It's Not Personal E-Book

Nigel Pantling

• Herausgeber: The Poetry Business
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 42

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

It's Not Personal evokes a life, from childhood in the Fifties through the challenges and eccentricities of the workplace, to the unpredictability of family, love and death. These are poems concerned with truth; but just as importantly, with what it means to tell a story.

Leseprobe

Published 2020 by

Smith|Doorstop Books

The Poetry Business

Campo House

54 Campo Lane

Sheffield S1 2EG

www.poetrybusiness.co.uk

Copyright © Nigel Pantling 2020All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-1-912196-35-7

ePub ISBN 978-1-912196-47-0

Nigel Pantling 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.

Design & typeset by Tim Morris

Printed by CPI Books

Smith|Doorstop Books is a member of Inpress:

www.inpressbooks.co.uk. Distributed by

NBN International, 1 Deltic Avenue,

Rooksley, Milton Keynes MK13 8LD.

The Poetry Business gratefully acknowledges the support of Arts Council England.

Contents

Something My Girlfriend Said to Me

First Times

Love Letter from My Pastry Cook

Crosswords

Visiting Sloane Square

Differences

Bath

After the Dream

Unlike Us

Cuba

Icebergs

Cleaning the Slate

According to Every Woman’s Doctor

On Being Named After a Film Star

Battle of Britain

American Hard Gums

Moon-landing

Moving School

On the Way Home from Choir Practice

After Evensong

Tineke's Party

Death in the Family

I       Night

II     Morning

III   Funeral

IV   Afterwards

V    Transportation Theory

Dog

Encounter

Lunch with the MI6 Recruiter

Final Interview for MI6

Signing the Act

I’m Googling My Name

Most Important Client

It’s Business

Operational Risk

Armageddon in the Property Market

Consequences

The Answer

Evensong: Organist

Evensong: Verger

Evensong: Vicar

Evensong: Treble

Evensong: Bass

Evensong: Sidesman

The Battle of Arras

Lockerbie

Sandhurst Drill

Sandhurst Bull

Sandhurst Shouting

Sandhurst Uniform

Finding the House

Delivery

Distinctions

Slipping

T Shirts

My Mother Mistakes Her Phone for a Shoe

Alternative Spaces

Some Things about Last Christmas I'm Sure of

Loveshack

My Father Mows the Lawn

Seedling

For my sisters

Something My Girlfriend Said to Me

Do you remember, when you were a boy,

how the chimes of an ice-cream van

could bring on a rush of excitement,

how you struggled with the choice –

a strawberry mivvi, a rocket lolly,

or a 99 with hundreds and thousands –

how different each felt

in your mouth,

on your tongue,

how wonderful

it was to know that

if you chose a mivvi today,

you could still have a 99 tomorrow?

Well that’s how it is with me and men.

First Times

After the first time, she said to him

‘The first time is always awful,

isn’t it?’

It was his first first time, in his first year,

in her shared room emptied of her room-mate

used to being asked to work in the library.

After that, his first times came and went,

in houses and halls, colleges and rooms,

home and away, indoors and outside,

baroque, bizarre, boring, bloody, bad,

but he would never say

they were awful.

Love Letter from My Pastry Cook

I want you to think of my heart as this egg.

Take it in your hand, fresh from its box –

how pale and undistinguished it appears.

Notice how inert it is: still, dry, silent.

Against your tongue it has no flavour,

smell it – there is nothing beyond a hint of earth,

in your palm it lacks the heft even of a pebble.

You know if you squeezed now

you could crush this egg of mine,

so treat it with care, keep it safely by you

ready for the moment:

                                                  take the trouble then

to open it gently, and what pleasure it will bring –

all the soufflés, cakes, and pastries you desire,

and, I promise, a chocolate mousse to die for.

Crosswords

She relished solving a crossword with her lovers,

folding herself round the current man in her bed

to measure his intellect against her own.

She gave each lover a cryptic crossword to himself:

Telegraph, Times, Guardian, Spectator, LRB

until there had been more paramours than puzzles.

Then she began to add rules of her own.

With J they did the across clues first.

K had to work up from the bottom right corner.

L must answer odd numbered clues before evens.

M just the ones where they already had a letter.

She switched to the General Knowledge Crossword

for N. Plumping the pillows and twining their legs,

she said they should only try clues with seven words

and with a transitive verb in the present tense.

‘Fuck that,’ he said, ‘that’s not what I came here to do.’

Visiting Sloane Square

Slithering down her stairs, his heels

slam, slat by slat by slat, slashing

his slight chance of slinking

silently away. He’s left a slick

where he slathered and slobbered

on the sleek silk of her pillow-slip

then slumped into the slotted

slab of her Peter Jones bed.

He’s praying she’s still asleep as he slips the latch,

sliding into his Docs for the schlep up Sloane Street,

where the sleet is slapping slantwise against the slates.

Differences

In some parallel world,

where Fermat’s Last Theorem has yet to be proven

and the rainbow has eleven colours,

they still had lunch together in Olivo’s,

still laughed, flirted, drank too much wine,