Latch E-Book

Rebecca Goss

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 37

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Longlisted for the New Angle Prize for Literature 2025 A London Review Bookshop Book of the Year Rebecca Goss' fourth and most ambitious collection, Latch, is a study in the act of returning. It is about reconnecting to a place, Suffolk, and understanding what it once held, and what it now holds for a woman and her family. These poems unearth the deep, lasting attachments people have with the East Anglian countryside, gathering voices of labour, love, and loss with compelling particularity. The book is various, unpredictable: memory and magic interweave, secrets tangle with myth. As in her earlier books, Goss again draws on her distinctive ability to plough difficult, emotional terrain. Here is an anatomy of marriage, her parents' and her own, while the natural world becomes an arena for the emotional push and pull that exists between mothers and daughters. The return to a childhood home recalls young siblings retreating into nature as they steer the adult lives that disintegrate around them. Readers will find themselves beckoned to barns, fields, weirs, to experience both refuge and disturbance: we are shown a county's stars, and why a poet needed to return to live under them.

Leseprobe

Latch

Rebecca Goss

CARCANET  POETRY

FOR MY PARENTS

‘and I, in my brand new body, which was not a woman’s yet, told the stars my questions’

anne sexton from ‘Young’

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraphThe HoundsNestStars In a FieldThe PactCousinsThe FarmRooksBlacksmith, MakingDarlin’At the Party I Shadowed SusieWhat Will It Be Like To Be Here?Woman Returns to Childhood Home, Carries Out an Act of TheftMy Father Gave a Cockerel to Jack BruceAfter Harvest in the EightiesWe Saw DeerSister, with MoleWeirClose WorkState of Being YoungWhen It Feels Hot, That Rage Against MeWoman Returns to Childhood Home, Finds Herself Amongst OthersDeathwatch BeetlesThe Retired Agronomist Drives a Tractor in the Summer Because He Likes the Oily Smell of the MachineCreosotePheasant in Rear-View MirrorYour Thumb at the LatchLaneBricksPictures of YouBalesBlessingsSylviaThat Afternoon, On Her BicycleRearingWoman Returns to Childhood Home, RemembersUnder a New SkyTo Love a Gambrel RoofArger FenVioletMakers of LaddersLife ExpectancyWe Walk This Avenue of English OakThere Was a SwingI Hear This Ringing From My HomeField FireWe Are Buried Under LimeIn Song FlightGateRepriseAcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorCopyright

LATCH

13

The Hounds

It’s as if something

calamitous is coming.

Their lament

rising across fields,

its claim on the dawn

keeping all the birds silent.

I want to know what stirs them,

the force of this pack.

What causes them to stand,

muscled frames trembling,

throats full of baleful song.

I am wakeful, rapt

and disrupted, their bays

sonorous against glass.

Should I slide the thin pane,

push my upper body

into emerging light,

let them scent out my sex,

tell them

we are all afraid.

O this night, this bidding,

claws at the latch,

pure thunder of them running,

my mouth opening

to the cool

and agitated air.

15

Nest

The cygnets draw a crowd

before they are born.

Mother swan’s occasional

rise to nudge her ovate crop,

beak slow and practised

at the turning. Father swan

circling, rearing at dogs.

We return to see one, peeping,

puff of grey from under her

and the next week come back

to find a family gone. One,

unhatched, remaining.

Its marble lonely in the bowl.

Your hand slips out of mine

as you bolt to waiting swings,

leaving me with the egg, and all mothers

who lay their babies down, knowing

they cannot stay beside them,

must lower their own bodies into water

and continue with the swim.

16

Stars In a Field

I have asked for this county

to soften in you

your marrow to swim

with its flint and barley

that you learn villages

and their stiles

sense the shadows

of churches

want stars in a field

bend to its soils

black and alluvial

swallow all the coasts

salt in our kisses

close a cottage door

stay with me behind it

17

The Pact

Hay, recently harvested, turned to those sweet-smelling

blocks, barn-stacked, almost to the roof, forbidden.

Only the dog watched our clamber, taking us

to where the swallows come, and up there

we leapt and trod the dry bundles, our elevated play.

Then one of us was gone. Slipped unnoticed into a gap

our parents warned us of, how this strawy structure

could snatch a boy, or girl, and the plummet too great,

too narrow to save them. We needed to hear him

before we laid our chests at the edge of the hole, my arm

voted longest to stab into the deep, a reaching into myth

where I felt his plump hand and heaved, watched his flop

into the light. Circled, shaking, we tried to still our

breathing, made the necessary promise, headed back

to the house and kitchen, mother cooking, the fall a secret

held far into our adult lives. Forever haunted by it morphing.

The drop deeper, our mother unable to remember

what made her look out of the window. Maybe she felt us

coming, or maybe our approaching shadows interfered