Selected Poems E-Book

Sheenagh Pugh

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 105

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Here is the best of Sheenagh Pugh's early work: a generous and wide-ranging selection from her first four collections, together with two dozen previously unpublished pieces Notable inclusions are the prize-winning 'M.S.A' and 'Intercity Lullaby', and the much-anthologised 'Sometimes.' Throughout, a lively and enquiring mind is brought to bear on how we live and die, and how we might live more equitably. Sheenagh Pugh approaches her subject unpredictably, through Norse saga and snooker, apartheid and falling tortoises, in a poetry of invention and conviction At the heart of the book is the Earth Studies sequence, "a history of the world in 19 poems', and the first major environmental poem of the "green" era. Set in the indeterminate future, it explores the rise of human civilisation, and abuse of the Earth, following them to their logical conclusion: the death of the planet. Ironic, lyrical, penetrating , these poems typify the craft and passion of Sheenagh Pugh's writing. Selected Poems ends with a section of Pugh's much-admired translations, of German poets such as Simon Dach, Andreas Gryphius and Christian Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau.

Leseprobe

SHEENAGH PUGH

Selected Poems

This book is for Anthony and Sam

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

New Poems

M.S.A.

The Frozen Field

The haggard and the falconer

Inter City Lullaby

The Climate of the Country

Official briefing for ministers on the recent violence in the capital

Uninhabited island

The black ram

Man getting hammered: between frames

Exhibition

Filing the Queen of Scots

The ballade of Sexy Rexy

Hello

Frankincense

Birmingham Navigation graffiti

Senesino/Farinelli

Nothing happened here

Tree of pearls

The Chester Zoo marmot movement

Reaches of Light

Sweet 18

Paradise for the children

In memory of Annie Christina

Quetzals only come once

from Crowded by Shadows

Detour

Guys

John Howard

‘Industrial Landscape’: L.S. Lowry 1955

The Partner

Inventory

Delayed reactions

Odin 1

Odin 4

Spring ‘72

Shoni Onions

from What a Place to Grow Flowers

Grand larceny

Coming into their own

Men growing flowers: Hveragerdi

Ingthor the chanter

The flute-playing at Skalholt

The black beach

Going back to Hlidarendi

Love

Eirik the Red

Swords

King Sigurd and King Eystein

Owl’s night thoughts

King Billy on the walls

from Earth Studies and Other Voyages

Earth Studies

Geography 1

The craft I left in was called Esau

Biology 1

Biology 2

I think someone might write an elegy

Religion 1

History 1

History 2

‘Are you saying people got above themselves, sir?’

Geography 2

History 3

Geography was peculiarly taught

Religion 2

‘What do you think about heaven then, sir?’

What Christie wrote when the child died

Literature

Biology 3

After I came back from Iceland

‘Do you think we’ll ever get to see earth, sir?’

Harbours

Sailors

Old widowers

Lost on voyage

McGonagall’s crucifixion

The capon clerk

St Cuthbert and the women

from Beware Falling Tortoises

The railway modeller

In Memory

1: In Morriston Crematorium

2: A Matter of Scale

3: Reallocation

4: Closing up

Magnolia

Eva and the roofers

147

A short history of cocaine abuse

Sometimes

Torturers

She was nineteen, and she was bored

Because

I am Roerek

Railway Signals

Dieppe: Sports Day

A shipwrecked Inuit learns Gaelic from a Hebridean

What a way to go

An even worse way to go

A modest request

Cameraman

Tulips

Translations

Dach:

Last words of a once-proud Lady on her deathbed

Gryphius:

The misery of being human

Mariana

Dominus de me cogitat

A likeness of our life, after a game of chess

Fleming:

On a corpse

Hofmannswaldau:

Poem in praise of the most amiable of womankind

On the gift of a carnation

Bright murderesses

A secret fire

Hebel:

Epitaph of a drinking man

Transience: a conversation

Copyright

NEW POEMS

M.S.A.

The news shows me more than I want to see.

I hold the Guardian between the screen

and my eyes; peer around at the Persian boy

coughing poison gas over his uniform.

I know with my eyes shut what he looks like:

dark smudged eyes, long lashes, skin

like ivory. That’s how they look

in my memory, the ones who must be

sixteen years older now.

The camera slews round; shows women

shapeless in black cloth, and I go back

to the paper. One hidden face

is like another, and any one could be yours.

She was twenty-three

in Berlin: there was a busload

down on a student trip

from the north. (The Shah sent them

West, to study science

and be out of the way.)

There were a dozen, all

dark-haired, pale, willowy.

but she was die Perserin,

the only woman.

She stood out anyway

from the others; she laughed

a lot. The boys didn’t laugh;

they were intense and pure

and a little ludicrously

serious, and very young.

Any of these young eager soldiers

tumbling like puppies towards death,

eyes shining, brain in neutral, could be them.

They’re forty now, if they’re alive,

but when that boy crouches miserably,

doglike, vomiting war, it’s as if

none of them had grown a day older.

That was a hot summer:

we found a lake

in the Zoo-park, and talked,

while she held her long fingers

in the water. They bowed down

under the turquoises: blue

roughcut masses; her dad

traded in them, she said.

She was going back

to him, when she’d qualified

as a textile chemist. The West

was fine, free and easy; the boys’

fiery purity passed her by,

but he had a walled garden

full of old roses, a house

full of old books, and whenever

she spoke of him, she smiled.

There are a kind of thieves that come by day

with dogmas, policies and manifestos

and steal your country when you aren’t looking.

Before you know it, you’ve no pride

any more; immoralities are uttered

in your name; your consent inferred

to actions that disgust you. It’s happened

to me, but at least I’ve a chance

to change things: I’m an exile only

in my heart.

Whenever I see fatherless,

landless people, living on sufferance

among strangers, lowering their eyes,

learning to adjust, their very language

drying to a trickle on the stones

of their throats, I hope you aren’t there.

The hotel room in Berlin

faced east: the morning sun

from UIbricht’s fortress fell

on her dark fall of hair.

It shone blue: gold glints

of light like fish in the black

water; she slept late

of a morning.

Talking half the night

at breakneck speed,

comparing options: Shah,

Islam, Communism, like goods

in a bazaar; spotting flaws

in the fabric; rejecting

the lot… Asleep, she’d turn

her face a little in the light,

like a sun-worshipper.

I wish I could write your name,

but you might be safe

behind your father’s wall, waiting

for better times, polishing the barrels

of your hidden mind, checking the cartridges

ready for action, like a good guerrilla,

and how could I send in the enemy?

The news shows me more than l want to see.

Whenever I watch some woman

behind a chador, scurrying for cover,

veiling her voice, l hope it isn’t you.

Those boys…they believed

so much, it hurt. Their hate

kindled when they spoke of SAVAK,

the pliers, the shocks. It did sound

pretty bad, I said; she eyed

them from a distance: “Yes,

but they’d do it too.”

There’s a night club, called

the Cheetah; probably refers

to the price of beer. The Persian

boys drank coke, sickly-sweet,

innocent, just like them.

They looked askance at her

dancing: she laughed gently,

said things were changing.

They changed all right, I’ve seen them. I’ve read

about the squads of the pure-minded, keeping

the streets clean of unveiled women. I hear

they beat them on the soles of the feet.

Those boys were soft, frail; they’d surely flinch

from the sight of pain. Perhaps they close their eyes.

What happened in your country, when one

murdering old con-man replaced another?

How many girls hid their glinting hair,

their clear voices: how many sweet-faced boys

got a taste for torture? It’s bad enough

he wastes their bodies in his wars:

firm flesh, straight bones, bright eyes, spilt

for a wizened bag of rheum. It’s worse

that he made use of innocence; bought

ardour and hope at market in amounts

expedient to his needs. But the worst

would be if he insinuated craft

and hardness into their wide eyes,

made them like him.

Do not trust, above all men, Priam,

praising the seemliness of young men’s

dead bodies; clinging to the altar

for his own life, when he ran out

of sons to send instead. He’s cunning;

look how he conned Achilles, in all

his youth and grief, out of his revenge.

“Think of your old father”, he wheezed,

“just my age, lonely for you”…. Always

there are mooring-ropes: anchors drag

on the white lovely ship whose canvas

itches for the wind; who would sail so far.

Her father behind his wall

traded in blue stone:

she lay under the wide sky

melting in the sun.

He traced leaf veins; touched

flowers to his face:

she analysed the fibres

of silk, jute, glass.

He stroked leather; fingered

gold leaf on the page:

she defended men’s thoughts

with soft-voiced outrage.

He loosed the jesses; let

his falcon fly,

wherefore she returned to him

most willingly.

The news shows me more than I want to see:

all over the world, young men blow off

young men’s heads with guns people my age

have sold them. I’m not young any more:

it’s the likes of me who counsel

compromise; who settle for less

than truth, because it isn’t that simple,

who grow fat at the centre of a web

of coke pushers, or peddle nerve gas

to good customers and no questions asked.

I am the enemy now.

It was different after Berlin,

the free city. Back in the sticks

I checked my address book; climbed once

to the little flat in Bothfeld.

She was tousled, sleepy; it was onIy

ten a.m., but she let me in. I perched

on the warm bed, while she dressed

and looked embarrassed. Her body

troubled me less than this unease

of hers: for the first time

she seemed un-Western, distant.

And that was all, really. Not much,

except it was when I was young.

I can still see pictures, like snapshots,

not faded, but disconnected,

random: the blue light of turquoises

refracted in water; a face drinking sun;

the serious boys dancing together

to El Condor Pasa: I thought at first

it was backs-to-the-wall time,

till you explained they just liked moving

to the music, and they were too moral

to dance with women.

Now they perform together

on my screen the movements of combat,

as formal, but less graceful; it’s hard

to keep the rhythm when you’re dying…. But no,

of course, these aren’t the same boys.

I was forgetting; we’re all forty,

but I have no picture of you like that.

From all my shots you look out

undamaged, frank, bright-eyed, expectant,

laughing at the grave boys.

The Frozen Field

I saw a flat space

by a river: from the air

a jigsaw-piece. It is green

by times, and brown, and golden,

and white. When green, it gives food

to animals: when golden,

to men. Brown, it is ridged

and patterned, but when white,

a plane of evenness.

When frost touches it by night,

it turns silver: blue shadows

etch the hollows, grassblades glitter

in the grip of silence. It was

in such a place as this,

elsewhere, on the coldest night

of a cold winter, two boys

drove a car, with some difficulty,

over the frozen hummocks: parked

in the breathtaking chill, the stillness

that weighed each leaf down,

and shot each other.

It was a place I knew

years ago: I must have seen

the field, in summer maybe,

growing turnips, grazing cattle.

dotted with the white

of sheep, the blue and orange

of tents, and all the time

traveling toward one night

vast with misery; the sharp cracks,

one-two, like branches in frost,

that broke the silence.

Who knows what a field

has seen? Maldon sounds

of marsh birds, boats, the east wind.

The thin wail across the mudflats

is a heron or a gull, not Wulfmaer,

the boy who chose to die

with his king, never having guessed

how long dying could take.

And an oak lives

a long time, but a nail-hole

soon closes. Of all the oaks

at Clontarf, which is the one

where Ulf Hreda nailed one end

of a man’s guts, and walked him

round and round the tree, unwinding

at every step?

The night the boys died,

their field was Maldon was Clontarf,

was Arbela, Sedgemoor, Solferino,

was every field where a moon

has risen on grass stiff

with blood, on silvered faces.

…Aughrim was so white,

they said, with young bones,

it would never need lime again:

better not to see

in the mind’s eye Magenta,

that named a new dye.

It was as if the field

clenched all this in

on itself, hunched over

the pain of all young men

since time began: as if

every crop it ever bore

crowded in on it: barley, blood,

sheep, leisure, suicide,

sorrow, so much, its being

could not stay in bounds

but spilled out over space

and time, unwinding

meanings as it went.

They tangle around

the field’s riddle now: I saw a stage

for pain, a suffering-space.

The fine mist of aloneness closed it

in the morning: at sunset

it was flooded with blood.

Thinking such things often,

we should see too much. I see

a picnic place, a playground.

My eyes half-open, I lean

against a tree; hear through the ground

children’s feet chasing.

The sunlight shivers: someone

walked over my grave. I chew

on a stiff grassblade.