Erato E-Book

Deryn Rees-Jones

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 67

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize Poetry Book Society Recommendation Named after the Greek muse of lyric poetry, Erato combines documentary-style prose narratives with the passionate lyric poetry for which Rees-Jones is renowned. Here as she experiments with form, particularly the sonnet, Rees-Jones questions the value of the poet and poetry itself. What is the difference, asks one poem, between a sigh and a song? Erato's themes are manifold but focus especially on personal loss, desire and recovery, in the context of a world in which wars and displacement of people has become a terrifying norm. In its narrative of transformations, the invocation of Erato also carries with it a sense of errata and erasure. As stories and ideas are repeated, and recurring imagery – of fires, bees, birds – is continually reframed, we are asked to replay, rethink, rename. How do we step out from the 'perpetual loop' of trauma? And how do we process painful change? Bewilderment by ongoing historical tragedy is countered by the Rees-Jones's close attention to immediate or remembered experience, and the importance of the body, whether lying awake with a sleepless child, felling a backyard tree, walking the encampments of refugees in Paris, or the dreamlike conversation she has with the radio about bombs and drones. Erato includes elegies for family members and close friends, including an impressive and moving long poem 'I.M.', and the autobiographical 'Caprice' in which Rees-Jones explores with musical abandon 'the scribble-mess' of self, and the 'grainy, atomized emotion coursing through in middle age'.

Leseprobe

Erato

Deryn Rees-Jones

Seren is the book imprint ofPoetry Wales Press Ltd.57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3AEwww.serenbooks.comfacebook.com/SerenBookstwitter@SerenBooks

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

© Deryn Rees-Jones, 2019.

ISBN: 978-1-78172-510-8ebook: 978-1-78172-511-5Kindle: 978-1-78172-512-2

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 photograph: ‘The Francesca Woodman Conspiracy’ by Greg Allum.

Author photograph: © Alison Dodd.

Printed in Bembo by Latimer Trend & Company, Plymouth.

Contents

Mon Amour

Líadain and Cuirithir

Cell

Palisade

A Courtship

Great Crested Grebes

Bowerbirds

Collared Doves

Siren

Lyrebird

The Owl Husband

Utamakura (Poem of the Pillow) 1788

Move

Walk

Night in Hell

Lapse

I.M.

Fires

Mauve

Drone

Firebird

Erasure

Autumn Leaves

Gardens

Rua

Eyes to the Right, Nose to the Left

Heartbreak

Caprice

Dark Mirror

Erratum

13 Numbered Fragments Keeping Barbara Hardy in Mind

Nightjar

Notes

Acknowledgements

Come now, Erato, and I shall relate the kings,the times, and the state of things in ancient Latium,when the foreign fleet first beached on Ausonianshores, and recall the first beginnings of battle.You, goddess, you – guide your bard. Of horrible wars,of combats and kings driven to death by anger,of the Tuscan host, of all Hesperia underarms I shall tell.

Virgil, Aeneid 7, 37-45

Then from the lidsone tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips.

Elizabeth Bishop, ‘The Man-Moth’

And so we make our lives by what we love.

John Cage, ‘Lecture on Nothing’

Is it time? he had asked at the end.Yes, I said, yes. I think it’s time.

Mon Amour

The university had begun to compile lists of all human remains on its premises (not just in university collections), and including ancient remains. An email arrived in my inbox asking for the following:

Please can you send to me information on materials less than 100 years old: includes bone, teeth, hair, skin, nails, saliva (i.e. collected for DNA analysis), etc, etc.

The email explained that this list needed to comply with the Human Tissue Act guidelines for the university’s annual return. If I was unsure how to report this, and the details required, I was to contact the Designated Individual for the Human Tissue Authority, Dr Risk.

*

I’d dreamt of the bomb. His face crawling through flames.

*

That afternoon I gave up trying to keep up with the emails and closed the curtains. The room felt dark and cool and I flicked through my library of DVDs. In Casablanca Humphrey Bogart smiled, the crinkles of tiredness under his eyes like a way into another world. Jimmy Stewart was peering from the case of Rear Window where Grace Kelly, perpetually beautiful, moved forever towards him in her black and white dress. Emmanuelle Riva gazed out, distraught, from the arms of Eiji Okada on the case of Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Here’s looking at you. In my half-awake state the films intertwined. Over the road, in the drama school, the musical theatre students were practising for their end of year performance. On the top floor actors were rehearsing sword fights. From my bedroom, with a pair of birding binoculars, I would have been able to experience the fight almost as if I were in the same room. A lone voice sang out, resonant, full of something I could only call optimism. Drowsily my mind flitted across the lines of song.

*

At night the building, was lit up and towered over the line of Georgian terraces like an oversized Greek temple.

*

My neighbour had installed a camera in his window box. It sat there like a cyclops or an unlegged octopus, surreally tied to an artificial rose between a blotch of purple and yellow pansies. I was not exactly sure what the neighbour was watching out for, and it seemed there was no law against the camera being there. Its infrared eye blinked frequently, monitoring my steps and the steps of my visitors up and out of the house. One morning I took a photograph of it on my mobile phone. Blink. I didn’t want my friends to think I had succumbed to paranoia. Sometimes small packets were misdelivered and I reposted them back through his letter box.

*

The man who lived in the adjacent house in the terrace stopped me in the street one day and told me I was a disgrace to my profession. I was not even sure he knew what I did. Later he wrote me an unsigned letter, reinforcing my need for personal shame, insisting I cut down the tree in my backyard which towered across the rooftops.

*

All afternoon I lay there in an old vest and pants with my hair tied up on the top of my head, watching the dark fall, and running films back- to-back. I watched Miss Torso and Miss Lonelyheart and dangled my limbs over the edge of the sofa; I watched dust fall on bodies as dust became sweat. The man’s body and the woman’s body were indistinguishable. Outside the smell of dope and beer and the cathedral bells all knotted up together. Nobody called, and the street seemed preternaturally empty aside from the dealers who hung around smoking on the drama school steps. Not for the first time did I think how glad I was of the summer and its showers and breezes.

*

Yet all the landscapes I held within me seemed to be receding.

*

I watched as the two naked bodies moved intimately on the screen and remembered that whole day in the attic room and the window that opened onto apple trees. Mon amour.

SHE: I saw the newsreels.I saw them.On the first day.On the second day.On the third day.

HE (interrupting her): You saw nothing. Nothing.

*

The screen flickered. It was hard to look at the piles of bodies, the skin, the hair, the bones.

*

I thought about truth and I thought about lies. I thought about love and all its erasures.

*

Knowing that desire was a series of chemical and neuronal firings better accustomed me to the dead feeling at my centre.

I thought about desire and how it made the body something other than itself. I thought about the outlines of bodies at crime scenes and the permeability of the skin that created such an unstable outline to the self. I thought about the soldiers who had returned from war with lost limbs and eyes. I thought about the perpetual loop of trauma. I thought – for no reason I could fathom – of Werner Forssman, the scientist who pushed 65 centimetres of catheter through his body, and then took an x-ray to prove that it was in his heart.

*

From the edges of my vision I was sure I saw a wolf slip with its yellow eyes from behind the bookcase to the room next door. I didn’t want to check. The room was filled with a strange scent. Then the doorbell rang. The screen flickered. Skin. Bones. A doctor had said to me, We will watch, and wait.

Something I knew was only beginning.Something, I knew, was at an end.

Líadain and Cuirithir

I named you the Otter’s Son. I was your Grey Lady.

For the short time we were together,

love was everything I owned.

When we sang, the woods sang back;

the sea whispered like your mouth at my ear.

But I gave myself freely

to another, knowing too – and who wouldn’t be mad? –

the slippery bliss of a soul in heaven.

Don’t be unforgiving. I was your Grey Lady.

Without you, I’ve no words.

Can you tell me a love that doesn’t own pain?

Like the sweet smell of the smouldering turf,

my heart’s burnt out. It’s an unmarked grave

that gathers mists and rain.

Cell

Imagine a landscape folded into a room:

moonlight like mist on the hills,

blackthorn and alder, the whole world pressed inwards,

a flower between the pages of a book.