Maskwork E-Book

Gregory Leadbetter

• Herausgeber: Nine Arches Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 52

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

In Gregory Leadbetter's second poetry collection, Maskwork, mystery, theatre and ritual combine to reveal rather than to disguise. The mask, in these resonant poems, acts as a way of becoming, seeing, and knowing – granting access to altered states and otherworlds hidden within and beyond ourselves. Here, language itself becomes an animating magic, connecting humans to our ecological roots. The spirit of revival, renaissance, new birth and rebirth haunts this book: and at its core, the idea of poetry itself as a form of learning – an art and a mystery – runs like a quicksilver thread throughout, between the elusive and the certain. Leadbetter's meticulously attuned lyrical poetry tells of the transformative experience of knowing, a dynamic state of being that forever alters both the knower and the known.

Leseprobe

Maskwork

Maskwork

Gregory Leadbetter

ISBN: 978-1-913437-03-9

eISBN: 978-1-913437-04-6

Copyright © Gregory Leadbetter, 2020.

Cover artwork: Red-deer frontlet with antlers removed or split to obtain splinters and skull perforated. Star Carr, Yorkshire, England. Donated by Graham Clark. Reproduced by permission of University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology © (1953.61 A).

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Gregory Leadbetter has asserted his right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published September 2020 by:

Nine Arches Press

Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,

Great Central Way, Rugby.

CV21 3XH

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

For my teachers

‘muses, goddesses of learning’

– A Table Alphabeticall (1604)

Contents

Maskwork

Musician

Doe

A Poppet

Gramarye

Two Lost Things

Cara

Labels for the Exhibition of an Hitherto Private Cabinet of Masks

Metaphysician

Tree Script

Archaeopteryx

Two Friends

Personal Computing

Lapse

Apple Tree

Optics

The Swoops

Found in a Wood

Engine Pool, Earlswood Lakes

Tuisto

Modranect

Solstice, Midwinter

Sleepery

Transhumanist Glitch

The Ape at the End of the World

At Porlock Salt Marsh

Interval

Sakadas at Delphi

Terroir

Beorma

Unconscious Minister

Dérive

Lord of Misrule

Europa

A March Nest

Second Best Bed

Sky Burial

Don’t Ask

Fogou

Mg: A Biography

Chess Metaphysic

Scenery

At English Bicknor

Daemon

Consistori del Gai Saber

Quest

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the author and this book

Well — but what is this now and yet other World?

– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.

Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.

– Oscar Wilde

the true mask is the expression of somebody unmasked

– Peter Brook

Maskwork

To teach the mask I make

   to tell the truth, I wear it

   as my own: feel its weight tilt

when it sees the first earthly thing

it loves suffer in its infant being:

   one mask passes to another

   the face that it has learned.

Still it makes no sound, even as

   its senses sow their trance

   where what would be its language grows.

Only when my life has done its work

   and the mask knows more than I could say

   without its visage – then

I take it off. It wears my voice:

   the mask speaks.

Musician

That night plays back scratched vinyl,

but here’s my fiddle.

The lane led way out and I went

though dark had spilt and shook the stars

in black water where I walked,

dressed for day and led by story,

nothing more. The spirits I’d swilled

warmed my blood, but the cold drank.

I knew I didn’t have long before

the blue moon stilled my flesh to crystal.

I heard it come: the air at work,

the medium lipping my ears and mouth,

spittled fingers circling my skin

to make it ring. I felt the bow

I’d hung at my back grow taut

and the raw strings of what you call

my violin thrill for the kiss:

they braced to meet and make a voice.

And then I was there: the blind road

emptied into a field, as if

where I stepped a sudden breath

had blown the earth to a sphere of glass.

I met that world’s musician:

a white moth alight within

its whisper. One of us said

play, and I did, and what it spoke

I learned, even as it danced me

to the bone in sound that shivered

to a mute dawn. I woke under dew

in open ground. I had no home.

You don’t have to believe me, but I can tell

your body heard. The song gets through.

That’s how I got this tune on my tongue.

Doe

Inside the green rhythm

below rippling leaves, turned

from the squint of a sickly heat,

the doe and I were breath

held in exchange for a sense

not yet our own but

heard in a call from the nerve

of this wood, spoken as a bird

that lit the feathered shade

we stepped into as space

we fell and flew towards

each time we stopped to tilt an ear

to listen for the trail of the other’s voice.

I tried to speak the name for friend

and the sound came back as the bark

of trees point-blank at my skin

that let me slip like a finger

through their silent folds

teaching my touch

to hatch like an egg.

Don’t be afraid I almost said

if not to myself, to the verging dead,

bone-dust scattered in bluebells,

deathbells knelling death’s end

in the sough of the wild

that led her and me,

sly as lovers, into this secret

taut as a web.

We opened like flowers, our scent

thickening air moist

with the dew of our lungs,

limned with antennae

fed on the dark light

of the radiant body afoot or sweet

with rot where it fell. We flickered

like a tongue from an adder’s jaw

and flared at our meeting, revealed.

The doe startled from her mottle bed

as if, this time, I had spoken

her true name, and fled.

A Poppet

When I dug you up

like a potato,

you could have been

vegetable, grown

in earth too long

lost by a girl

who gave you her name

and worried her parents

to death with her love

for your unstitched eyes

whose loose threads

look into mine

as I bath you until

the water is black

and your human hair

is chestnut again,

and the hemp sac

of your skin is warm

from the fire I

nearly put you in.

The embers are cold

when I think I wake

to find you folded

into my bed

and your voice thrown

to the tilth of my garden

growing you bone

by bone with words

no human breath

could hold, biting

my tongue and drawing

blood that tastes

wrong as I follow,

now a father

to a lost child

and feel small hands

push me into

fresh-torn ground.

When I think I wake,

your small hands lift me out.