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- Herausgeber: The Poetry Business
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
The poems in Andrew Forster's third collection continue his explorations of what it means to make a home: from Cumbria, where he now lives, to South Yorkshire where he grew up, this book is firmly rooted in the north of England. He works as Literature Officer for the Wordsworth Trust and the ghost of Wordsworth, that supreme poet of home, haunts many of these poems. As the poet approaches middle age, this is a book of settling down, of beginning to be content with what we have managed to distil from life.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Homecoming
Andrew Forster
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to the editors of the following publications, where some of these poems, or earlier versions of then, first appeared: Entanglements: New Eco-Poetry(Two Ravens Press); The Sheffield Anthology: Poems from the City Imagined(smith|doorstop);The Captain’s Tower: Seventy Poets for Bob Dylan’s 70th Birthday(Seren); From Childhood’s Hour(Ledbury Poetry Festival); Sculpted(North West Poets); Not On Our Green Belt(North West Poets); The Reader.
A number of these poems appeared as a limited edition pamphlet, ‘Digging’, illustrated by Hugh Bryden and published by Roncadora Press in 2010. Thanks are also due once again to Hugh Bryden for his wonderful cover art.
‘Lindale Hill’ was commissioned by Cumbria County Council Library Service for its Reading Detectives project in 2010.
The second stanza of ‘April in Town End’, was produced as a poster and postcard by North West Libraries’ Time to Read as part of their Perfect Places project in 2012, as ‘April in Dove Cottage’.
‘Grasmere Green: Summer Equinox’ was written for ‘Solstice’, a project devised and edited by Sarah Hymas & Rebecca Bilkau.
The author is grateful to Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers for a Fellowship in 2012 which gave the valuable gift of time to write a number of these poems and to shape this collection. Thanks are due also to Michael McGregor and the Wordsworth Trust for supporting this Fellowship.
The author would like to acknowledge the financial support of a New Writing North Northern Writers Award supported by Northumbria University and Arts Council England.
Published 2014 by
smith|doorstop Books
The Poetry Business
Bank Street Arts
32-40 Bank Street
Sheffield S1 2DS
www.poetrybusiness.co.uk
Copyright © Andrew Forster 2014
Digital Edition © 2015
ISBN 978-1-910367-38-4
Andrew Forster hereby asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset by Utter
Printed by Printondemand.com
Cover image: Hugh Bryden
Author photo: Henry Iddon
smith|doorstop Books is a member of Inpress,
www.inpressbooks.co.uk. Distributed by Central Books Ltd., 99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN.
The Poetry Business is an Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation
For Stephen, for putting up with being the brother in Brothers!
At Carstairs Junction
On the northbound platform, changing trains
in this village where routes converge,
the darkness hasn’t loosened its hold.
Rain slants into the lamps like the grain
of an old film. The waiting room
is small, the platform crammed, commuters
not speaking, trying to read the blackness
beyond the edge of the station.
Tomorrow, my car will hit ice
and I’ll crash down the snow-mapped bank.
In the slow days of convalescence, I think
about my days and nights spent travelling
and decide to plot a different course
but this morning I’m locked into this one.
A train draws in behind us, carriages
warm with the glow of home, and perhaps
it’s only hindsight that hears the wheels
whisper south, south as it pulls away.
Digging
for John Manson
The careful note on the door says Welcome
in four languages, but my knock
brings no shuffle of footsteps.
While I wait there’s a scrape of steel
on soil from the back garden.
The sun squeezes into the grey wash of sky.
In tracksuit and old dress shoes
he turns earth over in rows.
Always more professor than crofter,
he is out of place in the open air.
His study is a secret chamber:
one small window that doesn’t reach the sun,
volumes of MacDiarmid piled into pillars
and a Remington on the desk,
white keys shining in the constant dusk.
Here he sifts the random thoughts of poets
for that sudden glint that draws the eye
like a fragment of a painted vase
in a spadeful of earth. He passes me
a book and we go back to the day.
