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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.
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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.