Miming Happiness E-Book

Allison McVety

• Herausgeber: The Poetry Business
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 28

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

"Allison McVety's follow up to 2007's The Night Trotsky Came to Stay is a paean to the everyday." - Poetry Book Society "Miming Happiness's final section is collected into almost magical intensity. McVety's long lines describe her sister's mysterious illness, with lovely glances of sound, and the energy of verbs: 'on she swims, a shiver/ a shine, surfacing for air; slip-streaming the light'. Closing rhythms pulse with a town's life: 'the factories [..] breathe out, breathe in, go on'. McVety, the poet of solid things, reveals the wish 'to crumble away' into the 'infinitely small'. Her final poem is a vision of inwardness: 'the atom/ cracking with the thunder of a goldcrest's heart'. It is an astounding line. The best of Allison McVety's collection reveals the uncontainable power of poetry.' — Alison Brackenbury, PN Review

Leseprobe

Miming Happiness

Allison McVety

For Alan

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Peter Carpenter, Jane Draycott, David Morley and Susan Utting, to my tutors and mentors at RHUL, Andrew Motion and Jo Shapcott, and to Kate Long for her support and encouragement.

Versions of some of these poems were previously published in The Interpreter's House, Magma, The North, PN Review, Seam, The SHOp, Smiths Knoll, and The Warwick Review.

'In Little Black Dresses' was commissioned by Selfridges as part of their centenary celebrations.

'Offspring' appears in the paperback edition of The Daughter Game (Picador, 2010) by Kate Long.

'Two Mugs' was read on BBC Radio 3 by Ian McMillan and five poems, 'The Train Driver's View', 'Urmston Brickworks', 'Typewriter, Offices' and 'Exercise Books' were shortlisted for the inaugural MMU Poetry Prize 2008.

The Night Trotsky Came to Stay was shortlisted for the Best First Collection Prize 2008.

Contents

DedicationAcknowledgementsContents

This Year's Skin

Extra Curricula

i The Lesson

ii Exercise Books

iii Six Rows Back

iv Experiment

v The Young Person

Two MugsTown House, Tansley DriveIn The Year of Splitting UpThis Year's SkinIn Little Black DressesNight ShiftsLand's End to John O'GroatsOfficesHead CountOffspring

And Another Thing

Syrup of FigsGood in a CrisisOn the East Lancs RoadIn the Weeks After RationingWhit WalksWomen at the Swimming BathsWhat the Women SayPathologyMaking a ShowBreathButton KeepersTypewriter

A Grip on the Land

In a Northern TownIrwellThe Train Driver's ViewUrmston BrickworksBackyardsNo TickAfter DarwinBeginningsLike Coastal HousesFamily TreesTimbral PraxisLiquid HistoryOrdnancesIn the Reading Room at the British Library

Biography

This Year's Skin

... but the rain is full of ghosts tonight ...

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Extra Curricula

i The Lesson

We write to ourselves ten months on.

The friendless girls dream of prefects' badges.

Gill asks how you spell R.A.D.A. and Lucy asks

for more paper. David Essex features in most

and we all see Purdy hair as the answer.

What to ask for the future, even if it's in three terms' time,

is harder than the cut-and-come-again of Christmas.

Imagine a letter you'd written where all you wanted

was to kiss Mr Waters, as he packed up his notes.

So the dilemma was where to set the benchmark:

too high could break you, we knew that even then, but too low -

too low would put you in the gutter for life,

the kerb stones always out of reach, the stars

inching apart as you write.

ii Exercise Books

Kat's eyes are the colour of chemistry

and Frobisher house-points, but when Emily

says modern languages are purple, I see

papal robes and Mr Gregory's Redford tash.

Surely French is in the ruffles of plane trees

and Drake's maps? And how can red be geography,

when it's clearly in calculus, in the paisley

folds of further maths; in Scott's immortal dash?

Livingstone and English literature stream

through the atrium, find us laughing at a leaky

pen. Thirty years from Mrs Wadden's speech

impediment and she is still Anthony and Lycidas.

I cry for Joe Keller, for his sons; for the cabby,

for the poor horse, for Stevie on the street.

And not even Mallory's orange zest of history