Spills E-Book

Angela Leighton

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

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

In Spills Angela Leighton combines poetry, memoir, libretto, short story, prose-poetry and translation, slipping between genres while hearing the conversations between them. 'You start from who you are, and walk and walk', she writes, in the spirit of free-voyaging that defines this collection. The prose tells, semi-fictionally, of the poet's life as the daughter of a composer-father and Italian mother, a life split between languages and places, north and south, often among curious and memorable characters. The poems address related themes of place and language, war and peace, the landscape of southern Italy and the Christian story of the Passion. The conversations between different forms and motifs are a result of Leighton's approach to writing almost as a strain of musical composition. The writing is often about music, but it is also a search for music in writing. The collection closes with a significant new body of translations and adaptations of the Sicilian poet Leonardo Sciascia, Spills's luminous other voice, 'seeking its own heart of music'. // 'Outstanding among the excellent ... the poems ring like bells.' — Anne Stevenson // 'Angela Leighton's genre-defying book - poetry, memoir, experiment in translation in its many and often surprising senses - explores with beautiful precision what she calls the "two-ply tongue", a suggestive metaphor for the way we speak and think and write.' — Patrick McGuinness // 'This is one of those rare books that you know will become a kind of touchstone. It's an unlikely and fetching combination of prose fragments - memories, reflections, personal excavation, stories, travel - and poetry of astonishing grace and spiritual depth. Angela Leighton is among the finest poets at work today in the language, a truth evident in these tangible, philosophical, anguished, ecstatic poems. There is nothing quite like this in the world, which is what makes it art. I will read and reread Spills, and hope it attracts the many readers it deserves.' ?— Jay Parini

Leseprobe

Angela Leighton was born in Wakefield, educated in Edinburgh and Oxford, and has taught at the universities of Hull and Cambridge. She is Research Fellow in poetry at Trinity College, Cambridge and has published many works of literary criticism, poetry and short stories. Her three previous collections of poetry are A Cold Spell (2000), Sea Level (2007), and The Messages (2012).

Angela Leighton

Spills

Contents

Bog Asphodel

Life from Sixteen Angles

Preface

1—Pa Bu

2—Swings and Roundabouts

3—Piano Houses

4—Doubles

5—Cross Stitch

6—Night Train

7—Bone-Lace

8—In the Music Room

9—Classified

10—Last Call

11—Sotto Voce

12—Gowks and Lappies

13—A Place

14—Home Again

15—Stay

16—Last Word

Poems

A Stay

Pen Nibs: In Memoriam

Deerpark

Footing

A Limestone Pavement

Docklands

Sea Ears

The Anatomy Lecture, by Rembrandt

Below-Stairs

Lullaby

Blown Bubble, in Variable Time

Composition: To a Wine-Glass of Water

November Song

Sluice

Crocus

Lines at Break of Day

Roundel for the Children

Capriform

69388

Rosin

Crystal

Dump

‘Aftermath: Parasite’

Epistolary

On the Fridge Magnets

Nativity

Easterly

Canticles for a Passion

The Garden

The Tree

The Gardener

The Slipper Chapel

Diversion

By the Fire

Even-Song

Playing for Chopin

A Little Poem for a Space

Pomegranate

Luck-Penny

An Almond at Halaesa

Necropolis at Kamarina

Pantalica

Sicilian Road

Translations from Leonardo Sciascia

Note on the Translations

Sicily, its Heart

In Memoriam

The Dead

Alive as Never Before

To a Land Left Behind

Family Reunion

Hic et Nunc

Insomnia

Dancers on the Train

A Veil of Waters

April

From the Train, Arriving at B ***

September Rain

End of Summer

Wintry

Piazzetta for a First Act

To a Friend

The Night

Notes

Acknowledgements

Spill

— splinter or rod

— strip for lighting a pipe or fire

— wooden spindle or spool

— rod of wood, bone or plastic in a

game of spillikins

— pin for stopping a cask

— channel for carrying water

— overflow or puddle of liquid

— small gift of money

‘Can these bones live?’

– Ezekiel

‘Come andò che maestro Ciliegia, falegname, trovò un pezzo di legno, che piangeva e rideva come un bambino.’

[How it came about that Master Cherry, carpenter, found a piece of wood, which wept and laughed like a child.]

– Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio

‘The whole fabric that he had been building, like a game of spillikins in which one frail little bone is hooked on top of another, was dashed to the ground.’

– Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

‘Roped in at the end by the one

Death with its many sticks.’

– Sylvia Plath, ‘Totem’

for Harriet, fellow traveller

Bog Asphodel

Once, by Elgol,

under ikat sunsets, driving affluent rain,

my two-ply tongue,

tongue-tied for weeks, word-stuck in kind, recognised:

bog asphodel.

To a cold conditioning ground, unpastured space,

its Delphic heavenly

ring brought sandalled toes, Elysian meadows,

Athens, Rome—

gilding the peat bog, winning a pot of gold.

Asphodel—

long echo. Here on the bare, bone-breaking heath

my tongue’s bell,

bi-lingual, local, levies a name from elsewhere,

and finds its place.

Life from Sixteen Angles

Preface

Angles, not angels—though angels lurk among the letters somewhere, subject to some calligraphic reordering, slips of the tongue, trips or typos. But angles are different. They might be acute or obtuse, needlingly sharp or widely blunt. There’s no trusting words, though the journey we take, reading or writing, can trust to nothing else. There’s no other vehicle on the seas of memory upon which we set out whenever we put pen to paper, fingers to keys, or just eye to print.

This particular journey is a glancing one, angled and refracted like the light in the atmosphere. And although it might be described as a journey, an old story that goes from childhood to adulthood, early to later years, it also goes back and forth, like the various actual journeys of my life—its sense of progression stalled by returns of memory, hauntings from other places, etymological double-takes. The very language, of course, is full of its own memories: foreign derivations at work in the English, quotations and allusions jostling for attention, older senses layering beneath the new. The language was never simply indigenous, never just our own. It was always a migrant from other times, other places.

This, then, is a story that falls out, as most stories do, from a mix of life’s unprospected accidents and later patterns of retrospection. Although its narratives are based on fact and its characters known to me, the shape they take depends on a certain design, a discovery of connections and motifs which only came clear in the writing, as loose spills might settle into a picture. Chapters may be as short as snapshots or as long as stories, angled as documentary memoir or indirect short fiction. Their point is not so much to delineate characters, least of all myself, as to open an ear to the poem or the music to which they give rise, or from which they spring. The forms of memoir, story, prose poem and poem are always permeable, always sliding across thin walls into one another—and this is no exception. Like that first fallout of who we are, thrown together from an ancient random mix of inherited genes, the structure might recall a game of spillikins. These splinters or fragments, spills or spells, are a reminder that what we remember, even of ourselves, is only a haphazard thing of bits and pieces—a thing which language itself, whether prosaic, poetic or even translated, might try to join together again.

1—Pa Bu

Musica, musica, che vuoi da me?

Che corpo sta formandosi

lungo la tua catena di molecole?

Che traccia sto seguendo mentre vado

dietro le note come dietro briciole

lasciate da qualcuno per ritornare a casa?

A quale casa mi fai ritornare?

– Valerio Magrelli

[ Music, music, what do you want from me?

What kind of body is forming

along your molecular chain?

What trace am I following as I go

after the notes, as if after crumbs

left by someone to show the way home?

To which home would you have me return? ]

It was a small room, anaglypta wallpaper swirling in fronds, a dark upright piano against one wall, a barrel-shaped biscuit tin on the hearth and, on the mantelpiece, three grey monkeys sitting side by side, their too human hands covering eyes, ears or mouth. Were they playing some kind of blind man’s bluff, sharing a joke, or keeping a secret? She eyed them distrustfully.

On the floor where she crawled, empty cotton-reels lay scattered in all directions. They were roly-poly, warm-wooden to touch, chewable, even flavoursome in a queer way. They could be marched in rows, dull, identical and featureless, or built into rickety columns for knocking. With a swipe of her arm, she could send those chattery woodenheads knocking together to the edge of the carpet. Bobbins, Nanny repeated, holding one out, uncertain what else to say to this sullen, dark-eyed child who merely stared at her, wonderingly.

Those bobbins were the only toy in the house—the saved residue of years of labour, when each week she took in the neighbours’ mending, and spent her days patching, paring, repairing at the heavy sewing machine upstairs. It was black and gold, a growling, stomping creature called a Singer, that made the floor shake and the ceiling lamps sway. Up and down, up and down, her feet would work the ponderous iron treadle, while yards of cloth slipped under the furious piston of the needle. It was labour which depended on that pedestrian rhythm: slow and halting for the awkward collars and plackets, fast and easy as she ran the long hems between the pressure-foot and the throat-plate. Then, her fingers would dance round the eye of the needle, keeping the cloth taut and moving as the machine jabbed its thread into the weave. They were light and limber, those fingers, dancing for their lives, while her feet kept up their relentless tread, beating out time like some hard taskmaster. The heartbeat of that bass line thudded through the small house, audible everywhere: in the kitchen below, in the three-yard square of garden with its outdoor lavatory, and through the walls to the long-suffering neighbours.

Yet hers were also musician’s fingers. They knew their way round the piano’s blocks of sound, the tonic or plagal cadences of its hymns, the quick harmonic changes of its folksongs. Nanny played by ear, her listening fingers picking out the shapes of tunes in her head and touching them instantly into life. She played Abide With Me, Old King Cole, the Hokey Cokey. The piano, which made nothing out of nothing except songs to fill your ears, was like a mirror image of the other Singer upstairs, which clunked and whirred, clattered and thumped, churning out frocks, jackets, aprons—things made to measure, useful and paid for. One of the things it helped to pay for was the expensive manuscript paper constantly clamoured for by her difficult younger son. At first she insisted he drew the staves himself, ruling them on white sheets of paper. When, however, she discovered he was slipping buttons into the collection plate at church, and pocketing the coins she gave him in order to buy manuscript paper from the music shop, she relented. This, perhaps, was more than a childhood whim. One day he would indeed pay the church back for those filched offerings—pay over the odds in the quantity of church music he would agree to write for it. Perhaps he paid his mother back, too, many years later, in this, the only currency he knew.

She taught him to play the piano herself, but very quickly he surpassed everything she knew. At six, he was picking out her tunes, embellishing them, improvising, and as soon as he became a choirboy at the cathedral, aged eight, he was writing the notes down, making tiny whiskery dots on those yellowish sheets bought at such cost. Sitting at the piano, hour after hour, year after year, in that tiny terraced two-up two-down, parents and older brother suffering the noise, he turned out jazzy, syncopated rhythms, trialled dissonances and false relations, returned to lyrical sweeps of melody, against the routine wheels of the Singer upstairs—his fingers against hers, or else, more truly, his fingers within hers, as she battled on the other unwieldy instrument to help pay for the music he needed to make.

Perhaps it was only when she died, many years later, helpless and pitiful in the local asylum, that he realised what he owed her. Then, through months of anguished remembrance, he returned the gift, writing the symphony that he dedicated to her—a dark, macabre, witty piece, that might at moments of jazzy playfulness be remembering the sound of her fingers on the piano in that tiny, cluttered front room in Wakefield.

‘Bobbin?’ she asked again, holding one out as if offering the novelty of a word amidst a superfluity of dull things. It sounded funny in the child’s ears, and she frowned, refusing to repeat the senseless noise. Instead, she let out a whimper, and dashed one of them to the edge of the room where, on hitting the wall, it made a satisfying wooden click. ‘Naughty naughty’, the voice reproved, incomprehensible except for the tone. But its tone was enough to break the child’s restraint—the thing that had kept her miserably focussed on those little wooden drums that rolled wilfully here and there, chit-chatting together in their own language. Suddenly, she let out a wail of misery. It came out loud as could be, while tears filled her eyes. ‘Pa bu’, she bawled, choking on her own words, then even louder and clearer, dragging on each sound: ‘Pa bu, pa bu’. In it was all the bewilderment and terror of this, her first experience of being left alone, without mamma, in her grandmother’s house. Everything was foreign in it: the carpet, the cold brown tiles of the hearth, and above all the voices—hushed, reticent voices that spoke strange words in disapproving tones. Those bobbins, she knew somewhere in her child’s mind, were a decoy, a distraction from the conspiracy of betrayal that had left her there. She didn’t want bobbins, those hard, dry things; she wanted pa bu. And the more she wailed, the more she wanted it, in a world where everything seemed secretive, misunderstood, where cries made no difference.

So she wept, hiccupped and sobbed with the abandon of the lost. Nanny, in a fluster, brought a biscuit, a glass of milk; she held out the horrible row of monkeys; in desperation, she pulled a funny face and waggled her hands like ears. Ever more enraged at this madness of the world around her, at everything, it seemed, turned deaf and stupid, the child stared for a moment, then continued to bawl hopelessly, miserably: ‘Pa bu’.

Eventually, exhausted, she fell asleep, rocked on Nanny’s lap while she sang, very softly: ‘Golden slumbers kiss your eyes; Smiles await you when you rise.’ Much later, when she awoke, it was at the sound of a door closing, voices coming clearer, and then a familiar voice apologising, explaining: ‘Scusa, mi dispiace. So sorry. I should have explained. What she likes is pa bu – pane e burro. It’s bread and butter.’

2—Swings and Roundabouts

The city was huge and dark. It towered above her as they walked down the street, her father clutching her hand tight, as if uncertain of his hold. Usually she went with Mamma, but he’d promised to take her to the playground one day when he wasn’t working. They trudged together along the stony streets, both of them newcomers to this northern city, both of them still somehow feeling their way. Outings with her father were rare. Sometimes he played to her, sat her on his knee at the piano and, growling in the bass, taught her the nursery rhymes that made her laugh. Mamma’s language was different. She read stories at bedtime: Cenerentola, about the girl at home among the ashes, or Pinocchio, the boy whose jointed wooden bones were carved in a workshop and whose nose was as long as the lies he told. But English came later, from her father, and it came in songs with queer rhyming repeats, like ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary’ or ‘incy wincy spider’.

When they arrived at the playground it was clear that something was wrong: the swings had gone. No, they hadn’t gone; they were all looped up, twisted round their metal scaffolds and tied with chains. Where they should have hung was a great empty space, purposeless and blank. The small roundabout also had a chain across it, like a beast being restrained. All the swoop and thrill of the place had gone, set beyond bounds. She stood and stared, the disappointment so intense she was struck dumb. ‘What is it?’ she whispered, as if she needed to be careful, as if a cataclysm had come and wrecked the place and might return at any time. For a moment her father seemed equally at a loss. Then, shrugging, he remembered: ‘Oh, it’s Sunday—the Sabbath. Never mind. You can come another day.’

But this day, the one that she had, the one that now loomed endless and purposeless into the distance, would never come again. It had been snatched from her by some freak of denial and by a word she didn’t wholly understand: Sabbath. The immeasurable sadness of walking home again under the disapproving Edinburgh tenements, the afternoon deranged, her playtime unplayed, was like grief for a lost time. ‘Non c’è?’ she asked, bewildered still and lapsing into Italian. What was it, exactly? Something more than a swing’s lovely game of scuff and go, push and pull. She turned to look back at the empty triangles, hollowed through where the inviting seats might have hung. But he tugged her away, impatient now, preoccupied with other things. ‘Never mind’, he repeated, explaining nothing. ‘We’ll come another day.’

On the return, as they walked past the biscuit factory with its gloomy flat facade, its high chimneys and barred darkened windows, she suddenly thought she saw it, that thing she met in her dreams sometimes, waking terrified though never quite sure why: the shape of a monkey sitting at a window. She shrank and whimpered, even while knowing that dreams didn’t cross into real life and that, however much she disliked the grim, dilapidated building which she always passed on the way to the swings, there were no monkeys inside.