Terminarchy E-Book

Angela France

• Herausgeber: Nine Arches Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 31

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Angela France's Terminarchy eloquently considers the troubling terms of existence in an age of climate catastrophe and technological change. How do we negotiate a world where capitalism and greed threaten a fragile earth, where technology seems to promise us connection but might also fuel isolation? Where even finding solace in nature reminds us that the seasons can no longer be trusted? Reframing ecopoetics in her own instinctive, radical, lyrical form. France considers whether, rather than collison-course, there might be a better way to coexist. Where extinction threatens, these wry, alert poems and their earthy voices try to find a way through and look for hope. "Angela France travels the living world of our fellow creatures with much empathy, considering the survivals, (for now) and the irrevocable losses. Though the theme is mortal and full of danger, the poems sing, they inhabit delight amid the sorrow. Observational, meditative, earthy, riverine, full of foundational energy; this is a key collection, an essential poetics of gravity and grace." - Penelope Shuttle

Leseprobe

Terminarchy

Terminarchy

Angela France

ISBN: 978-1-913437-17-6

eISBN: 978-1-913437-18-3

Copyright © Angela France.

Cover artwork © Fumio Obata. www.fumioobata.co.uk

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Angela France has asserted her right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published July 2021 by:

Nine Arches Press

Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,

Great Central Way, Rugby.

CV21 3XH

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Printed in the United Kingdom by: Imprint Digital

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Contents

Poetry Makes Nothing Happen

Threshold

Water Mark

What Remains

Early Spring

Stone-glow

After

We know the Wantwite

Small Gods

City Break

Growth

Sparrow Complains

On Balance

Scrolling

Wantwite gets clever

Junk

Landlocked

For a Glacier

Singing lessons

Departures

Suddenly, a frog

Rooting Out

Wantwite likes company

Desire Path

Strange Road

Blame

Second Wind

Fallow

Down Piggy Lane

Getting Late

Lightfall

Missing the Blood Moon

Wantwite needs slaves

How to be alone

Muscle Memory

Grave

Conversion

Wantwite is sickening

Nearly

Sparrow says

Wild Seed

Endlings

Living Yule

Notes and Acknowledgements

About the author and this book

Poetry Makes Nothing Happen

W.H. Auden

Let it make nothing happen more, this year,

                                                                     so that a young girl

whose mail arrives early can read the book she’s waited for

over breakfast and find a poem with blue depths and points

of light which she tastes in the back of her throat on the way

to work and walks a little slower than usual so that nothing

happens as she crosses the road because the guy in the 4x4

who was answering a call on his mobile already passed by.

Or so that a fighter sits up almost all night reading Rumi, trying

to understand death and blood, peace and love and sleeps

too late to be ready for the knock at the door so tells them

he’ll follow after because he wants to hold his son and play

with his daughter and nothing happens as he kisses his children

because he isn’t in the car when a government missile hits it.

Or so that a man, sleepless and pacing, picks up a book

from his wife’s bedside and reads a poem casually

but finds lines stuck in his mind like burrs on a wool sock

like when he used to spend weekends relaxed and outdoors

so that he holds back on giving an order and extends

credit on a couple of loans so that nothing happens

to a lot of people that day who carry on going to work

and never even know that nothing happened.

Threshold

Every house has something of a whale at its entrance.

Bleached vertebrae, their jutting transverses

arm-span wide, set at the wall’s base

where long grass cords through their spaces,

perched on the stone post as if about to fly,

or carefully alcoved into the wall.

A scapula buttresses a wall, a jawbone curves

against stone, each whitened and cracked

in alien air, and a weathered pair of ribs arc

over a gate, lost promise of a heart-cage.

When the wind booms through the lane

and the sea bellows over rocks to bite the field-edge,

you could think the bones tremble and shift,

yearn together to take their old places. A spine, a shoulder,

the suggestion of a tail-fluke in the bending trees.

Water Mark

Water geysers from the road, tarmac humped

and cracked as if pushed up by tree roots over years.