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- Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
Drawing on Romany language, storytelling and the speech of birds, award-winning poet David Morley offers a provocative and passionate invitation to reflect afresh on the ways in which the lives, stories and fate of humans – and the more than human – are twinned and entwined. In poems that crackle with verbal energy, he invokes a world where God is Salieri to Nature's Mozart, in which hummingbirds hover like actors 'in a theatre of flowers', pipistrelles become piccolos, swans swerve comets, and a Zyzzyx wasp is 'a zugzwang of six legs and letters'. There are exuberant celebrations of Romany language in the style of Edward Thomas; of how a Yellowhammer inspired Beethoven's Fifth Symphony; of the world-shaping discoveries of women scientists; and an autobiographical sequence, which roots this poet's authority and reflects on how power shapes what may be said in public.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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4The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
rainer maria rilke5
6To Siobhan7
Contents
The Mist Net Releases Her Birds
You open a window to the morning mist of this ghazal.
I release songbirds from the mist net of this ghazal.
You write to me from Morocco. Your messages migrate from midnight.
They fly in fabled feathers towards gables of this ghazal.
A pandemic makes prisoners of us. I reach out to you
across Spain and the Bay of Biscay from this ghazal.
Swifts swoop over Sahara. Our postcards crisscross a world.
What birds could we be, flowing through this ghazal?
Morning sings with landfall, overhears swallows over oases,
the Mediterranean murmurating in this ghazal.
You watch an acacia and oak fly past your train’s window.
Their leaf-tips unfurl in the forest of this ghazal.
‘It is strange that the sounds of nature are never heard,’ you say.
Silence surrounds the singing glades of this ghazal.
‘We resist through poetry,’ you write, ‘poems are a kind
of politics as well as religion.’ Pray kindly for this ghazal.
A Saharan djinn twists in a sirocco of words.
Your lines spin twinned between voices of this ghazal
and our voices twine around its lines.
Open the mist net. Throw wide the wings of this ghazal.
Ruby-Topaz Hummingbird
a thought. —
hold it —
unrehearsed
dreamed on to the stage
of the flower’s mouth
as if she were an actor
called from the wings
of the theatre of flowers
with no time
to take breath:
the spotlight
of the corolla hunts her
like a searchlight
on the glisten and
rainbows of plumage
(the fewest number
of feathers on any bird)
as she havers
in the hover of
the time warp of her
wingbeats, her speech
of nanoseconds:
her nectar.
and moment.
Ringing Swallows
Swallows clip the lake for a sip of water,
or kerfuffle their feathers as they dip for a bathe.
They stipple ellipses across the surface like a skimming stone.
None skitter the water except by glitch or error
nor overwinter under its ice-barred door.
When swallows vanished into September
we thought them depth-bound, cold, deaf as flatfish
slumbering in the benthos until April unleashed them
in whirlpooling flocks with vortices of mayfly
to cram their chicks’ clamorous gapes.
In 1740 Johann Leonhard Frisch
wound wool to the legs of swallow chicks.
When the air-streaming birds swooped home to their nests in spring
the threads had not cast their colour
nor the swallows their rings.
Baby Birds
Spring has weighed and measured her fledglings
on scales of light and the flight of dark.
To the guillemots nesting on Vestmanna, she says,
your jumplings will not plummet in the morning.
Absolved, too, are the shock-headed herons
squabbling over the broken crowns
of their heronry shipwrecked on crosstrees.
And the pufflings and storm petrels deep
in the long pockets of their burrows, asleep
under rocks and stones and storms
with the eye of the Atlantic watching.
And blessed also is the eaglet, tiptoeing
the edge of her eyrie on a tightrope of air.
Pardoned are the owlets and the eyas
staring saucepan-eyed from nest holes.
Acquitted too are pipits in nest cups,
and tomtits in birdhouses, popping
their heads out like jacks from their boxes.
Spring has weighed and measured her birds
by the flight of the dark on scales of light.
A Skylark Slowed Down to Syllables
When I died, I woke
to a skylark song
slowed down to syllables.
Not the human-heard
fervour of notes
fireworking
from its throat.
I heard it as bird.
Its true sound.
A speech of spirals.
How a lark hears a lark.
His voice resounded
in spheres in spheres in spheres
above, beyond, and down
the meadows and towns.
Another lark, skying,
caught his song, bodied
heavenward in a being
so rapider than my own
until the birds vanished,
no sound but their song
intertwining
into the one longing,
where everything
slowed to the truth.
Puffins on Bardsey
for Gabriel
beak-clasped catch
of a clupeoid—
the puffins skittering
across the glitter
swivelling between
tines of their wingtips
over waves that slip,
flipped down the air’s
tipped stairs to their
shearwater-scrounged
burrows, where their
pufflings gasp underground,
all frizz and fluff-crowns:
rug-headed kerns,
clemmed, clumping
up a skerry of sky
from their coney-warm,
shearwatered earths,
gawping and gaping for
silver shivers of sand-eels
prised from the purse
of their parents’
clamped closed, clowndaubed
beaks.
Heligoland Trap on Skokholm Island
An
Alder
Flycatcher
survived a gale
then a storm. Starved,
wind-hurled out of his senses,
he flickered into our Heligoland trap
where we bagged him with a Firecrest
and a hopping mad Chough. The Flycatcher
