead E-Book

Jacqueline Saphra

• Herausgeber: Nine Arches Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 36

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Jacqueline Saphra will follow her critically acclaimed, T. S. Eliot Prize shortlisted All My Mad Mothers (2017) with Dad, Remember You Are Dead, a sister volume to her previous collection, taking on the canon in an examination of fatherhood and daughterhood within a wider context.

Leseprobe

Dad, Remember You Are Dead

Dad, Remember You Are Dead

Jacqueline Saphra

ISBN: 978-1-911027-73-7

eISBN: 978-1-911027-75-1

Copyright © Jacqueline Saphra

Cover artwork: Artemisia Gentileschi, Lot and His Daughters, c.1636-38, oil on canvas, 90 ¾ x 72 in. (230.5 x 183 cm); The Toledo Museum of Art (Toledo, Ohio), Clarence Brown Fund, 1983.107 Photo Credit: Richard Goodbody

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Jacqueline Saphra has asserted her right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published September 2019 by:

Nine Arches Press

Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,

Great Central Way, Rugby.

CV21 3XH

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding

by Arts Council England.

For all my sisters

Contents

Recusatio Redacted

The Power

Carina

Lessons My Father Taught Me

Strip

To My Little Sister at the Shore

How We Saw Things

Chiaroscuro

Dad and the Facts

Offal

Portrait of My Father as a Kipper One Week Old

Utterance

My Father’s Parts

Triolet for a Good Father

Fallopia Japonica

There are not many friends I can talk to like this over a continental breakfast

The Canon

The Hinges are Broken

Forgiveness

My Stepfather’s Will

Not the Deathbed just the Disappointment

The Big Picture

you do not have to be wise you do not have to be kind you do not have to be right you do not have to be good

After Sodom

My Father’s Stories

Darkroom Lessons

Milk and Ash

My Mother’s Will

Yael and Sisera

Death Charm

My Father’s Will

Burial

August Evening on the Estuary

Songs and Stones

Leda and the Swan

Acknowledgements and Thanks

About the author and this book

Recusatio Redacted

‘Yet why not say what happened?’ – Robert Lowell

no

no elegies for my

who is no longer

still the fear and the

not going there thank you

oh come on give me

yes that’s a start continue

the wives and sons may feel

in fact they may be absolutely

but now I’ve begun I am filled with

and an incandescent

no it’s not like me to

I was always so

and daughterly

where is my shy

and my soft

what will people

so many omissions

lack of factual

what do I actually

must not speak ill of

no never seen a ghost

of course my imagination

memory is notorious for

trust it

the body

and inside

a wave breaking on

another wave breaking –

The Power

The daughter won’t. The dad dictates.

The daughter smiles, the dad declines

a trade-off; so the daughter waits.

The daughter won’t. The dad dictates.

While you are small and I am great

you will! he yells.Slow years unwind.

The daughter won’t, the dad dictates,

the daughter smiles, the dad declines.

Carina

Like the vessel that floats

through the night

its celestial keel a glitter of bones

a spine bound by fire and light

he’ll no longer careen: after the shock

after the pain, he will walk

say the prophets in green.

Where he is collagen, calcium

crumbling, they’ll fix him

they promise, with bolts of titanium

buy him more years.

Let them build me a father

a new one, a safe one

his crooked keel

caulked and steady with stars.

Lessons My Father Taught Me

I. Cycling

Must I? Don’t make me. I wish I could run

from the chill of the challenge. I carp and I cry

as he sprinkles some grit in the white of my eye

as a father will do. I’m weedy and green

so he gives me a push but the push is no fun

sends me spinning to nowhere whatever I try

and I baulk at the brakes and I’m making a scene

though I know he won’t like it. I teeter and lean

and I let myself fall: please god, don’t let me die.

It’s nothing, stop crying, you’re making a scene

he says, Mothered to hell but the damage is done.

It’s a matter of balance. It seems I have none.

II. Diving

I don’t know how you learn to be gritty and game