Rays E-Book

Richard Price

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Teasing, funny and celebratory - Rays is a wry and tender lover's gift. Continuing Richard Price's virtuosic playfulness of form, it improvises on the formal shape of sonnet and canzone, charging them with the energy of blues and rock, glimpsing narratives of desire. In a restless, sleepless landscape where language becomes shrill, an alphabet of love poems creates a dreamy island, between the solace of haiku and the precisions of Emily Dickinson. The Renaissance poet Louise Labé and an imaginary band, The Loss Adjusters, sing the complex beauties of passion.

Leseprobe

RICHARD PRICE

Rays

for B

Acknowledgements

Some of the poems in this collection first appeared in the following limited editions Earliest Spring Yet (Landfill Press), Lute Variations (Rack Press), and little but often (with Ronald King, Circle Press). Some have appeared in Atlas, Booklight (Knucker Press), fragmente, Markings, PN Review, Poetry International, R.U. Taking the Biscuit? (University of Reading), The Thing That Mattered Most (Scottish Poetry Library), and The Times Literary Supplement: my thanks to all the editors involved.

‘Wake Up and Sleep’ was commissioned by Lavinia Greenlaw in a project by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in association with the Royal Society of Medicine, and a version was first published in Signs and Rumours published by the Foundation. My thanks to Dr Peter Venn for discussing his work on the treatment of sleep disorders. Wake Up and Sleep was later developed as a limited edition artists’ book in collaboration with the artist Caroline Isgar.

A number of the ‘Songs for the Loss Adjusters’ have been set to music by Caroline Trettine and recorded by Mirabeau.

Dorothy Stirling’s Passing Acquaintance was painted specifically for this collection and is reproduced here with kind permission – and in admiration.

My thanks, too, to David K. for reading and commenting on the manuscript of this book.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Freehold

Wake Up and Sleep

The thought keeps counting

Continuous Positive Air Pressure

Wake up and sleep

Lute Variations

Your eyes translate me

From the moment

Lute, companion

Earliest Spring Yet

About this

The idea

Manet with Mardy

Formal

Melancholy plumber

A shape, the past

Off, on

As if a song

Babyshambles

Resonant frequency

Channel Link

A century find

Volume

Shells

Internationalist

Earliest spring yet

Flax

Shades on

Wren

Age of Exploration

The long low structure

Dippers –

Languor’s Whispers

Songs for the Loss Adjusters

Parkway

Work’s over

Trackside fires

Ambulance work

Two halves of nothing

Last train, full of couples

I’m writing to write again

[Hidden track]

little but often

Rhyme nor Reason

The Line

Countless

Informer (1)

Informer (2)

Informer (3)

The line

Griefy train

The snow gets it

Waymoat

Ties

Darkness and Dazzle

Question time

Darkness and dazzle

Rotavator

Non-reflective glass

Like a student gardener

Golden Key

About the Author

Also by Richard Price from Carcanet Press

Copyright

Freehold

A summer’s day? – you’re

lovelier… You’re… more gentle.

Gales shake May’s sweetheart buds,

summer holds a short-term lease –

one minute the sun is foundry hot,

the next all gold is lost.

The season’s fairs, too, so easily decline – bad luck reigns,

rivers reclaim their rightful plain.

But your summer won’t dim, won’t flood,

you won’t lose, love, the celebration

your self-contained self, almost by itself, contains.

Death won’t claim you mooch in his twenty-four-hour mall.

That boast is nearer mine –

in these eternal lines you walk right by my side.

So long as folk can breathe or eyes can see

so this will live, and this gives life to you and me.

William Shakespeare (trans.)

Wake Up and Sleep

The thought keeps counting

The weight of my own eyes.

I have a forehead. A mouth,

dry. The thought –

the thought the thought the thought

*

Overheated. A wash of the face

and it’s right cold if you run the tap.

*

A drink of the old polar covalent,

ache too oh. Simple. Can work.

*

Not this time.

*

the thought the thought the thought

*

Drowsy in charge of a photocopier.

‘Off coffee, thanks.’

The tea’s buzzless, camomile and calm.

I’m gulping watercolours, columnists’ remedies.

*

the thought

*

The thought keeps counting. Can the thought

just stop counting?

*

Lives in the linear programming, people in the detail.

*

the thought the thought

*

Drowsy in charge of a people carrier.

*

The night’s A–Z is stuck at Why.

Anyone know Zed Street?

‘In your dreams.’

*

With primary insomnia the data suggests

there’s decreased regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF)

to the frontal medial, occipital and parietal cortices,

and to the basal ganglia. I’ll explain these things later.

Countries of the brain. Decrease, yes. Surprising

when you don’t think about it.

We know behavioural therapy for insomnia (BT-I) works

but how does it work? Definitive conclusions

are just not possible but first indications –

it’s just one study – but first indications

suggest successful treatment is associated

(I have to emphasise it’s an association at this point),

with a reversal in cerebral deactivation.

*

the thought the thought the thought

*

The thought was only thinking,

the thought just doesn’t think.

You just don’t think, do you?

*

Subjects were diagnosed through interviews,

psychometrics, blood chemistries, sleep diaries.

Patients underwent three nights of polysomnographic testing

and on Night 3, ten minutes after the first K-complex / sleep spindle

they were infused with 25mCi of Tc-99m-HMPAO.

Sorry, yes, infused means injected.

Twelve minutes after injection we wakened the subjects.

They were scanned.

On diary measures all patients exhibited improvements in sleep

(including, in layman’s terms, falling to sleep quicker;

night wakenings fewer).

The SPECT results you know:

while it appears that insomnia may be experienced by the sufferer

as thinking too much – the behaviour of ‘a worrier’

or, temporarily, a victim of inspiration –

objective analysis associates this variety of sleeplessness