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- Herausgeber: The Poetry Business
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
In Lighthouses, Allison casts a light over the world, catching as she does, a man grafting in his shed; the new moon's pull on a love affair; Emily Wilding Davison hiding on Census Night; a mother as a listening telescope and Amy Hopkins falling for a comet. Virginia Woolf dips in and out, with her charcoal stare, her diaries and essays. And there are quiet poems too: sat at bedsides when ghosts and love, like the keeper's light, are never far away.
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Lighthouses
Allison McVety
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to the editors of Ambit, TheGuardian, The Huffington Post, Magma, Manchester Review, New Welsh Review, The North, Poetry Ireland Review, Oxford Poetry, POEM Magazine, Poetry London, Poetry Review, The Rialto and The SHOp where some of these poems first appeared. ‘Afterwards’ and ‘The “Stradivarius” Tree’ were published in The Arts of Peace: A Centenary Anthology(Two Rivers Press), ‘Finlandia’ in The Best British Poetry 2013 (Salt Publishing), ‘White Jeans’ and ‘Meeting Mallory’ in The Sheffield Anthology: Poems from the City Imagined (smith|doorstop), and ‘Pandemic: Incidents of Mortality’ in The Hippocrates Prize Anthology 2013 (The Hippocrates Press).
‘To the Lighthouse’ won the National Poetry competition in 2011.
‘Crossings’ was written for Traced in the Shadows: ways of looking at poets, a photographic exhibition by Derek Adams. ‘Lookout’ was written during ThePoet’s Hour in the Tower: a Poetry Trust initiative for readers at the 2010 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.
Thanks are also due to Ian House, Lesley Saunders, Susan Utting and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch.
Also by Allison McVety
Miming Happiness
The Night Trotsky Came to Stay
Published 2014 by
smith|doorstop Books
The Poetry Business
Bank Street Arts
32-40 Bank Street
Sheffield S1 2DS
www.poetrybusiness.co.uk
Copyright © Allison McVety 2014
Digital Edition © 2015
ISBN 978-1-910367-27-8
Allison McVety hereby asserts her 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.
Cover image: © Anthony Ware
Author photo: Derek Adams
smith|doorstop Books is a member of Inpress,
www.inpressbooks.co.uk. Distributed by Central Books Ltd., 99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN.
for Alan
She belonged to a different age, but being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable … this interminable life
– Virginia Woolf
If you’re a mother, you are either too present or too absent
– Elizabeth Badinter
White House
Alfred Wallis paints the sea through the houses
so the upstairs are flooded. The road is the same
colour as the sea. All the houses are the colour
of sand except his which is the colour of loss
though the sea seeps in. Scrunched eyes bring
seagulls the colour of loss and their shrieks
are the colour of loss and the sky has strands
of loss streaking across it. Chimneys are the colour
of sea or the colour of sand. Their grates unlit
the stacks mute. They don’t shriek of anything.
If they shrieked they’d shriek a tissue of loss
and slur with the winds in the sky. The brother’s
house is painted small. It’s full of sand and no loss.
This skew a kind of revenge. You are nothing to me
he paints not sea not loss and I have silted up your house.
If this was my perspective and I was painting you
I’d paint you huge – a house offshore in Cornishware
I’d paint you hooped with sea and loss – the one eye
shrieking like a seagull. The one eye weeping light.
To the Lighthouse
i The Window
It was Virginia’s charcoaled stare
that put me off: her disappointment
in me, the reader, before I even started.
So I walked in to the exam without her:
without the easel, the skull or the shawl,
the well-turned stocking, Minta’s
missing brooch. In the hall I watched
the future show its pulse and all the girls,
the girls who’d read the book, set off
together, lined up at desks and rowing.
ii Time Passes
You need a daubière and too much time –
three days’ absence from the plot. Rump
bathed overnight in brandy, a stout red
brought back from France. The liquor’s
boiled once, added back to beef, calf’s foot,
lardons, les legumes. For six hours – or more –
it idles. It can’t be over-cooked. It will not
spoil. At table, a stream of consciousness
breaks out. And it rains. It rains. If not
the stew what was the woman on about.
iii The Lighthouse
The year I gave the book another go,
[the year my mother died], I learned
everything big happens in parenthesis –
marriage, birth, the War. Poetry. Is it the full
manuscript or just the bits in the middle
that count. Is it the woman at the window,
