Path Through Wood E-Book

Sam Buchan-Watts

• Herausgeber: Prototype Publishing
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 42

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Sam Buchan-Watts' debut collection considers the capacity contemporary lyric poetry has to reflect social change. The many ethical dilemmas these poems enact listen in to the noise which society makes to distract itself – from carceral space to questions of asylum, masculinity and the boundaries of aesthetic play. Described by the Guardian as a 'sceptical, serious, versatile writer', Buchan-Watts variously inhabits poetic form, exposing the interplay of sound, sense and desire. Returning repeatedly to the figure of a vulnerable boy approaching the thicket of adolescence, these are poems that are listening in when they're not supposed to, distracted when they should be listening in, and finding secret listeners behind the arras. In this disquieting terrain we must hold ourselves to account for what we hear and what we make of what we hear.

Leseprobe

Path Through Wood    Sam Buchan-Watts

Lines following

ballad

‘The Days Go Just Like That’

Coastal Scene

Pillar of Smoke

Tableaux

Listening In (Fresh Claim for Asylum)

Happy Accidence

Sounds Inside

Gigha

Listening In

Borderline Decisions

Listening In

‘We don’t just hear you, we listen’

Cloud Study

You just know

A Mess

Colouring In

Sky Pavilion

Dew Point

Pavilion Complex

Pigeon Grey

The art of trying

Forum Bar

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

[the nameless other boys]

Cloud Study

The Days Just Go Like That

Plinth

The Word Pavilion

for Ken Watts (1955–2021)

PATH THROUGH WOOD

All repetitions are intentional.

Lines following

‘I have set you here’

On the way into the woods, do you feel someone

turn the focus of the lens with the topmost parts

of their forefinger and thumb –

in line with the crick of your neck, as you turn to look

but feel the head fixed straight. The branches tick,

someone set them going. The woods have set you here,

so as to feel away from thoughts, but still you think

I never really entered. The way into the woods is in a way

to go round the woods: the woods are always in the way

when you’re in them (if they’re woods). The way in

weighs on the memory of summer like a cloak hung

over the sun. The way in is an act of hyphenation,

a statement about the weather, the weather in the woods.

ballad

glare does its fluorescent spider, greenery fidgets, what twitches, waking after a long sleep     lines knot in protest at ‘I’     beneath the lithe long grass that swallows the path     ballad, ballade, roach, a vintage alloy     heard a cough indicating copse or corpse     hoped to swap quarrel with communion drenched bracken     leonids, lighters crammed with dirt, murky translucence, cigarette cherry a jewel of heat, a signet ring, a sovereign state     laminated signage, condensation, water retention on the lung     the wood’s en-dash     the closure of wood     the woodland sings, the woodland stinks     deodorant sting     chill afterburn     the seal of its fridge withered, weak     roots feel for closure or release     find rusted pulleys, quaint dusty canopy in need of husbandry     corrupted membrane reconfigures green     empty promise of springe     beyond that screen     bare board     ballad     has been

‘pleasant sutherings of the shade’      fine      for childhood’s ‘elaborate inner space’     bleached plastic     hands making steeple     lonely cathedral     to burr or to burrow  unlawful burial     to be spun out     to white out     from the crowd     forest floor     a stage     the woods’ bookcase its muttering inhibitions      dirty magazines      gateway drugs     dirt is shit      at what gradation     boys brittle in the woods     epochal summer     where you bury the past     the path not taken  

what could we hide here     hope it’s grown over    jim carey energy     abattoir slurry     the children’s book     laughing gas canister     whatever predecessor      moral tincture     lean     learned         enlightened    left where it was found

‘The Days Go Just Like That’

If you emerge from the glove of woods –

the trail’s patchiness like jaundiced spliff paper

and the dry powder bloom of a fire extinguisher

let off by kids last night –

blinking, feeling skew-whiff, confused, to find this:

a medieval reenactment in medias res

then you have seen it exactly as it should be seen,

exposed, but distant, so that the quirks –

the radiant tinkle, the gather of enthusiasts,

the rhubarb-rhubarbs, the unintelligible frills,

the coarseness of sound their makeshift dress makes

like brown paper crumpling as it’s being burnt –

are so correct, as if history were a thing to be administered

in the afternoon. And the hold-all blue

seems about to decompress, until all we have left

is a far-off clobber of wood. And the days go just like that.

Coastal Scene

to pollute or purify the air

or the air’s fringes

what’s the difference

down here

in the ditches

and the skatepark put

naturally with the cesspit

Pillar of Smoke

beyond there is a hut smoked out by

paintball the man loved the game

because of very few rules the chance

he might be mistaken as benign in his mask

men play at boys playing men

the chemical smoke tinged by artificial

colourings like cake mix pushed,

without pain, to the back of the phrase

behind black smoke is guy ropes

like hurt behind the fingernail

pressed to see if it is dirt or bruising

the flattened veneer of canvas

Tableaux

Coulisse

He acts as if deception is the plainest thing,

while a flat piece of scenery hides at the edge

of the stage or in its wings, or the science-

lab-cum-dressing room or the space between

the buildings and the mobile classrooms, the birds

and the birds’ wings, or the mirror with its brownish

mix of poster-painted primary colour confused

with a dirty window or screen, or slab of water

ready to slide from off- to centre-stage,

and the narrow frame not in line with its rollers

squealing with what you are about to see

or that which you have already seen.

Cornice