How Snow Falls E-Book

Craig Raine

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

In his first poetry collection for a decade, Craig Raine addresses themes of transformation in human nature and the natural world and confronts the quiddities of death and sex, memory and desire, commemoration and love. At the core of How Snow Falls are four long poems that explore the possibilities of the form; there are two ardent elegies, one for the poet's mother and one for a dead lover; a sparkling reworking of Ryunosuke Akutagawa's story In a Grove; last a 'film-poem', High Table. These poems are sometimes joyous, often moving, and always turn an unflinching gaze on the world. Taken together, this collection reawakens us to forgotten worlds and gives voice to the hidden language of existence. As Raine writes in 'Night': 'don't give way to drowsiness, poet. / You are the pledge we give eternity / and so the slave of every second.'

Leseprobe

How Snow Falls

HOW

SNOW

FALLS

Craig Raine

Atlantic Books

LONDON

First published in Great Britain in hardback in 2011 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Craig Raine, 2010

The moral right of Craig Raine to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 1 84887 285 1 eBook ISBN: 978 0 85789 250 8

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WCIN 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Contents

How Snow Falls

I Remember My Mother Dying

Rashomon

In Hospital

Night

La Médica Harkevitch

Three Poems after Willem Van Toorn

Words Upon the Window Pane

A Festive Poem for Albie Marber

51 Ways to Lose a Balloon

Ars Poetica

Venice

Those No-Doubt-About-It Infidelity Blues

Davos Documentary B&W

L. F. Rosen: Three Poems

Marcel’s Fancy-Dress Party

High Table

For Pat Kavanagh

On the Slopes

A la recherche du temps perdu

Acknowledgements

How Snow Falls

Like the unshaven prickle

of a sharpened razor,

this new coldness in the air,

the pang

of something intangible.

Filling our eyes,

the sinusitis of perfume

without the perfume.

And then love’s vertigo,

love’s exactitude,

this snow, this transfiguration

we never quite get over.

I Remember My Mother Dying

I remember

we were driving to my father’s funeral. An overcast day.

A downcast day. Outside Darlington, eight miles away,

my ten-year-old son Vaska asked: Do you think

your brother will try to murder you? My cock shrank.

I remember

my father’s open coffin in the unlit dining room.

White nostril hairs, fog-lights in the gloom.

His face was the colour

of old glazed cheddar.

His right eyelid was straining open,

to see what was going to happen:

stitches stretched the parchment

like the flysheet of a tent.

It was the face of someone about to be shot,

about to flinch away from being hit,

apprehensive as those Hungarian security police,

all their body language a single plea,

snapped by that Life magazine photographer

John Sadovy, just as the trigger

was pulled in Budapest in 1956.

I felt faintly sick.

But I had to think about the speech

my brother had just asked me to make in church.

I remember

that my mother had found a phrase,

empty, sentimental, formulaic self-praise,

something to say, to explain why

my father’s corpse was on display.

She repeated it to everyone

as they offered their commiserations.

She was playing the indomitable wife:

‘I looked after him all his life

and I wasn’t going to let anyone else

look after him now.’ Pure pretence.

She went along with it, but the whole stupid idea

had my brother’s wonky, macabre steer.

I remember

the funeral congregation

paying wary attention

to my brother's affected upper-gloss voice

pledging to care for my mother. His solemn promise.

Three years later,

he turned up from god knows where

and terrorized the middle-aged female wardens,

issuing edicts, insults and orders,

a rip-tide of abuse by telephone

every night and all night long.

It was a little freehold flat in sheltered housing.

My mother began to lose her mind.

I remember

my brother, drunk, as usual,

announcing his 3.30 a.m. arrival

by leaning on my front doorbell.

And shouting through the letterbox as well.

‘I’ve brought you my mother’s ashes.’

The ineffectual, thirty-second thrashing

I gave him was a surprise to me.

I was hampered by my nudity,

my bare feet, my open dressing gown –

and he cycled shakily off to Summertown.

I don’t think he was expecting me to spurn

the sturdy screw-top bronze plastic urn.

I remember

seeing my brother on a bench,

sweaty, unshaven, intense,

his tight tie-knot shiny with dirt,

the morning after our mother died.

It was outside the Radcliffe Hospital.

He was talking to himself, spraying spittle

like a madman. I laughed out loud.

Because he’d been abusive, he wasn’t allowed

to see my mother’s body in the morgue.

He was reviewing the legal arguments,

taking legal advice,

raising his voice...

Undertakers, not one but two firms,

had already refused to deal with him.

In the end, though, he put her on display

just like my father, for a couple of days.

I remember

the first inkling of my mother’s mental decline

was a disagreement about the design

of plastic cocoa-butter containers,

which, against all evidence, she maintained

had a hidden pump, something recessed,

that would spring up when pressed.

I remember,

when she took out her top set of teeth

at Sunday lunch, facing the truth

that something was seriously wrong.

Her wincing delicacy was always so strong

she would berate

my father for removing his dental plate

to rinse out a painful raspberry pip,

‘in public’, under our kitchen tap.

Sometimes when criticized, he’d jut out

his bottom set,

his whole face a grotesque leer,

and ask for ‘a gottle of geer’,

like a ventriloquist’s dummy –

his routine routine, no longer funny.

I remember

at the same lunch, my mother said:

‘I’m dying’ and added:

‘At least there’s the flat.

You’ll make money on that.’

Just the two of us. The words were humble,

but her voice was slightly trembling.

It was a declaration of love, disguised

for her other difficult, distant son, as pure prose.

I remember

as I helped her into her black coat,

she asked me, ‘Am I all right?’

I remember

that I didn’t want to frighten her,

so I said, ‘Of course you are.’

And I straightened the turquoise brooch

on her right lapel and watched her fingers search

for the chipped gilt buttons, one by one,

as her blind eyes darkly searched for mine.

‘You’re my protector.’

Too late, I put my arms too late around her.

I remember

that every Sunday I made her her favourite drink,

lemonade and Advocaat, simple pub plonk.

When she became worried about her mind,

she stopped drinking the Snowballs. Another sign.

I remember

her trying to remember. After she died,

we found Post-it notes with names to memorize.

HAROLD PINTER. OLIVE WALKER.

Then 1 2 3 4. Then 1 2 3. Then 1 2 3 4.

I remember

asking questions to test her, and her strategies,

her desperate remedies:

‘How old was your father

when he got married?’ Answer:

‘My mother never wanted me.’

Question: ‘Was he 40? Was he 30?’

A favourite all-purpose answer:

‘When I had my operation for cancer

there was blood all over my back.’

Or a variant on ‘Jack Sprat’,

a nursery rhyme,

but also a feat in her private scheme:

Jack Sprat could eat no fat,

His wife could eat no lean,

But with a drop of HP Sauce

They licked the platter clean.

I remember

another scrap of verse

that represented Annapurna, F6, Everest:

Salvation Army, free from sin,

All go to heaven in a corned-beef tin.

I remember

that before she became ill

my mother had a dark-eyed, frail

wispy delicacy, a gracefulness

created by her partial sight loss.

She would stand,

smiling, unseeing, with folded hands.

When her brain began to struggle

and fail, she became ugly.

Her nose got bigger.

Everything was coarser.

Under her eyes, the bags

were great wax seals, swags

on a medieval document.

I felt an irresistible instinct:

I wanted to wash my hands when I left her flat,

as if I’d just been to the toilet.

I remember

my mother’s instincts were better

than mine. Her sense of etiquette

survived the indignity of being on the loo:

‘Excuse me.’ She said ‘thank you’

at the end of even the briefest visit.

Her manners went on being exquisite.

I remember

trying to get her to drink

a mouthful or two of milk.

I was worried in case she lost

her swallow reflex. She’d started to fast

and she was losing weight at speed.

Her: ‘Can I lie down?’ Me:

‘Yes, when you’ve drunk the milk.’

This is the small talk

we make when someone is dying.

She takes a sip, then lies back sighing

on her pillows. I stroke her hair.

She moans, continuously, lying there.

Her: ‘Can I lie down now?’ Pretending to scoff,

Me: ‘You are lying down.’ She laughs.

I remember

this resourceful viva voce between her

and Dr Duodo, the hospital doctor,

the afternoon she was admitted

to the Radcliffe Infirmary. He said,