Out for Air E-Book

Olly Todd

• Herausgeber: Penned in the Margins
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 33

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Infused with movement, surprise and play, Out for Air presents a unique vision of the built environment, celebrating places where 'the bridges are endless / beyond the cantilever / of reality'. Expansive in scope but intricate in form, a masterclass in precision engineering. Todd rewires T. S. Eliot's Waste Land in his strange, compelling descriptions of the modern city: melting asphalt; a U-turning taxi; a diner swallowed by a sinkhole. In this disorientating landscape the skateboarder-poet is genius loci, the spirit of the place. From Manhattan's 'silky streets' and the Pacific Coast Highway to inner-city London and his native Cumbria, together these poems record a life lived on the move, in motion, on the cusp of things. 'I'm dazzled by this wonderful debut...The language itself crunches, glides, grinds. A radically different way of experiencing the built and natural environment and an endlessly engaging, witty, serious and astute new voice.' - Luke Kennard 'Out for Air is an inventive and alluring debut...With shades of Kleinzahler and Eliot, these poems explore angles and movement, friendship and distance, in a voice that is genuinely original, graceful and often strange.' - Martha Sprackland 'Through his words a whole world and potential opens up, a distillation of experience that feels universal and intimate.' - Nick Jensen 'Out for Air creates a world of familiarity gone strange, a world of signs of the human in motion, where the living in place becomes its constant study. It makes a hard-to-pin-down language which is all its own, and which mirrors its subjects' international scope, its playful, sometimes arch, worldview, and which announces a wholly original voice.' - Will Burns

Leseprobe

OUTFORAIR

Olly Todd lives in East Sussex with his girlfriend and their daughter. His poems have appeared in Ambit, The Rialto, Vice, Prototype, Five Dials and the Clinic anthologies. His pamphlet, Odeum Spotlights (Rough Trade Books, 2018), was long-listed for the Michael Marks Awards.

ALSOBYOLLYTODD

Odeum Spotlights (Rough Trade Books, 2018)

PUBLISHEDBYPENNEDINTHEMARGINS

Toynbee Studios, 28 Commercial Street, London E1 6AB

www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk

All rights reserved

© Olly Todd, 2022

The right of Olly Todd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Penned in the Margins.

First published 2022

ePub ISBN

978-1-913850-11-1

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

CONTENTS

The Fuel

Tides

Leaving Goshen

The Spiralist

Yes, Oleaginous

Walking to Camberwell

NX RD

Ether Including Voices

Oaks

Low Tops

Ululation

Features of a Flight Path

Century Boulevard

Marines

Repose on the Flight into Egypt

Is This to Be That

Now

Sparrow

Rocks

The Room of a Mile

The Aircraft in the Space Below the Plane

Two Thoughts on a Hartlepool Sound Mirror

The Replacement

Tilia

Memories of a Sponge

TIXE

Milan

Just Think

O’Meally Frees a Seagull

Arisings

Cool

Us and Them

Entonox

Yan, tyan, tethera

Out for Air

The Fuel

A man so Embarcadero as to be emanating bridges.

The big red one.

The one over the oil farms.

Any but the one that rippled.

For one skater in the backseat of his future

to travel safely across.

For another fishing out a windcheater in the rucksack

of his ambition

to shelter under.

And the bridges are endless

beyond the cantilever

of reality

and the waters are friendly, lapping

at the trusses

and Cow Hollow High’s canteen chairs

look between their legs

for his manoeuvres; its scholars

grip their pens;

its corridor floors shine.

A man so Presidio as to be the plateau of hills.

The eight-hairpin cobbled one.

The one with the hotels with the cellophaned bear claws for breakfast.

The one mellowing out past west-flank Black Rock.

Any but the one where speeding car

wing mirrors brush

T-shirt sleeves.

For one skater timing traffic from a hillcrest café

to get the green lights.

For another re-reascending

to roll instead of stroll for a welcome sec,

blissing out calves, quads, glutes.

And the hills are summitless

above the bedrock

and the gradients are kind, rendering

off the curbcuts

and the glass eye of prejudice cracks

on the mirror held up

by his graphics.

A man so Soma as to be the fuel of foundries.

The one where the baseball diamond now stands.

The pierside one.

The locomotive one shipping out

boxcars of fuss, any but

the one bringing them back.

For one skater to gain his stability, geometry, nimbleness

and another and another and others

and the sparks are innumerable that leap

from the fires

and the welds are honest, floating

on the bearings.

And the Ellesses

and the toast raised in polystyrene cups

and the humility in a twoscore of shout-outs

resound with my crew and I.

Tides

If that’s the pavement rolling towards us

through the art department phone box like a tide,

it follows that the focus puller’s glove

turns out to be lunar gravity.

The phone box is a man standing in the swash,

riveted together, filled with a conversation,