Dynamo E-Book

Luke Samuel Yates

• Herausgeber: The Poetry Business
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 35

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

What is Dynamo? It is the first full-length collection by an extraordinarily entertaining and exhilarating poet. Over the course of this book, things break down, start again, light up, get stuck. Relationships stagnate, mountains and seas diminish, White nationalists fall over in Blackpool, and a wealthy couple's house disappears one day, leaving them surrounded by their appliances, tanned and eating an egg. I'm always listening out for a new poet who can take the deceptively effortless, witty yet ultimately serious chops of the New York School, make it work for this generation and bring the whole thing in to land just outside a British city, losing nothing in transit. And God it's been worth the wait. This is a poetry of exquisite timing, with some of the most satisfying last lines I've ever read. Yates can take an everyday domestic detail and make it sparkle with the mystery of a Raedecker painting. – Luke Kennard

Leseprobe

Dynamo

Published 2023

by The Poetry Business

Campo House,

54 Campo Lane,

Sheffield S1 2EG

www.poetrybusiness.co.uk

Copyright © Luke Samuel Yates 2023

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

ISBN 978-1-914914-43-0

ePub ISBN 978-1-914914-44-7

All rights reserved.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, storied in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Designed & typeset by Utter.

Printed by Imprint Digital

Cover image: José Guadalupe Posada, ‘Corrido del Caracol’ ca. 1899, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Smith|Doorstop is a member of Inpress

www.inpressbooks.co.uk.

Distributed by NBN International, 1 Deltic Avenue,

Rooksley, Milton Keynes MK13 8LD.

The Poetry Business gratefully acknowledges the support of Arts Council England.

Contents

1

Going somewhere

Snorkelling

They were building something

The third way

The pair of scissors that could cut anything

Birmingham New Street has ten different exits

The mystery shopper

Stopping the White Man March

Hotpot

The bikers

Signs

Matinee

That I am so angry

Finding Bobby

Dynamo

2

Untitled 9-5

Mike and Annette’s working week

The Flemish Primitives

Treading on another tall man’s long foot

Mars, surrounded by Arts and Sciences, conquers Ignorance

Getting to travel a lot with your job

Persimmon

France

Can’t

After work

After the rain the snow started

The man on the plane had paid

It wasn’t the varroa

On the experience of accidentally preparing a vegetarian shepherd’s pie in a bike basket on the way home

The good morning

3

Moving

And the year you moved in

They’re quite famous, apparently,

The frisbee

Done up by the landlord

Forton, 5AM

Short-term lets

The mouse

Somehow I had written the times down wrong

Help

Popping candy

Desert boots

Song about putting a bird in a pie

Flight mode

The laundry

Acknowledgements

For my family

1

Going somewhere

The engine gave out when we reached the top.

We were on a B road going over the moors.

Horses grazing on their shadows off West

and in the other direction turbines

gesturing like air traffic controllers.

You walked down the road for a signal.

Mum stayed in the passenger seat

with the door open, drinking tiny sips of water.

Flies kept landing on her hands and hair.

I wanted to brush them away but didn’t want to startle her.

Some way off you found it and called me over.

A swarm the size of a Cantaloupe melon

clinging to the trunk of a hawthorn. A ball

of bees, chocolate and khaki, barely moving

but all pointing in the same direction.

A planet of traffic jams. Going somewhere

but also not going anywhere. We watched

as some left and others arrived,

ignoring us, figuring out

what to do next.

If only we could work together

to get out of this fix, you said

when we were back on the road,

back on the motorway, with all

the other people, in their cars.

Snorkelling

I was on the beach.

You were on the beach.

The sea was half on half off the beach.

You filled a bucket with the shells we found,

pressed yourself to the ear of each in turn

and they heard your city, impatient and ceaseless

and you walking through it in your sunglasses and baseball cap,

snorkelling through the shopping malls,

the department store china set displays

and mannequin models listing in their underwear,

the crowds swirling around you in unrepeatable patterns

of desire, more complex than a Vitamin B complex,

more complex than a military-industrial complex,

more complex than Complex, the magazine for men:

Music, Girls, Style, Entertainment, Sneakers, Technology.

And you put out your arms in front of you but do not touch anybody,

and nobody touches you, they were always already leaving

a space around you, a space of you plus the extra they call personal space

around the bit that they call your place in society.

We’re getting in the car as the rain starts to fall.