Near-Life Experience E-Book

Rowland Bagnall

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 52

Beschreibung

The poems in Near-Life Experience are curious about the world, the present moment, its weather and animals, its objects and things. They want to make it real in language before it changes, vanishes. Documenting landscapes, paintings, insects, and trees, Near-Life Experience experiments in precision. Understanding is subverted by the day's distractions and the unexpected shapes of the imagination. How do I relate to this? What does it mean? What's happening, exactly? Does experience experience me? Description shapes into a different precision, the poet finds humour and panic at the changing edges of the actual. The poems include a variety of walk-on parts – from Breughel's hunters in the snow and American painter Richard Diebenkorn to nineteenth-century geologist James Hutton and the poet's own friends and intimates. They measure his expanding and contracting times, birthdays, seasons, climate breakdown, witnessing the moment and its 'sheer / ongoing changes'.

Leseprobe

Near-Life Experience

Rowland Bagnall’s first collection, A Few Interiors, was published by Carcanet in 2019. His poetry, reviews and essays have appeared in Poetry London, PN Review, The Art Newspaper and elsewhere. He lives and works in Oxford.

First published in Great Britain in 2024 by

Carcanet

Alliance House, 30 Cross Street

Manchester, m2 7aq

www.carcanet.co.uk

Text copyright © of Rowland Bagnall 2024

The right of Rowland Bagnall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

Copyright, Design and Patents Act of 1988; all rights reserved.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Ebook ISBN: 978 1 80017 390 3

The publisher acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England.

CONTENTS

Nothing Personal

The Hare

Near-Life Experience

Freighter

Double Vision at the Sink

Eight Studies of a Hand

The Sure Season

Known Unknowns

A Lull in the Birds

Views of the Winter (November 1899)

Feeling and Painting

Shattered in Fall

The Citizens

Outtakes

A Week in March

The River More Than Ever

Poem with Richard Diebenkorn

The Sunlight Falls Partly in a Cup

Lynceus

An Atlas

Confirm Humanity

Sites of Instruction

Landscape Unevenness

Prologue

Signs of Life

Loose in the Field

Under the Equalizing Night

Projections and Interstices

Think Fast

The Nature of Arrival

Mid-June Sonata

Poem for Charlotte and Jacob’s Wedding

Unripe Plum

Things to Come

Epiphany, or Lines for the Poet on His Thirtieth Birthday

Animal History

Uppsala

Vision of Ezekiel

Unconformity at Jedburgh

The Vast Hour

Notes

Acknowledgements

for becky

for teaching me to pay attention

What does the hard look do to what it sees?

Pull beauty out of it, or stare it in?

– Denise Riley, 'Outside from the Start’

Well I used to be sort of blind

Now I can sort of see

– Bill Callahan, ‘Rococo Zephyr’

Near-Life Experience

Nothing Personal

The century surges,

shuddering on, accelerating in pursuit

of someplace rumoured up ahead, swallowing

dusk after dusk of wilful, uninfected time

in cold-blooded mouthfuls, growing huger

and more disarranged.

In the end isn’t the point that this is all meant

to relate to us? To tell us – in a broad sense – that

the message is about ourselves?

Instead, maybe the message is that we

are understood by them, giving us a meaning

at the time we most require it.

Still, like the inhabitants of a city

soon to be razed by a unit of cavalry, know

that this is happening in spite of not because of you.

The mountains are silent, though they speak

to each other, the gold air thin at the top of them,

a flowering peak, from which point can be seen

a valley of arrivals and departures,

smouldering campsites, a bend in the river,

livestock and settlements, not an inch of land unclaimed.

The Hare

I wake into the morning

and find unanimous spring

and the windows are pale with filtered light

and the day asks, How shall I survive myself?

and read a poem which ends, let it be small enough

and my throat feels dry

and the new rains have defanged the night

and the blackthorn is over, or its blossom is

and the lights burn blue

and imagine a harvest and dry stacks of wheat

and answer my e-mails in record time

and feel deep currents of understanding

to find a living mosaic, polished and repetitive

smothering the yellow dawn

and the white sky is canoeing south

and have certain phrases in my head, including silent stroboscopic waves

and see ghosts and know that one of them is Robert Frost

and consume a pear from Argentina

and take in the general feel of the place

fading like a set of tracks

and write I wake into the morning / and find unanimous spring

and pass my hand through my own body

and feel omnipresent cloaks of rain

and the oceans appear silvery

which is stabbing into months of ice

and think what kind of poet writes ‘I wake into the morning / and find unanimous spring’?

and the harvesters are lying down, taking a rest

and its knowable sequence

and it caverns

and it opens like an eyelid

and it stalks us as you stalk a hare

Near-Life Experience

So far the year is imprecise,

spelling itself out using a limited vocabulary.

Outside it is greys and browns and dark, rich, spruce-hued greens,

life, or very close to life, the wind whipping in twos and threes,

rain seeking us out.

I test the coffee and the coffee table, which seem

real enough, as does the eucalyptus tree I’ve noticed only

just now after many months.

Acre-hungry fires are licking the outback,

exposing giant sketches on the surface of the earth: an eye, a hand,

a mouth starting to speak.

Everything looks futuristic, as though it hasn’t really happened yet

or like it’s only just pretending to have happened and will

suddenly switch on ‘for real’.

The pure contralto still sings in the organ loft;

the mate is always ready with his lance and his harpoon.

Liz is hunting rabbits in Wisconsin;

Adam is bowing his head during The Burial at Ornans (1849-50),

inhaling luminously painted air;

Becky turns her head in Miró’s studio in Palma;

Stephen, Jane, and Ariel are sleeping now in Montreal.

The grasslands here have all grown back.

The grey waters recede.

I delete myself, returning to a previous save-point.

When I arrive, so light I can barely move – loopholes, static, terrible

slaughters – the situation hastens, veering about, and the wind whips past again

cutting my younger, cleaner, stranger face.

Freighter

How much can it

take – the level evening

and its centre like a season

shifting gear?

Hardly any time

has passed – is it just me, or

is it just me that’s getting this?

The bait-and-switch

of the dying light,

the unfinished business

of the waves, the feeling

something’s missing – and I mean

really missing.

On the mainland,

now radiating some of

its great strength – granite,

breccia, hornblende

schist – best understood

in motion – you can feel the tilting

of the earth.

A few miles

down the coast a town has lost

its people, proving

nothing – or nothing yet.

Can you hear

the susurration of the headland?