Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Alison Brackenbury's poems are haunted by horses, unseasonable love, history, hares and unreasonable hope. Brackenbury's Selected Poems begins in the almost Victorian villages of remote Lincolnshire, where her father tramped, as a ploughboy, behind great Shires and Percherons.Her acclaimed early poem, 'Dreams of Power', gives voice to a little-known woman from the past, Arbella Stuart, and her still-contemporary choices: safe solitude, fashionable London, dangerous love. Her song-like poems draw on years of experience of bookkeeping and manual work in industry, of VAT, of trichloroethylene on 'a thrumming lorry'.The poems take readers to northern China winters and the damp heat of Hanoi. And always the countryside returns: its mud, its huge hares, its stubborn sun. After nine books, major prizes and national broadcasts, the rush of Brackenbury's poems are a work in wonderful progress, full of surprises and renewals.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 136
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Sammlungen
Ähnliche
GALLOP
SELECTED POEMS
Alison Brackenbury
Contents
GALLOP
from DREAMS OF POWER
My Old
My old are gone; or quietly remain
Thinking me a cousin from West Ham,
Or kiss me, shyly, in my mother’s name.
(My parents seem to dwindle too; forget
Neat ending to a sentence they began,
Beginning of a journey; if not yet.)
Cards from village shops were sent to me
With postal orders they could not afford.
They pushed in roots of flowers, carelessly,
And yet they grew; they said a message came
To say the Queen was dead, that bells were heard.
My old are gone into the wastes of dream.
The snow froze hard, tramped down. Old footprints pit
Its smoothness, blackened footprints that I tread
That save me falling, though they do not fit
Exactly, stretching out beyond my sight.
My old are gone from name. They flare instead
Candles: that I do not have to light.
Gallop
An unholy conspiracy
of girls and horses, I admit,
as never being part of it
but riding late and anxiously.
On Sunday when the horses climb the hill
scrambling the dried watercourse to reach
the open field to gallop: all my breath
swells hot inside me as the horses bunch
and pull for mad speed, even my old horse –
‘gently!’ the leader calls – but they are gone,
hunters, young horses, surging hard ahead,
I rock across the saddle, the wet soil
flung shining past me, and the raking feet
shaking me from saddle as I speak
breathless, kind names to the tossing neck
haul back the reins, watching the widening gap
between my foundered horse and the fast pack,
wondering if I can keep on, why I do this;
and as he falters, my legs tired as his,
I faintly understand this rage for speed:
careless and hard, what do they see ahead,
galloping down spring’s white light, but a gate
a neat house, a small lawn, a cage of sunlight?
And pounding slow behind, I wish that I
rode surely as they do but wish I could
tell them what I see in sudden space –
Two flashing magpies rising from the trees,
two birds: good omen; how the massive cloud
gleams and shadows over as they wait,
the horses blown and steaming at shut gates:
disclosing, past their bright heads, my dark wood.
The House
was the house of childhood, the house of the dark wood,
four-square and safe. It was the second house
at least, to bear its name. The first was burnt: was charred
foundations, hidden by a timber yard.
I knew this in my dream: the house was same
and solid. All its yews, church trees, were strong
red wood of generations. As we came
out in the dusk sight heaved, house, orchard, gone.
Cold in the trembling grass we shivered there.
On open hillside, to the first stars’ stare
I watched dark, unsurprised. I could remember
the bombers roaring low above the trees
to reach their high drome, though the war was done.
The house had strained and crumbled.
There is only
the old magic, forced out in new ways.
Hard through the dream’s cold spring I raised
My house again. My bones and my heart ache
In every joist. The altered rooms are filled
With lovely light: the only house
Which kills in falling, which you must rebuild –
In new wood boxes, apples there
All winter breathe out sweetness, in cold air.
The Divers’ Death
The two dead divers hauled up in their bell
died not from lack of air but the great cold.
The linking cable severed and they fell
fathoms of dark, away from tides that rolled,
from gulls that rode the storm, from sun that warmed
down where the wind dropped; and the hands that cried,
used to much, not this. No breath
deserved the line to break, the spasm, black to death.
And so the dead child, taken quickly out
from white walls, the emptied woman. Or
brain-damaged babies, who can roll about
like small sea-creatures on the padded floor.
Someone washes them and listens for
their cries; they turned their heads when we went near.
But someone might have wished for them a knife
to exorcise the darkness of that life.
Deeper than the bright, fast fishes go
are the great depths that divers cannot kill –
what knife could cut so bitterly? And so
we are love’s strange seabirds. We dive there, still.
Because
you dazzled me with cleverness,
mocked the magician, ‘Stripped of cheats he can
do no more than you, or anyone.
The doves are tame. He is a shrunken man.
Sleeves of silk handkerchiefs, like crumpled wings
a shiny card hid in his sweating palm,
bright saws which do not cut are all his art.
It is your dull belief which does you harm.’
Your eyes fixed on me. But I climbed the stage
to help his act. Was it the final trick,
because I was so frightened of your rage?
Because I disobeyed you or because
all my art was gone in loving you
icy and true silver ran my tears,
dazzled, by the light we vanished through.
Derby Day: An Exhibition
The great Stubbs’ picture of the great Eclipse
Hangs in the corner it defies,
Effortless. The great are luminous.
Orbed flanks shine solid, amber, having won.
A gold-red horse called Hermit won, and broke
The wild Earl of Hastings, who had flung
Woods and fields against. How can Eclipse
Comfort those eclipsed, who never won?
The young Fred Archer, with a boy’s sad face,
Shot himself, sick dizzy on the edge.
He won six flaring Derbys. Not that one
In which a woman sprang beneath the rail.
In thudding dark, pain tore all colours; died.
And yet a brilliant day. Do not mistake:
That which we do best kills us. Horse and man
Amber in the mist of downs, sea-shore,
The spring of wave, glow greatly. They survive.
These Are the Colours
These are the colours. New, cold blue
which glints between the drifting packs,
the wasted dark of the long day,
pure snow, which fills and freezes in our tracks.
This is the region where the ships are caught
where gold-billed swans die heaving in the ice
to which the lode-stone sings with human voice
this song I sail into your northern eyes.
Kingdoms
Gold, edged with green, the peacock’s eyes
ducked and shimmered past my head
to see the young Athenians
who could not leap the bull, lie dead.
Their ended screams still twist my sleep
become the staircase where I run,
of alabaster pale as milk
in courtyards where the black bull shone
his high horns lashed with reddening silk.
Black, pierced with grey, pricks morning’s leaves,
where all the headdresses lie dark
crushed now in rough volcano ash;
where now we sleep in shelters, cracks
in painted stones: in fear I brush
for morning’s sticks through the deep wood.
A young black bull they would have found
with net, gold rope for sacrifice
stirs through the thicket: I am caught
only in his drowsing eyes:
a smudge of mist. He rubs the grey
smooth trunk; blinks sleep, walks slow away.
For pomp and cold, twigs crackle: fade.
In a still space I am drawn.
Fire, be moth-wing, grey and gold,
bull and dancer: ash and dawn.
‘Yesterday Vivaldi visited me, and sold me some very expensive concertos.’
He had only one tune.
And that
a thin finger on pulses:
of spring and the frost,
the quick turn of girls’ eyes
a tune
to hold against darkness,
to fret
for trumpet, for lute
for flutes; violins
to silver the shabbiness
of many towns
the fool’s bowl, the court coat,
a tune he would give
without sorrow or freedom
again, again
there is only one tune.
Sell it dearly to live.
The Wood at Semmering
This is a dismal wood. We missed our train.
Leaning on a bench, and happy while
The express, green, like a Personenzug
Slid past us as we sat there with a smile.
Tree draughts blow smells of earth to us and tug
A memory: a sadness, found again.
For in this place the nervous women meet
Summer, summer; watch their fingers shake
To splash a tonic water round the glass.
Where the widow, thin, brown-haired, will take
Her daily walk between the pines; will pass
Small cones and drifting flowers, with numb feet.
Past pale yellow foxgloves, small to ours,
Where harebells darken purple, she steps slow.
The toad-flax opens deeper mouths of gold,
The tiny eye-bright, high white daisies blow.
Rose of chill lips, small cyclamen unfold,
And touch her feet.
For earth has many flowers.
The Two
do not fear
the golden wings
sun lit their tips
before they fell
all lips meet the shadowed sea
love pity no such ends
your pity fits the careful man
who joined soft wax with feathers well
who fell alone: on a grey shore:
on whom all love depends.
Intimates
You lived too near the ghosts. For they were kind
dry, warm as snakes you never feared.
Speak now of love to men whose eyes
are moist and cold,
unkind as the true world.
For you are woken now by evening’s rain
(a snake would shiver, slip into the dark)
are startled as it smashes on hot land.
The sky-light leaks. Rain pricks against your wrist –
Strange fingers slip the gold ring from your hand.
Two Gardeners
Too far: I cannot reach them: only gardens.
And stories of the roughness of their lives.
The first, an archaeologist, had lost
Her husband to the Great War; never married
Again, but shared her fierce father’s house;
Lit oil lamps and humped bright jugs of water
Until he died. We went there selling flags
Stopped at the drive’s turn: silenced by her garden.
White water-lilies smoked across her pools.
The trees were hung with musk-roses
Pale as Himalayas; in darker space
Gleamed plants as tall as children, crowned with yellow,
Their name I never learnt. Her friends had found
Smuggled her seeds and lush stalks, from abroad;
While she walked with her father’s snapping dog
Or drew the Saxon fields of Lincolnshire.
The other lived in the cold Northern side
Of a farmhouse, split for the farm’s workers,
(Where we lived then). Once she had been a maid,
Had two children for love before she married
A quiet man. Away from her dark kitchen
She built a bank, her husband carried soil.
There she grew monkey flowers, red and yellow,
Brilliant as parrots, but more richly soft.
She said I could help plant them, but I dare
Not touch the trembling petals – would not now.
I have sown some. I do not look to see
Such generous gold and scarlet, on dark air.
Both live; I call them gardeners. And I grow
Angry for them, that they might be called
Typically English. They were no more that
Than sun or wind, were wild and of no place.
The roots of light plants touched them for a while
But could not hold them: when they moved
They left all plants to strangers
in whose dust
The suburbs’ wind sucks up white petals round me
To look and see them in their earth-dark shoes
Skirts stained by water, longer yet than ours.
Dazzled by dry streets I touch their hands,
Parted by the sunlight, no man’s flowers.
Summer in the Country
‘Strawberries’, ‘raspberries’, whisper the letters
Until July is a taste, to hide
In reddened mouths, in fields which feet
Can’t flatten, tall, soft throbbed with heat.
Where horses shaking gnats aside
Come slow to hand through the darkening grass
Where seeds fall too, from willow trees
(Rooted in damp, an ancient drain)
White silk clings to my back. I see
Small clouds pass slowly overhead.
Ask me nothing. In harvest fields
Drivers wear masks – cough dust; hear grain
Hiss profit; loss. But in the shade
Pale seed drops lightly over me.
The harvest ends. White webs of cold
Are strung across the sun;
The wind blows now no hint of fruit
but draught, unease, what’s done; undone.
Robert Brackenbury
Ancestors are not in our blood, but our heads:
we make history.
Therefore I claim
you, from dark folds of Lincolnshire
who share my name
and died two hundred years ago
you, man, remembered there
for doing good: lost, strange and sharp you rise
like smoke: because it was your will
all letters, papers, perish when you died.
Who burnt them? Wife or daughter, yawning maid
poked down the struggling blackness in the grate
or walked slow, to the place where leaves were burnt,
the white air, winter’s. Slips of ash
trembled on the great blue cabbage leaves:
O frozen sea.
Why Robert, did
you hate the cant of epitaph so much?
leave action to be nothing but itself:
the child who walked straight-legged, the man
whose house no longer smoked with rain, and yet
