New and Selected Poems E-Book

Cliff Yates

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

Seitenzahl: 72

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Cliff Yates's New & Selected Poems brings together over thirty years of inimitable work, from his Fenton-Aldeburgh Prize debut, Henry's Clock, to his most recent pamphlet, Another Last Word and beyond. His poems are moving, surprising and funny, sometimes in the space of a few lines, and, gathered together wonderfully here, add up to an oblique but compelling document of lives and times.

Leseprobe

New & Selected Poems

CLIFF YATES was born in Birmingham and grew up in Birmingham and Kidderminster. He left school at 16 for the printing factory and did various jobs before returning to full time education. He taught English at Maharishi School, where his students were renowned for winning poetry competitions. Awards for his poetry include the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, the Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition, and an Arts Council England Writers Award. He wrote Jumpstart Poetry in the Secondary School during his time as Poetry Society poet-in-residence. A hugely experienced writing tutor, he is a former Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Aston University.

Published 2023

by The Poetry Business

Campo House,

54 Campo Lane,

Sheffield S1 2EG

www.poetrybusiness.co.uk

Copyright © Cliff Yates 2023

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

ISBN 978-1-914914-59-1

eBook ISBN 978-1-914914-60-7

All rights reserved.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, storied in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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Distributed by BookSource, 50 Cambuslang Road, Cambuslang Investment Park, Glasgow G32 8NB.

The Poetry Business gratefully acknowledges the support of Arts Council England.

Contents

fromHenry’s Clock (1999)

Tonight in Kidderminster

Waiting for Caroline

Ferret

Apples

Hank

Leswell Street

Poem on the Decline of the Carpet Industry

Henry’s Clock

Oakworth

On the Difficulty of Learning Chinese

Clara

Playing for Time

Bricks in the Snow

Borth

Telescope

The Day the Lawnmower Caught Fire

from The Pond Poems

Get Me Flowers

Meeting the Family

Naked, the Philosopher

from 14 Ways of Listening to the Archers

fromFrank Freeman’s Dancing School (2009)

Lighthouse

Locked In

Thank You for the Postcard I Read it

Emergency Rations are Tasting Better and Better

Fishing

Leaves Are Just Thin Wood

Daglingworth Blues

On the Third Day

Day Breaks as a Petrol Station

L’Hermitage and a Bird

Hôtel de l’Angleterre

Shoes

Would you listen to the safety instructions please

At the Smell of the Old Dog

Apple Trees in a Gale

Baldwin Road

New White Bike

Yes

Kidderminster-on-Sea

Vienna

The Poem

Boggle Hole

The Science of Predictive Astrology

Snow

fromJam (2016)

Chez Marianne

Life Studies

Alt St Johann

Easter

The Chinese Girls Played Cards

Bike, Rain

Spade Bucket Apple

February, Colden Valley

I Met my Friend

Bike Ride

Just Before You Taste It

Shakespeare and Company

Bar Billiards

Fifteen

Apprentice

The Bowling Green

Chapter Twenty, Leonard Cohen

Born in Handsworth

There’s a Full-Size Snooker Table in the YMCA Furniture Shop

Pilates

from Riversound

The Lesson

Blue Sofa

How do you fly in your dreams?

Gate

The End of the World Again

Rain on the Conservatory Roof

Lighthouse III

Travis Perkins

fromBirmingham Canal Navigation(2020)

Birmingham Canal

Lifting

Collapse: Barry Flanagan at the Ikon Gallery

Bank Holiday

Spitfires were built in Castle Bromwich

Red Sky Lift

I’ve Just Invented the Tai Chi Sprout Stalk Form

5:15 p.m. February 9th 2017

A Thing to Do

Swimming Pool

Black Sabbath Bridge

Sky Blues Bus

Dog

fromAnother Last Word (2021)

from Another Last Word

Taxman

New Poems

Tonight We’re Showing a Film

Fish Street

Eagle Special Investigator

Phil and the Tension Wire

Meeting the Train

Bastille Day

Nightingale

October

Acknowledgements

For Gillian

Tonight in Kidderminster

begins under streetlights and their word is speed.

Two of them, chewing gum with their mouths open,

thumbs in their pockets and feet tapping.

The tall one sees me first, sees the hat. This hat

goes with the hair, the desert boots and jeans,

the shabby raincoat and ripped gold lining,

it goes with the sky before rain and just after,

and with one unforgettable night on Kinver Edge,

eight of us in the back of a Mini Van.

This hat is my dad’s and I wouldn’t sell it for fifty pounds.

They chased me for the hat and lost, turned left

into another story. Fiction.

It begins up an entry, trembling hands

full of someone’s prescription.

Eyes that are needles

sewing the hem on tomorrow’s shroud.

Or gramophone needles. The first record

is Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale.

The devil’s guest Private Faust

has forgotten the silent princess.

He hums along to the drum solo

and dreams only of the fiddle

he traded for a book, words

he could not read, words he can’t remember.

Next it’s 4’ 33’,

a bootleg of David Tudor

live in Woodstock, New York 1952.

The duff tape missed the rain

on the roof, traffic in the distance,

the people angrily rising and leaving

but detected the silence, four years

in the making. Listen. No

sound but the lid of the piano.

Tonight in Kidderminster our audience

is the night. The agitated stars cough less

and less discreetly, by the third movement

programmes flutter like moths. Barely visible

to the naked eye, the devil jigs

to the soldier’s fiddle while the silent princess

wheels the plough across the night sky

and the pole star stays where it is.

Waiting for Caroline

Outside Readings on Blackwell Street,

bikes in one window, jokes in this one:

nail through your finger, Frankenstein,

invisible ink. She looked great

behind the gym at dinner time.

Her friends were in the long jump pit

out of sight of the dinner ladies,

holding down Andy and giving him love

bites. Outside Fletcher’s, Mr Fletcher

humps potatoes, sings in Italian. She’s late.

I’ve been set up, like Cary Grant

in North by North West

                                              I’ll hear it

before I see it, the crop duster

out of the sun above the multi-storey

dipping dangerously over the Seven Stars.

I’ll make it to the Red Cross on Silver Street,

under the ambulance, hands over my ears …

On the way home, the fat man in the black suit

will climb on the Stourport bus with his cello.

I imagine her coming round the corner

by the Riverboat, she’s run from the bus stop

but she’s not sweating, she’s smiling

like the girl in the Flake advert.

I’ll tell John I didn’t turn up

and if Frog says anything I’ll hit him.

Ferret

My ferret is a very British ferret,

shy and retiring unless provoked.

I keep him in a special case,

strapped to the petrol tank

of my BSA 500. This gives me

a special feeling, like wellingtons

with a dinner jacket, or pumps.

I tried to feed him sardines but he wouldn’t.

I think he’s got a hormone imbalance.

He chewed through the lawnmower

cable once. If it had been switched on

it would have served him right.

Then he found the bonemeal in the shed.

I heard him cough from the greenhouse and my wife

nearly fell off the ladder. The river’s flooded.

It hasn’t stopped raining since Christmas.

Apples

The children won’t sleep, we give them apples.

There is hardly enough light for these strange signs,

unfamiliar road markings, the distinction between

mile and kilometre. Our headlights find a farmhouse …

Men and women in the loft, hide inside barrels

with last year’s apples, praying the rats keep still.

The young officer in the room below

slowly raises a Luger to the ceiling

and fires at random, here and here. Blood

drips on his outstretched finger.

His men’s boots clatter on wooden steps.

From barrels, hands push through to light,

apples bounce and roll across the floor,

machine guns rattle and grow hot.

Some stay crouched among the harvest,

breathing the sweet smell of bruised fruit.

Our youngest is so tired she can hardly

keep awake, let alone eat. She chews slowly

as if she is not used to eating,

hasn’t eaten for a long time, has forgotten.

Hank

(for Brendan Cleary)

Woke up this morning in Arizona,

a filling station on the highway,

under someone’s pick-up, dismantling the gear-box

which is a joke

because I’m the kind of bloke

who starts looking

for the left-handed hammer.

My name is Hank, I smoke roll-ups,

call you Bud and have a wife called Gloria

who hangs endless items of clothing

on the washing line out front

when she’s not in the house

singing along to Country and Western

on the radio.

Men just turn up and say, ‘How’s it going Hank?’

I hammer repeatedly on the silencer

pretending I can’t hear,

hoping they will go away