Karaoke King E-Book

Dai George

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 64

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

"George's ear is precise, rueful, sanative. His images amaze, yet through each poem journeys a voice we always want to know better, capable even in the tightest situations of the sort of thought you wish you'd had." – Vidyan Ravinthiran"The poems of Karaoke King are nothing less than transcendent. No tricksy stuff here. Just lucidity and formal grace: the words and the music. Their ability to move us to tears, to laughter, or contemplation of the mess we make of the world, and its extraordinary capacity for forgiveness, offering fresh opportunities for redemption." – London Grip"Bravo Dai George, Karaoke King is my poetry book of the year so far." – Caroline BrackenThis confident second collection addresses the contentious nature of the time. Always deeply thoughtful but also alternately ebullient, angry, curious, ashamed, the poet moves through urban and digital spaces feeling both uneasy and exhilarated. There is a sense of history shifting, as a younger generation confronts its ethical obligations, its sense of complicity and disappointment. Karaoke King also contains numerous reflections on popular culture, culminating in 'A History of Jamaican Music', a sequence speaking to urgent contemporary questions of ownership and privilege, pain and celebration.

Leseprobe

Karaoke King

For Jasmin, my luck

Seren is the book imprint of

Poetry Wales Press Ltd.

Suite 6, 4 Derwen Road, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 1LH

www.serenbooks.com

facebook.com/SerenBooks

twitter@SerenBooks

The right of Dai George to be identified as

the author of this work has been asserted in accordance

with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

© Dai George, 2021.

ISBN: 978-1-78172-628-0

ebook: 978-1-78172-629-7

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

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without

the prior permission of the copyright holder.

The publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of the Books Council of Wales.

Cover artwork: James Donovan

jamesdonovanart.com

Printed in Bembo by Severn, Gloucester.

Contents

I

Doxology

Aisles

Poem on 27th Birthday

The Park in the Afternoon

Fooled Evening

Cooking with Butter

God Willing

Universal Access

Far Enough Away

Rock vs Pop

Dustin Hoffman in Biarritz

Real Rain

Station to Station

Valet

The Disclaimer Room

Agoraphobia

Near Historical Swoon

Karaoke King

Neck of the Chicken

Contact Again

Ubi Caritas

II from A History of Jamaican Music

Referendum Calypso

Or, a Prelude

Bus to Skaville

People Rocksteady

Knows It, Scratch

The Night (Dub)

Or, a Windrush Interlude

Soon Forward

Toasting for Pronouns

Party Time  

III

September’s Child

Wards

Post-Historical Teatime

American Gratitude

New York Morning, Six Years On

Sun Has Spoken

Poem in which my hairline recedes

Shopping with Mam

Obsolete Heartbreak Suite

Doggies

Benevolence Test

The Mercury Mine

Pink Cones

Notes and Acknowledgements

I

We are close enough to childhood, so easily purged

of whatever we thought we were to be.

Robert Duncan, ‘Food for Fire, Food for Thought’

Doxology

Blessings flow, through narrow fields, a weir

              finds restitution as it falls.

            Tightroping gulls, the crumbling edge

is anxious as they slip and cling to show them

            peace below. I number the blessings

in a split and democratic sky.

            The clemency of inland water.

The resourcefulness of creatures left to try.

Blessings flow, but trouble finds me

in the impasse after rain. I mean democratic

            as an argument that neither side can win.

Praise grass from which the pylons ship

            invisible cargos that I wait upon

unthinkingly, an emperor inured to the hand

            that serves him fruit.

You’ll find little god here but demanding

            drifts of pollen, little trouble but a boy

whose dream last night was of a concert

               and his frozen voice.

            The gulls find trouble in a moment

they can’t trust, a wind that smashes them aloft

then drops beyond the river.

                     Obstacles and carrion,

            fluidity and rest, a hatchling woken

in its nest of foil.           The parliament still warring

            through its agonies of choice,

the hustle never ending

               nor the trouble            nor the joy.

Aisles

Plenitude and frigid air: death

could never come where fruit

will never rot before it’s sold

or thrown away. I could never be

mistreated, never fall to mischief

in this humming galleon of service

down whose many-jarred and many-

branded gangways I could trip

forever, never sickening or asking

where it comes from, how. Bacon

sweats beneath its plastic corset.

On empty schoolnights we

would drive here, newly licensed,

and plunder the golden sundries

of the deli counter, less in hunger

than enchanted boredom: bhajee, satay

skewer, olive bar, layered salad

reduced to clear, the decadent

barbarian empire of freezers and

lurid condiments, beyond which lay

the household aisles, our lives

mapped out by ergonomic grid.

I lied when I said I never

wonder how it happens; how

like a quietly ovulating mammal

these shelves replenish. It speaks

of a greater kindness working

in our world than I’d assumed.

A providence less radical and more

assured. It stuns me into apathy

the colour and thin consistency

of milk expressed and pasteurised

by exploited farmers. Returning

here alone this frightened evening,

I knelt down among the chicken

strips and mince, dreaming myself

a worm in the field that reared

such miracle and blight. I’ve never

known a hunger worse than two

pounds in my pocket here could quell.

My anger may never meet the air

but lies in wait, flesh under wax

in fruit that’s yet to perish, or to sell.

Poem on 27th Birthday

The osteria’s blasting jazz, the slick and fruity

after-hours sort, while down the street a Fiat stereo

fronts up with a folksy Anglophonic strum.

I’m down with it all; I’m a honey trap for wasps

snuffling the grains in my espresso cup,

but those bastards don’t bug me any more. No,

the dread in this young daddio’s soul derives

mainly from the monoglotic cringe that comes

in proffering twenty per un grande bicchiere

and hearing, ‘Do you have any smaller change?’

It’s hard to start again. On the way here,

a sculpture of two people kissing was less

a weight of metal that stuck in my chest

and more…

I know this Fiat song – I heard it first

one Friday night at home with a talent show,

where the person singing it reached out, aching,

and her mentor boogied in the aisles.

Today is a first bite of well-hung steak,

the middle third commencing in a long life’s

lunch. I chowed down the starters in a haze

but today is marbled and glossy and rare.

Two tables across, a group of girls

could be fifteen or twenty, happy or stuck,

with a baby mauling the sides of his pram

and the red-capped dad, or likely dad,

lipping a roll-up, thumbing his phone.

A sculpture of two people kissing should dare

a timid heart to back itself, and I

should know the name of this song,

this warbly, flighty, homely strum,

just as a jazz cat should know when to stop,

and a wasp should be smooth to the rump, and my luck

should be turning, not turning the world on its head,

and a boy should feel lucky he’s drinking, not dead,

or at least that he’s watching impossible wars

play out on the TVs of hill-town bars

on a boot-shaped peninsula, not one where drones

patrol the residential blocks.

My luck is fine. You’re my luck. I’m working

through the end of luck, and today,

though far from me, you’re still the sculpture

flexing into flesh and breath.

No, the guy’s not the dad, any more than

the venerable pair on the suntrap bench

are married, or kin to the gurgling kid,

for all that they’ll pop over now and check

if the mama’s helping him grow up strong,

if the guy’s got a light, if he saw what went on

at Juve this Sunday, and – I belong to you –

I’m digging the hell outta this Fiat jam,

for all that it makes the noodly hum

behind me sound like the Rites of Spring.

In younger days, when opinions were crisp,

astringent as radicchio, I’d have declared myself

immune to its sickly charms, to anything

sunnyside-up and blancmange, so lacking

in phobia, friction, demands, but – You belong to me –

it floats to me now as nothing less

than the Glory of Love. The old boy raps

pink sports pages on the tabletop.

Cuore Kaka. Milan è casa mia.

His young friend shrugs and arranges his cap

in an opposite sideways angle and laughs.

Today’s been flashed on the griddle and served.

The osteria flips the disc. Teddy Pendergrass

gets jiggy all over his chorus line. Kaka’s

come home. Ain’t no stopping us now,

and as the Fiat down the street affirms

you’re my sweetheart. What a mute wonder

love is. It’s here, it’s the bench, it’s the statue

and a dog, loping where the old boy goes

when the sun sends him in for a kip.