Dry Stone Work E-Book

Brian Johnstone

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

Seitenzahl: 52

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

This book is also available as a eBook. Buy it from Amazon here. The third full collection by Brian Johnstone, and his second to be published by Arc in their Poetry from the UK & Ireland series. A grounded yet playful collection from an assured poet, flexing his muscles into newer territory. As well as the deep lineage of rural landscapes that populated previous collections, here Johnstone treats us to an extended trip to the circus, where the glitz and thrill of the big top and its stunts are peeled back to allow us into the physical and emotional rigour that forms the show's backbone. Elsewhere poems transport you more literally through music, movies and TV history, around Europe and into the distant past, again balancing between illusion and the tension that supports it in the more mundane world. And throughout, the tone and language also plays an ingenious balancing act between the structured, the rhyming and the informal. This is a personal and expansive collection, honest and exploratory. "Brian Johnstone appears to have taken to heart, or learned by instinct and experience, Robert Frost's advice to avoid approaching a poem's subject too directly. A consequence of this is that Johnstone's poems establish their own presence, leaving room for mystery and lyricism to emerge with a convincing uniqueness. Dry Stone Work is a robust collection, packed with original strengths, delicacies, variety, and a vivid awareness of life. An impressive collection, then, not just to be recommended, but to be read and re-read." - Douglas Dunn "The use of language is authentic and precise, and the perception of an often-hidden world fascinating and genuine." - David Morley on The Ring Cycle sequence Born in Edinburgh in 1950, Brian Johnstone has lived in the Fife countryside since 1972. He has published two full collections and three pamphlets, as well as appearing in anthologies and other publications in Scotland, elsewhere in the UK and in Europe and the Americas.

Leseprobe

Dry Stone Work

Published by Arc Publications

Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road

Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK

www.arcpublications.co.uk

Copyright © Brian Johnstone, 2014

Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications, 2014

Design by Tony Ward

978 1908376 05 3 (pbk)

978 1908376 63 3 (ebk)

978 1908376 06 0 (hbk)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due to the editors of the following publications in which several poems (or earlier versions) have appeared: New Writing Scotland, Gutter, Causeway / Cabhsair, Chapman, Magma, Reactions (4), Revival, Fourteen, Island, Northwords Now, Markings,New Writing Dundee, Poetry Greece and The Writers’ Bureau journal. Various poems have appeared in the anthologies 100 Favourite Scottish Poems (Luath, 2006), Such Strange Joy (iynx, 2001) and Split Screen (Red Squirrel Press, 2012) and on the Ink, Sweat & Tears, Magma, Translation Lab, The Drunken Boat, The Open Mouse, The Poetry Kit & Scottish Poetry Library websites.

Translations of various poems were published in Post Scriptum (Sweden, translator Boel Schenlaer), and La Otra 12 (Mexico, translators Victor Rodriguez Nunez & Katherine M. Hedeen). ‘Parable’ first appeared in the fine art folio Postcard (Dundee Printmakers, 1998). ‘Storm Chaser’ was featured in the exhibition Dualism (Chris Park, 2010-11). ‘Surfin’ Safari for a Small Town Boy’ was a prize-winner in the National Poetry Competition in 2000; ‘Reservoir’ won the Writers’ Bureau Poetry Competition in 2002; ‘Blanket’ was a prize-winner in the Poetry on the Lake Competition in 2003; ‘Tree Surgeons’ was long-listed for the Magma Competition 2011 and selected for the Scottish Poetry Library’s online anthology Best Scottish Poems 2011. Both ‘Who Knew’ and ‘How Well It Burns’ were commissioned, the former for the anthology Split Screen, the latter for the filmpoem project Absent Voices.

Thanks are also due to the Scottish Arts Council (now Creative Scotland) for the award of a Professional Development Grant (2010).

Cover image by Will Maclean

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

Editor for the UK and Ireland: John W. Clarke

Also by Brian Johnstone

POETRY

The Book of Belongings (Arc Publications, 2009)

Homing (The Lobby Press, 2004)

Robinson, A Journey (Akros Publications, 2000)

The Lizard Silence (Scottish Cultural Press, 1996)

POETRY IN TRANSLATION

Terra Incognita (L’Officina (Vincenza) 2009)

AS EDITOR

The Memory of Fields: the poetry of Mark Ogle (Akros Publications, 2000)

The Golden Goose Hour (Taranis Books, 1994)

BRIAN JOHNSTONE

Dry Stone Work

2014

for Jean

Contents

FOOTINGS

Tobacco Road

The Thousand Blows

Reservoir

Dry Stone Work

Ghost Story

The Tattie Line

Concrete Poem

The Ring Cycle

I Whip Hand

II The Dividing Line

III Heft

IV A Studied Fall

V Long Shot

VI A Certain Swing

VII The Caring Blade

VIII Pitch

Sonny Rollins on the Williamsburg Bridge

The Method

TRACINGS

Dolls’ House Skies

Making the Change

On the Site of the South Side Joke Shop

Surfin’ Safari for a Small Town Boy

Storm Chaser

Who Knew

Lady Day’s Experience

As From A Car

To Live Apart

Parable

Codicil

Contracted

Blanket

Back at Bash Street

Askew

HEARTINGS

Reading the Book

Zakros

Source

Tokens of Admission

The Garment District

Craiglockhart

Sappers

How Well It Burns

A Hotel in the Berenese Oberland

Opening Up the Bag

A Disused Cinema in Lithuania

Rope Trick

An Executive Decision

Mercenary

Out-Station

Wake Up Call

Dark Matter

COPINGS

The Accents of Mice

As We Watch

Favour

In Passing

In the Flood

The Bitter Fruits

Spreading the Net

Freeze

Changeling

The Jaws of Wasps

Tree Surgeons

One Last Breath

History

Behind Your Eyes

One for the Road

Notes on the Poems

Author’s Note

Biographical Note

The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.

ORHAN PAMUK

Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech,

December 2006

FOOTINGS

Tobacco Road

when every man jack lit up no-one expected worse

a shortness of puff

dry hoast

fingers stained lino brown

and that tobacco breath overall air

meant these men were men

there in their place

feet on the rail

slops pooling the top of the bar and something they’d all made

their fathers’ their grandfathers’ smoke

tinting the walls

the sweat of their work

still pocking the ceiling with dots

where the reek had condensed and dripped off

like their lives

truncated by work

slid like a nip down the length of the bar

and lost in the smoke

that fizzled from nostrils as the tip of each roll up

glowed

The Thousand Blows

What’s done to wood cannot be

undone; to steel

abrasives can rub down,

a whetstone can restore,

and could with time

this edge

that hasn’t seen its like

for years. The thousand blows

this handle took,

shivered in the splintered grain,

splits so old

they’ve taken on

the patina of age, the tally

of time spent

over chisel, over bench

where cord was little use

to bind the stock,

damaged by the hefted knock,

no more than

accident deferred. It’s held

but would not do

for long. This long. As long

as steel is dull,

the edge unused,

the rust grown slowly

on the blade,

the sweat that soaked

into the handle

with each blow glowing

in the dim electric light

that aids a rummage

in the drawer where each one

of the thousands

has its twin

in other blows, in other tools

forgotten as the men

who made them

sing. Let them lie here, goods

no-one will get

the good of, ends as rough

as hands that held them,

weary with it all.

Reservoir

Something tolls, dead in the water,

from sixty years back; chimes

in the stonework of the brain

the way a mother’s voice is never

quite forgotten, the sounds of childhood

carry through somehow. And you

look downwards at the brink, knowing

that the eddies washing on this shore

have inhabited what’s left of life

that quit this valley by decree.