Half-Life E-Book

Michael Hulse

• Herausgeber: Arc Publications
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 52

Beschreibung

Half-Life is a riveting new collection full of family dramas, global warming and conversations with Death. The poems swing between Mexico City, New York, the Peloponnese, a Staffordshire village and home, engaging with the various beauties to be found in art, nature and the church. Then, in an extended sequence, Death relates stories of her encounters with the world's peoples and cultures."He writes with a controlled passion... using sophisticated effects to locate the significant and develop its larger emotional truth."John Levett"Compelling and moving."Poetry Review on The Secret HistoryMichael Hulse was born in 1955 in England, and lived for 25 years in Germany before returning in 2002 to teach at the University of Warwick. His poetry has won the National Poetry Competition and the Bridport Poetry Prize (twice), as well as Eric Gregory and Cholmondeley Awards. His most publications are the poetry collection The Secret History (Arc, 2009) and a translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Penguin Classics, 2009). He co-edited The New Poetry, the bestselling Bloodaxe anthology and GCSE set text (1993), and the Ebury anthology The 20th Century in Poetry (2011). He lives in Stafford.This book is also available as an ebook: buy it from Amazon here.

Leseprobe

Half-Life

Published by Arc Publications

Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road

Todmorden OL14 6DA, UK

www.arcpublications.co.uk

Copyright © Michael Hulse 2013

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications 2013

Design by Tony Ward

Printed in Great Britain by the MPG Book Group,

Bodmin and King’s Lynn

978 1908376 19 0 (pbk)

978 1908376 20 6 (hbk)

978 1908376 21 3 (ebook)

Cover image: ‘Gethsemane’ © Tony Ward, 2011

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Poems in this book have been published in theIrish Times,Istanbul Review,Kenyon Review,London Magazine, London Review of Books,Poetry Review,Poetry Salzburg Review,Sport,Yale ReviewandThe King’s Lynn Silver Folio: Poems for Tony Ellis.

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.

Editor for the UK & Ireland:

John W. Clarke

Half-Life

Michael Hulse

2013

This book is for Kathrin and Agnes

I’ve loved it all my life,

the smell of baking bread,

and now it fills the house

as my daughter, all of two,

eagerly helps her mother

and proudly tells her father,

“Agnes bake it.”

We break the pith and crust

and raise a glass of wine

and talk of what we have done

and what we hope to do

and all of us together

humbly tell the father,

“Homo fecit.”

Contents

I

Freeman

II

The Return

The Syrian Bride

A Carcass

In Sant’ Antonio di Padua

Saskatoon

Home

Burj Khalifa

Lagerfeld

Wewelsfleth

In the Peloponnese

After the Warming

From the Virtual Jerusalem

Swiss National Day in Lavigny

Rousseau in Staffordshire

To Thine Own Self Be True

Arse over Tip

Quod Scripsi Scripsi

A Virgin in Mexico City

The Half-Life of Jesus

The Swallows

Eh, Tom?

III

Foreknowledge Absolute

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

IV

The Truth of Fiction (I)

The Truth of Fiction (II)

Author’s Note

Biographical Note

I

Freeman

Freeman pulled over on the West Gate Bridge, in heavy traffic, says my friend,

with his kids in the back, the little girl, the boys,

and he walked round the car and pulled open the door

and he took out his four-year-old daughter

and lifted her and threw her off the bridge.

When he opened the door, did he hold out a hand, and speak to her reassuringly,

and smile as a father smiles when he knows there is nothing to be afraid of,

and take her, calmly, with death in his heart, and raise her, calmly, as any father

might, let’s say, when his daughter dares the slide, alone, for the very first time,

when six feet are still the Empire State – calmly, teaching her trust?

You have to imagine it, says my friend –

the whole of it happens in full view

of six lanes of commuter traffic,

cars and trucks and vans are shrieking to a stop,

everyone sees him as he throws his daughter off the bridge.

I can imagine it. Nothing easier. Nothing more impossible.

But I remember how K and I were thrilled to see, on a hospital scan,

the beating heart of a life in the making, the life that became our daughter.

I remember the moment I saw her head appear.

I remember the cries her mother gave. The joyful agony.

It was the usual story, says my friend – revenge on a wife.

He drove to the family court and stood there witless with his boys,

Ben and Jack, hugging his trouser-legs, begging him to go back, Daddy, get her.

By then the police were wading into the mudflats by the riverbank,

and found the little girl. Alive. Who clung to living for an hour or two.

Please, I say, have mercy, please, oh no, please, not another word.

– But my friend will have none of it: Which of us knows what we are capable of?

There’s evil in us all. It might so easily have been you, throwing the girl from the bridge.

Wasn’t that you, climbing back in, snapping at the wailing boys, stepping on the gas?

They’re wrong (I say), the witnesses – oh no, that wasn’t me –

thatwas me down there, down there in the water, down there, far below,

standing in the shallows, waiting among the reeds and the waterfowl,

waiting with my arms outstretched to catch my daughter when she fell –

my shoes and trousers, look, are soaked, and caked with reeking mud –

there I was, at the dark river’s margin, waiting as any father would.

II

The Return

A Carthage it wasn’t; but this was a city of libraries and bars,

offices, hospitals, galleries, schools and arenas.

That cypress grows where the 34 bus used to stop.

That’s what remains of the chamber of commerce. And that

was the headquarters of a software corporation.

I knew the place. But that was long ago,

and now the stories being written here

know nothing of urban planning or insider trading,

nor of collateral, nor of collateral damage,

nor of the pools where the damsel-fly sits once again on the lotus on long summer days.

They say that the souls of the dead inhabit the place.

They say there are shifts in the light, prints in the dust,

unravelling veils of vapour on the breeze,

whispers that tell of rememberings of the heart,

murmurs at night like the plainsong of the stars.

They say from the visible darkness, the nowhere of days,

a figure comes walking, into the limitless light,

gazing ahead into space as if all of his life

were dependent on what lay before him. As if

he saw now, as a thing he might touch, the past become present.

He has been to the place. The profundis. The night

where neither man nor woman has a name.

He has been to the place. To return her to life.

And now he walks as if the very air

threatened to snatch her back and keep her there.