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- Herausgeber: Seren
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
Rooted in everyday communities, the voice of Say It With Me is wry, candid and knowing, offering poems that playfully record the foibles of domestic life. There are curious stories: a parrot flies away but always returns to its master, a school bully becomes their victim's acupuncture patient in adulthood, and a donor finds new kinship with the woman who receives his cells. All these stories are gems full of curious twists and turns.Often the poems represent specific places and people, sometimes nostalgically so, like memories of family beach trips with loved ones now deceased. Others are flights of fancy: imagining a park of one's dreams, an ode to the small pleasures of life, or inventing a new history where a father didn't die young. Most significant however are the poignant and remarkable stories of family life. There are happy portraits as well as thoughtful poems concerning divorce and parenthood, also the body in triumph and decline. Though speakers take up a watchful distance from events, they are also fierce and unafraid to intervene. A middle-aged woman on the beach wades into the sea to chastise some lads playing with an inflatable sex doll."Say it with me" a line taken from the poem 'Canada' is a phrase that often precedes a rallying cry, or a brave but controversial factual statement. The tales in this collection feel true and honest and its title is a call to unite. This is a collection about the communities in which we live and the interconnectedness of human beings. The likeable speaker of these poems surveys it all with the dry humour and wisdom of an older woman, posing scenarios that we can all recognize as authentic. Ultimately, Vanessa Lampert uses deep and rich storytelling to lay bare truths that are at once funny, moving, and illuminating. 'The poems in Vanessa Lampert's new collection are lodestars. How lucky to be guided by them. In this book nature is more than an encounter to wonder about, it is a binding-- both to our home here on earth, the dailyness, joy and loss of that, and to our own corporeal selves. For anyone looking for the words to what it means to be human look no further: they are here.' - Matthew Dickman 'Vanessa Lampert has a rare talent for telling stories which, although they come from a place deeply personal to her, become universal in their rendering. These are poems which welcome us in like old friends, full of warmth and generosity, and which have the sudden ability to switch gears – and with them, our emotions – in just a few short lines or phrases. Say It With Me is a remarkable first collection of poems, a book infused with darkness and light, beauty and sadness, humour and ultimately, hopefulness.' - Brian Bilston In Say It with Me Lampert's observant and witty voice accompanies us through subtle turns in thought, redirecting our attention with a glance, a clearing of the throat, so that we step from the scenery of life, into the resonant emotional landscape of living. Her poems open the aperture, and expose us to the loss that time is always enacting upon us, its cruelty and its beauty.' - Jack Underwood 'Vanessa Lampert is a chronicler of minute but crucially significant moments; she holds them to the light to find their gleam and then shows them to us as stunning jewels. We enter one of her poems on the familiar ground of a summer beach or an ordinary municipal park, and leave years later, often having communed with those we've lost. What she accomplishes may seem simple, but the seismic shifts of our lives are packed into her humming lines. Her poems are like a fairground on the final night of the season – we want to clasp onto their joy and celebration that bit longer.' -Tamar Yoseloff
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Seitenzahl: 56
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Say It With Me
I was looking for trouble to tangle my line
But trouble came looking for me
— RICHARD THOMPSON
Seren is the book imprint of
Poetry Wales Press Ltd.
Suite 6, 4 Derwen Road, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 1LH
www.serenbooks.com
facebook.com/SerenBooks
twitter@SerenBooks
The right of Vanessa Lampert to be identified as
the author of this work has been asserted in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
©Vanessa Lampert, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-78172-701-0
Ebook: 978-1-78172-704-1
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without
the prior permission of the copyright holder.
The publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of the Books Council of Wales.
Cover artwork: John Brennan: ‘In Your Room’, 2022, oil on canvas. Artist’s collection.
Printed in Bembo by Severn, Gloucester
Contents
Not Like This Park
Limpet
Sand
Tower
Stopper
Mark My Words
His Cars
In The Olden Days
Letter
Belonging
Oh Jossers We
Sheffield
Donor
Toads
Easy Does It
The Size of It
Elegy for Two Placentas
Birthday Magic
Woodland
Those Who Remember World War II
On Mother’s Day
Duty
Likes You
Happy Family Soliloquy
Some Pleasures
Say it, Hiker
Call
The Crux
Running
When You Are King
Wimbledon 2020
Margate in September
What the Horses Told Us
Snow
Homing Pigeons
Boys
Mount Toubkal
Cornish Morning
Flight
Budgie
Golden Hamster Elegy
Black and White
Dig Deeper
Bedlington Terriers
Still Life with Story
How to Avoid Clichés
Bomb
Halloween
The Menopausal
Canada
What I Learned on the Erasmus Scheme
Return
Student in Lesvos
Our Song
Aldeburgh
End Party
Notes on the poems
Not Like This Park
My park will be a bowl to hold sunlight,
the sky dropped on long loan.
Shade no one would need to call the shadows.
No crouching spikes of glass in grass
by rusty swings, no busted drinking fountain
left for years, no Fuck off gouged on a bench
by an angry hand, no harm, no drinking,
no bargaining, nor pleading with God for out.
My park will be the out, with a café painted yellow,
where we’ll watch a woman in an apron
fill a cake with raspberries and whipped cream.
No dogs bred for menace, routinely whipped,
their owners beaten or broken.
No men staring at Betfair on iPhones,
no polystyrene takeaway trays, no greasy paper
blowing over the grass like fallen cloud.
No bags of shit dangling from branches
like baubles, no man hanging, no police car,
no plastic police tape pulled taut.
No note in a freezer bag tied to a tree, saying
babe oh why, the boys? No flowers left there
cheap and dying, and drying or already dead.
My park will have great beds of roses, white
roses, their stems unbroken, no one to break them,
no one in my park but us. The warm weight
of your hand in my hand. High up there
fistfuls of stars, all hidden, and us
not needing to wait until dark
to know they’ll keep coming back.
Limpet
I tried so hard to wrench you off a rock
and who could blame me? I was
only a barefoot child, hell-bent
on control. All I really wanted
was to see beneath your roof,
small apology-for-nothing
little muscle-in-a-hill. Stubborn
boarded-up-building
made for a life that wouldn’t budge.
And what of all my surreptitious
wrenching? I think I was
ashamed to want to plunder
your dark cabin, quiet companion
of the ocean, quite content
to be alone. I was seen
and pulled up short as children are,
collected up your dishes
and took them home.
Little caramel-inside-a-shell,
sealed cubicle of wet.
Salty living thing that told me No.
Sand
On Woolacombe beach my Grandpa builds
an MG convertible sports car from sand
in front of the swingboats where I was sick once.
My car faces the wind-ruffled sea, roof down
under a sky made of torn strips of paper.
Grandpa slowly carves the bonnet and makes me
a member of the AA. He shapes the wheels
and stands back, proud as a car salesman.
Other kids are staring. They want to be me.
In a few weeks my parents will separate,
but now our orange windbreak holds them
close together in flowery beach chairs,
safe from the wind. I sit behind the steering wheel
of my new MG. The engine starts first try.
I take her out for a spin to Lundy Island
to see the puffins and the granite stacks
and back, beeping my horn to warn the surfers,
who wave. I park her where she was before,
facing out to sea. Mum looks up from her book
and says it must be time for a 99.
I want to jump on my car before we leave,
and ruin her so no one else can ruin her,
but Grandpa won’t let me. He takes my hand
in his, saying don’t look back. Let’s go.
Tower
My father took me to London
when my whole fist could fit
inside his palm.
On the tube he lifted me up
and, holding tight, stepped out
from our carriage to the next
through the filthy hurtling dark
to thrill me, then did it again.
By the river he bought chestnuts
roasted on a brazier.
My red gloves swung on strings.
I looked up at the tower of him,
and grief would never dare
to touch my life.
Stopper
The sun is winched high in the sky
above the young men in their long shorts
who hurtle across the sand dunes,
down the beach and into the sea
carrying dirty noise in their mouths
and an inflatable woman over their heads.
They’re drunk or high in the heatwave,
free falling through the promised land
that lies between boy and man.
They know everything there is to know
about how to love a woman.
Not a single one is thinking about
how long life might be this good, this sweet.
Children are watching open-mouthed,
sand on all their knees and hands like glitter,
in swimsuits with sharks and flowers
while the young men take turns
to mount the inflatable woman
lying plump and silent on an ocean-sized
bed of salt water with her red mouth
open, and her smooth pink legs
open, and her eyes fixed on the sky.
She waits for the real woman who’ll lift
her yellow skirt and wade into the water
all the way to her freckled thighs
to make those young men boys again,
by shouting pack that in and grow up.
Then one will pull out the stopper
from the inflatable woman’s shoulder
