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- Herausgeber: Seren
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
'A poet who instinctively sees the possibilities of defamiliarisation wherever she casts her penetrating, colour-loving eye' (Carol Rumens, Guardian) 'Her poems wrestle at the interface between self and other and from the heat of that fight she forges startlingly original imagery' (Poetry London) re:Loudness '...the collection takes on an imaginative charge that sparks many surprises...there's no telling what Brown will do next, but it will be worth reading.' On Loudness(Douglas Houston in Poetry Review) "Sometimes narky, sometimes tender and afraid, each poem offers up its own shock of uneasy wonder. Judy Brown troubles the edges of certainty in poems that greet us with a glittering strangeness. This is a thrilling and compulsive collection." – Kathryn Simmonds What do animal dens have in common with mathematics? Lairs is darkly suggestive of secretive havens and shelters, but also frames the poem as an equation. This collection is both a kind of nest and a beautiful accumulation of dense detail. Lairs also highlights the contrast between noble aspirations and a messy reality, the poems' atmospheres being sometimes borrowed from the fervid pandemic lockdowns. The innovative style is daring and embraces complex music. Post-Brexit life is also a subtle strand in these poems, as they deflate and challenge establishment conservatism.
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Seitenzahl: 49
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Lairs
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 Judy Brown to be identified as
the author of this work has been asserted in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
© Judy Brown, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-78172-666-2
Ebook: 978-1-78172-667-9
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: Roger Mattos, from @linearcollages
Printed in Bembo by Pulsioprint, France
Contents
| Lairs & Cages |
Postmonkey
Settings
Fish. Oh. Fish.
Fruit for Offices
Cravings for Pure Sugar
The Coelacanth
Room Service Menu
Vivarium
Small Visible Queen
The Larder
The Royal Forests
Greenery
Working From Home
The Visiting Princess Snips A Tiny Rose
Another Young Man Chooses Water
Fluxville
| Curtilage |
Sea-Want
Towards Gentrification
The Property Market
From Platform 1, Blackfriars Station
The Islander
The Reunion
On Not Leaving the House All Day
The Property Market
Waiting for the Pomegranate Boat
North of Here, South of Here
The DIY Forums
The Frog Prince
The Unfair Coin
The Fourth Wall
| Apertures |
Ways to Describe Motion
Judas’s Rule of Three
Three Chinese Boats You’ve Never Seen
Some Security Questions
The Landlady
Charcoal
The Three Gods of the Heart
The Data
The Hero’s First Telling
Brink
The summer when the rest of the world seemed to be burning but it was only the start
On the Front
Steeped
My Latest Era
The Baby Tooth
A Model Life
Birthday
My Comeback
The Victory Parade
Our Acts as Dreams
Steam Tables
winter a dropped stitch
Acknowledgements
Notes
| Lairs & Cages |
Postmonkey
As the ship speeds up at Pluto, the earthlight sensors blow.
Lights fade to pastel touches on your toffee-coloured fur.
The flight recorder picks up your first words three years in:
a garble of Merriam-Webster, harsh against the hum.
It’s not long before a halo’d planet sets off some chimpy whinge
about a green place and your females smoking red in spring.
When you give up hope, the language programme hits its stride:
more dopamine, more titbits, an electrode’s neat incentive.
In the slow lane, a terrace of dying suns, you learn to really talk.
This one is your lab tech’s voice; you’re asking about stars.
Decades in the leatherette pod the psychs designed for you
turn your muzzle silver, and the low-grav wrecks your bones.
Your tail must be bald as a bike-chain, the way you grumble.
I transcribed your words on landing, the part with the needle,
where you’re yelling you’re not ready, won’t be rushed.
The cargo hold opens and you’re wiped, then flushed.
Settings
That was the day I discovered the tick
in the place a navel piercing would sit.
It was just a dot and I scratched it off with a nail.
I’d been in Scottish rooms for days
reading John Cheever’s thready journals
underlining the bits where he expresses self-hate.
On the internet they were vile and interesting,
hard-bodies with a corona of grippy legs.
The sated ones swelled to shiny cabochons,
mottled as frogs, in sockets of queasy skin.
A lot happened later: the tick was irrelevant
like jewellery you wore in a dream and lost.
I never had that one, just the usual teeth
rattling into my palms like a jackpot.
The omens bore no fruit. The tick had no precursor.
We swam through half-term, keeping no records.
Even though I had scraped it off and soaped
the place, somewhere it bloomed, underground
like an iron-rich gem, awaiting its wearer.
Scotland was famous for its perfect raspberries
and a kind of stone named after some mountains,
the colour of ginger ale, in an ugly brooch.
Fish. Oh. Fish
‘Even snakes lie together’ – D.H. Lawrence (‘Fish’)
Your egg eye is open and you look worried.
You’re the scaly junior lawyer at midnight
falling short on her target of a year’s billable hours.
Corporate fish, you’re bright as pain, sliced up.
You share the water with a spill of inky stripes.
Your kind blaze colours fine as banknotes.
Oh, fish, you have whisked up a clever curve
defining the future as it draws itself into a fist.
Then the evening comes on, pistachio and blue.
You breathe and flex between bars of dark.
A clerk could still walk into the hot, open night
leaving a jacket on the back of her office chair.
A lit anglepoise floats above the papery desk.
There’s a deep anglerfish clocking the hours.
No one must turn off your light while you are gone
or there’ll be nothing to swim back to
but a scrunchie of kelp, uncounted on dry sand.
Little fish, everything that matters happens here.
Fruit for Offices
In long glasshouses we bloom inside our skins
on plants obedient to the fertiliser piped to their roots.
The fruit must swell with dispensed water
but never to splitting point since we are for display.
The company provides bowls the client is free to keep.
We share nothing with the windfalls the staff bring from home.
Our curves are as contrapuntal as a composition,
of small amendments made at the nutrient’s origin.
We are carnivals of eugenics: picked over, intentional.
No one hungers to milk our tidy molecules for sugar
to flout god. Few of us will know what it is like
to be bitten, how hot and bruising a mouth can be.
No one risks being driven out of anywhere,
head-down and cringing, by the conference organisers.
As the meeting circles us, the taken minutes rope us in.
We are the daughters of the oligarch:
