Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
while news love meant to keep forever is wiped, so lightly, by this scanning weeper. 'Another Lighthouse' Angela Leighton's sixth collection of poems turns on the strange arts of remembering and forgetting. From Rome to Yorkshire, Naples to the Fens, she sets contemporary moments of hope and loss against a classical or Christian backdrop, while tracking a path that goes, more impersonally, from winter's cold to the growth of a garden. There are poems about war, love, childhood, age, and the wiping of memories they (differently) encourage. Whether elegiac or humorous, each tightly written poem is its own imaginable place, where words have the keen touch of things, yet things – a creaky old lift in a palazzo, a glass harp played in a backstreet, the CDs hanging on a tree, a clay doll in a museum – resonate like memorials to 'something' beyond themselves. Whether in strict or free form, in rhyming stanzas or verbal openwork, this is a collection that tests the sound-shapes of language while always listening for the tunes and rhythms that make it sing.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 69
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
Something, I Forget
Angela Leighton
CONTENTS
I made this. I have forgotten
And remember.
t. s. eliot
A poem will be written if in the grip of memory we are able to forget.
james longenbach
11
A thought in your ear, my friend – a word in your pocket.
A phrase for fingering, player – a tune for caressing.
A breath in your hair, love – a touch of nothing.
A line in your sight, reader – a space for pausing.
A beat in your leaving, traveller – a time for going.
A verse in your hand, my dear – to keep… forgetting.
SOMETHING, I FORGET
STONE GROUND
Grief cuts no ice.
Its stone drives deep.
It sings to keep
a silence live.
It laughs to cry.
Then takes the long
steep road – to write
a way to weep
Snowdrop
I dropped off just now and dreamt I was writing to you –
and maybe I was, or am – tenses confuse.
So we’ll take what comes in the present, whether dreamed or no,
use handy pronouns – I, most like this wand
of a pen that wavers along the line’s narrow feint –
a perfect blank of thought or paper, verse
or purpose – for the feints of phrase we might call true.
For I was never just mine, or you, you.
Something I wanted to say which slips my mind…
So here’s a garden instead, and a snowdrop stiffened –
its natural antifreeze anticipating zero
(survival technique), like unfeeling learned, like frozen
bedrock closeting its secret deep in the earth.
Here’s my wilding garden of remembrance. It will run
to seed. But today, deep winter clamps and leaves
just a fragile whiteness surprised in its shivering bracket.
Frost Work
Jack-the-lad with his spray-can whitener
gifts a cruel jewelry to the world:
sparkling moonstones for the bones of branches
prickly karst to stiffen the short grass
flecks of pearl for the crossbeam webs
opals to frill the wings of cyclamen,
and a frozen kiss for that alabaster look-alike:
Cupid with a bird-bath, poised to draw
an arrow across quartz water, cracked
for thirst, for love – for solvencies of rain.
Water like a Stone
Christmas, a cold day –
and lost to ourselves in a windless heaven
with all that story fallen away
(peace and goodwill, a baby in the hay)
we walk uphill from the world’s quarrelling,
our company, weather –
true cosmopolitan fetched from elsewhere,
drifter-stranger – and we together
following the night’s sketchy snow for a trail
to the late moon’s uplands, one step away,
reach a small shore –
water polished to a drumskin of ice
where each skimmed stone knocks for a door
to leave, but skips, teasing with repeats,
its note multiplying birds of nowhere.
It’s as if you heard
creation’s chip skidding high and clear
over glacial wastes, and imagined a bird –
one, then another – voiced from sound waves,
shivered from the physics of touch and air.
My one last throw…
a stone to try this basin of iced rain,
the tarn’s soundboard struck accelerando
to scatter, for luck, a kerfuffle of bird notes –
and win a love song from the earth’s deep cold.
Skaters
Pebbles
Sea’s worry beads
breves, vocables snapped in stone
like o’s and oh’s
their cuddled hard-hearts rolled in cold.
Glossed by waves
to rose or grey, amended by millennia
they rattle on the drag
that cracks no code, but only realigns
(like words for pain)
their coasting turnover, shiftless lie.
Stone Prayer
Give us this earth that deeps to rock yet keeps its temperate crust that stops the light the air the living from heat that is the magma’s fiery inner cauldron of a heart that needs no beat but is what sparks this airy bowled planet at the start.
Give us this stone no carbon-dating calibrates that knows no change but goes before bacterial mats conceived of us and stores the star that holds the fire that flared its sign and formed us in earth’s elementary crucible of stuff.
Give us this time just one split-fraction of all the aeons that cooled and set in solid stone from four thousand million years ago and will outlive the breath the bread the breaking nano-seconds of us who waste in time to grist and silt.
Give us this world that turns in space to make the time we must compute by day or night by heart or clock by breath or step by tick tock till tripped up on sedimentary rock that grinds to soil and feeds the wheat that takes the sun
to make the bread our bones grow from till thinned and fallen bone to stone like twinned offspring timed and rhymed like lifelong longing to lie down we home in this hard ground and give the mineral gift of ourselves again to earth as it is
earth as it is.
Tarn and Wall
I set out in sun to reach that shore –
the climb’s surprise
among the higher fells – its wide-open eye
a bowl of ice-melt
brimful, sky-struck, a cup for the gods.
But found instead
this Damascene stop – a blindness sudden
as the unread rock
of a sheltering wall topped with slate –
each upright blade
a transverse fipple to the wind’s ways
each hearting-stone
a keeping lock to baffle the rain’s
crosswise slam
and a driven pashm of mist everywhere
infilling the visible
where all I find is a coating of star-moss
galaxies of green
the tiny life’s clinging resilience
and a dry-stone wall’s
soaked reserves of stony minerals –
my one gain to be
crouched to the coldest thing – like a tomb –
learning to see.
Villa dei Misteri, Pompeii
In the city of the dead
a redstart startles the stonework, flirts and flares
with tail feathers spread,
then chips, chips –
(a mason chiselling a stone – whose name is it?)
A dead leaf flips
where a lizard darts
and a shiver rakes wild mint like something passing.
What is it starts
to unsettle the still
noonday heat earthed deep in this stony place,
packed with its kill,
its clinker, cavities?
A small child squats and sorts random igneous rocks
ignoring all this
happy in the dust
to heap up mock-volcanoes from the mountain’s cast-offs.
How something lost
and purposeless
