Farewell to the Earth E-Book

Christopher James

• Herausgeber: Arc Publications
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 56

Beschreibung

In Christopher James' mercurial second collection, Seamus Heaney breaks down in a lane, John Lennon haunts the Great Wall of China, and King Midas is spotted somewhere in Herefordshire. Reaching from the Humber to the Thames, from Kashmir to Cromer, it's a dizzying and unpredictable world tour.In the shadow of environmental disaster and the possibility of dragons, there are more mundane dramas to face too: moving house, family secrets, marriage proposals that do not go to plan, and children woken in the night by rain."Amongst new collections I have enjoyed is Christopher James's Farewell to the Earth. James's first collection, The Invention of Butterfly, was rightly much praised when it appeared in 2006. This second collection is marked by the same fertility of invention, blurring the lines between the ordinary and the extraordinary... James is skilled, imaginative and highly readable."AcumenChristopher James was born in Scotland in 1975 and educated at Newcastle and UEA, where he graduated with an MA in Creative Writing. He won the National Poetry competition in 2008 with 'Farewell to the Earth', and his other accolades include the 2002 Bridport Prize and the Ledbury Poetry Prize twice, in 2003 and 2006. His previous collection, The Invention of Butterfly (2006), was listed by the Independent as one of its top ten poetry books, and saw him hailed as "the UK's brightest newcomer" by the Poetry Society. He now lives in Suffolk.This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here.

Leseprobe

FAREWELL TO THE EARTH

Published by Arc Publications

Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road

Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK

www.arcpublications.co.uk

Copyright © Christopher James 2011

Editor for the UK and Ireland: John W. Clarke

Typeset by BookType

978 1906570 70 5 pbk

978 1906570 71 2 hbk

978 1908376 00 8 ebook

Cover picture “No. 6 Allotment” byEmma Dunbar, 290 x 305 acrylic on board, reproduced by kind permission of the artist www.emmadunbar.co.uk

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

To purchase this book, please visit www.inpressbooks.co.uk/farewell_to_the_earth_christopher_james_i022653.aspx

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following magazines and anthologies in which some of these poems first appeared: The Bridport Prize Anthology 2006 and 2008, The Forward Book of Poetry 2010, The Frogmore Papers, Interpreters House, Iota, Magma, Poetry Nottingham, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, The Rialto and Smiths Knoll.

A number of the poems in this collection have been awarded the following prizes: ‘Farewell to the Earth’ won first prize in the 2008 National Poetry Competition; ‘John Lennon on the Great Wall of China’ won first prize in the Ledbury Poetry Competition 2006; ‘The Novices’ was a runner up in the Bridport Prize 2008; ‘The Light Age’ was a runner up in the Bridport Prize 2006; ‘Backpacking across Pangea’ was longlisted for the Bridport Prize 2009; and ‘The Cat on the Dashboard’ was shortlisted for Open Poetry Sonnet Competition 2007. ‘A Star Shell’ was commissioned by the Tate and written in response to the painting of the same name by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson.

The author would like to thank the Authors’ Foundation (administered by the Society of Authors) for a grant which assisted in the completion of this book.

The author would like to thank the James and Keeble families; Bob Mee and Janet Murch, Maria, Polly, Noah and Martha.

Contents

Farewell to the Earth

The Retired Eunuch

The Light Age

Detective Fiction

55 Mill Hill Road

King Midas in the Golden Valley

John Lennon on the Great Wall of China

Backpacking Across Pangea

The Small Architect

The Novices

Running with the Polish Airman

Road Trip

Solo

The Lakeland Poets High Jump Contest

The Elizabethan Stag

Noah

How I Learnt the Fingerpicking Style

1 Graham Street

Triathlon

Saturday

The Flood

The Windmill Conversion Neighbourhood Watch

The Queen’s Master of the Swans

Seamus Heaney’s BlackBerry

Wading the Humber

The Skimmer King of the Antrim Coast

Captain Sydney Smith

The Cat on the Dashboard

The Chitraker’s Allotment

Second Honeymoon

The Royal Yacht

Ring

Returning

Another Fine Mess

Halos

Exposure

Out of the Bag

Cortege

The Tower

You Do Not Need Your Wristwatch, There Is a Clock on the Wall

The Divebombers

Amends

Unheard Music

Fresher

Firewood

Exile Blues

A Star Shell

The Girl in the Piet Mondrian Dress

The Benevolent Plague

Disinterring the Archaeogist

Waiting for the Stick-Man

The Mist

The Wonder-Smiths

Ashes

Let the tape-machines go drunk

Turn on the purple spotlight,

pull out the Vox Humana

Louis MacNeice

For Martha

FAREWELL TO THE EARTH

We buried him with a potato in each hand

on New Year’s Day when the ground was hard as luck,

wearing just cotton, his dancing shoes plus

a half bottle of pear cider to stave off the thirst.

In his breast pocket we left a taxi number

and a packet of sunflower seeds; at his feet was

the cricket bat he used to notch up a century

against the Fenstanton eleven.

We dropped in his trowel and a shower of rosettes

then let the lid fall on his willow casket.

The sky was hard as enamel; there was

a callus of frost on the face of the fields.

Dust to dust; but this was no ordinary muck.

The burial plot was by his allotment, where

the water butt brimmed with algae and the shed door

swung and slammed as we shook back the soil.

During the service, my mother asked

the funeral director to leave; take away some hair

and the resemblance was too close, and yet

my father never looked so smart.

I kept expecting him to walk in, his brow

steaming with rain, soil under his fingernails,

smelling of hot ashes and compost,

looking for fresh tea in the pot.

THE RETIRED EUNUCH

Today I crashed my last wedding, hung up

my bells, kissed goodbye to my maracas.

From now, I will dance only for myself,

choose turquoise stones from the village bazaar

and walk between the grass and the green wheat.

I will wear a yellow turban and striped shirt

and, when I draw my pension, will put aside

enough for the silver stilettos I saw in the shop

in Chandigarh to be worn on the anniversary

of my mother’s death. At night I will wear

the white headdress shaped like a swan,

dream of the City Beautiful and Lucky Ali

with his denim shirt and Dean Martin eyes.

In spring when my skin is still as pale

as the palace of the ambassador, I will walk

the high paths, pick the yellow flower

and feel rain on my feet; I will not speak of the past.

In my last days, I will play at high volume

the big hits of Daler Mehndi, the Bhangra King,

learn the sarangi and, once every year, journey

to the shores of the Bay of Bengal. My soul

I give to the stars, my eyes to the orphans.

I will leave behind nothing but yesterday.

THE LIGHT AGE

In the badly drawn world, when England

was as plump as a summer marrow, when Essex

changed places with Kent and no one much cared,

the shape of things was not what mattered most.

Scotland was squeezed between finger and thumb;

Eire was a flattened gourd. When the possibility

of dragons had not entirely been ruled out

we made our way from Berwick to Canterbury

in under a month; our forecasters cast their

eyes across the clouds and feared the worst:

a dark future of science and order; of lands

that would not shift and rivers that refused to bend.

We held out our hands as the dragons took flight,

catching the sapphires they shook from their scales.

DETECTIVE FICTION

It was a strange day to begin with:

as I left the office I found a fifty dollar bill

gummed to the bottom of my shoe.

Good luck, you’d think, but it just didn’t feel right.

It was like a beautiful woman you didn’t know

blowing you a kiss across the room.

On the street a sheet of newsprint

was frozen to the sidewalk laminated in ice:

the headline read: Detective found dead.