Reckless Paper Birds E-Book

John McCullough

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

Seitenzahl: 44

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Winner of the 2020 Hawthornden prize Shortlisted for the 2019 Costa Poetry Award Surreal, joyful, political and queer, Reckless Paper Birds is a collection to treasure by Polari Prize-winning poet John McCullough. These exuberant poems welcome you into a psychedelic, parallel world of 'vomit and blossom' where Kate Bush mingles with a weeping Lady Gaga, a 'fractal coast' full of see-through things: water, mirrors, glass pebbles. With a magpie's eye for hidden charms, McCullough ranges across birdlife, Grindr and My Little Pony while also addressing social issues from homelessness to homophobia.

Leseprobe

RECKLESSPAPERBIRDS

John McCullough’s first collection of poems, The Frost Fairs, won the Polari First Book Prize and was a Book of the Year for The Independent as well as a summer read in The Observer. His most recent collection, Spacecraft (Penned in the Margins, 2016), was named one of The Guardian’s Best Books for Summer and shortlisted for the Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize. He teaches creative writing at the Open University and the University of Brighton.

PUBLISHEDBYPENNEDINTHEMARGINS

Toynbee Studios, 28 Commercial Street, London E1 6AB

www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk

All rights reserved

© John McCullough 2019

The right of John McCullough 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 2019

ISBN

978-1-908058-88-1

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 Zigzag Path

Flock of Paper Birds

Tender Vessels

Stationery

Nuthatch

Jay

Tumbleweed

Queer-Cole

Flamingo

Aether

Notes for a Cheery Post-Apocalyptic Short

Flavour

Nervous Systems

Michael

Pterodactyl

Stones

Spout

The Sandman

Please Don’t Touch Me, My Head Falls Off

Sungazer

Strange Stories and Outlandish Facts

The Orange Trees of Now

What Chaos Angels Eat for Breakfast

Soulcraft

The Weeping Gaga Speaks

Are the Circles Clearer on the Red or the Green?

A Floating Head

Pelican

Silkworm

Tonight, the Hours Arrive Like Animals

Cartoons for Adults

Accidents

Bugsong

Your Kindness Has Snapped Me Like an Old Deckchair

Mumpsimus

A Walk with Our Imaginary Son

The Skeleton Flower

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the editors of the following magazines and anthologies where poems from this collection have appeared: Alice (Poetry Shed, 2016), B O D Y, Disclaimer, Divining Divas (Lethe, 2012), Litter, The Morning Star, The Moth, Perverse, Poetry London, Poetry Wales, The Rialto, Stand, The White Review. ‘The Zigzag Path’ was commissioned by the BBC for National Poetry Day 2018 and was made into a video poem that appeared on the BBC Arts website.

I wish to thank the members of my writing group in Hove who have looked at drafts of a number of these poems: Maria Jastrzebska, Jackie Wills, Robert Hamberger, Janet Sutherland, Bernadette Cremin and Robert Dickinson. I’m grateful, too, for feedback from Kate Potts, Holly Hopkins, Dai George, Alison Winch, Rowena Knight, David Tait, Karen Goodwin, Deborah Turnbull, Daisy Behagg and Sea Sharp.

NOTES

‘Soulcraft’ takes its title from both a book by Bill Plotkin and a popular series of action RPG games. ‘Michael’ was written after figures were released showing Brighton has the second largest population of rough sleepers in England, with a quarter of all young people who are homeless identifying as LGBT.

Reckless

Paper

Birds

The Zigzag Path

The day connives and you think you cannot live here,

in your body, alone and rushing forward all the time

like a silty river. All you wanted was to find a home

beside the souls of white roses and hurt no one

but the light keeps shifting. An invisible broom

keeps flicking you out from cover. You roll up

at each destination with a different face, as wrong

as the beech tree in Preston Park hung with trainers,

a museum of tongues. The day connives, but this dirt

is proof of trying. The chalk path you never longed for

zigzags through cowslips no one asked to throng.

In the park, a robin has built its nest inside a Reebok,

the shoe’s throat packed with moss and a crooked

whisper of grass that says I can, I can, I can.

Flock of Paper Birds

I needed the God of my childhood to be useful

so I folded him, shaped his pages into wings.

Cranes at first, then more challenging roosters,

swallows, owls. I pinched edges, split clauses

to make word plumage. I fractured Leviticus

with pleats. Now toucans mount doves

on the kitchen counter, near an unholy pile

of geese, cloacas gaping, beaks jabbing everywhere.

Birds plummet from shelves without bothering

to flap, remember nothing. Ink blurs,

feathers yellow. They drown in baths, rip luridly,

turn up mangled in the hallway, footprints

across their necks. Mostly, they’re individuals,

smoothly indifferent to each other’s fates,

though now and then some prop up neighbours

if they topple, and when I lie with a visitor

beneath my quilt, incubating his glorious buttocks,

the flock discover their throats and sing together

while I guide my tongue along warm creases

and the tight sheet of his body unfolds.

Tender Vessels

I keep trying to slip away through the crowd

but history won’t take its mouth off my body.

What was exacted on someone else’s softness,

his cuttable flesh, is always about to happen here.

The vague kinship which exists between tender men