The Claims Office E-Book

Dai George

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

Seitenzahl: 47

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The Claims Office is a startlingly good debut. Dai George's method is deeply engaged with narrative traditions, but the textures and imagery are often elaborate and strange.This rich surface is undercut by a mixture of rebellious energy and unflinching satire. His 'nature' poems are often anti-nature poems, and darkly funny. Lively pieces about London and New York jostle with skewed love poems. His works about his native Wales alternate between an edgy irony and the elegiac tone of the collection's title poem, and display a deep suspicion of authority and a reluctance to conform to nationalist cliché. 'A really fresh and ambitious voice, celebrating the local without sentimentality, and tackling major matters of political vision, faith and scepticism, loyalty and self-knowledge, with assurance and sharp wit, and a brilliant metaphorical repertoire.' - Rowan Williams 'Dai George offers something new to Welsh, and to British poetry.The diversity of Dai's style has been aided by the rigours of an MFA at Columbia - one of the best places anywhere to study poetry - where he has been introduced to wider ideas which have formed his work as a young poet away from the dominant influences of current British poetry.' - Roddy Lumsden

Leseprobe

Dai George

THE CLAIMS OFFICE

Seren is the book imprint of

Poetry Wales Press Ltd.

57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3AE

www.serenbooks.com

Facebook: facebook.com/SerenBooks

Twitter: @SerenBooks

The right of Dai George to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

© Dai George 2013

ISBN: 978-1-78172-090-5

ISBN e-book: 978-1-78172-092-9

ISBN Kindle: 978-1-78172-091-2

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 Welsh Books Council.

Cover painting: Kevin Sinnott ‘Public Private Life’ (detail)

1997 – 2006 Oil on Linen 200 x 208cm

Printed in Bembo by Bell and Bain, Glasgow.

Contents

Reclaiming the View

Mergers and Acquisitions

Poolside at Le Domaine

True Eccentrics

My Peace, the Ornament

Metropolis

Plans with the Unmet Wife

Narwhal

Hymn to Technique

Boys of Leisure

Referendum on Living

The Anecdocrypha

The George

Claimant

Oran-Bati

Different Shoulders

Metroland

Bombshell

Mojitos

Tyndale

Distraction During Evensong

Towards the Palatability of Contemporary Faith

How the World

New Translation

My Accent, the Eunuch

MMIV

The Claims Office

St. Fagan’s for the First and Last Time

Squander

My Ambition, the Rival

Two Months Left

Seven Rounds with Bill’s Ghost

Mediation

Chestnut Festivals

Jakey for the Third Time

A Clifton Postcode

Inside the Company

Prospectus

Queen’s Lane Approximately

New York on a Shoestring

Reclaiming Terra Firma

Acknowledgements

Reclaiming the View

At her graveside I’m without walls. Safe

from the churn of claim and counterclaim,

I hand myself over to what there is:

six trim mountains overlapping,

the town below, its vest of rain.

I sit on her marble roof and hold

a census of the trees. Here flowerless,

there Nordic in their bristling green;

to her left a spritz of elderflower-white

bubbling off the boughs. Her grave

restores the land to decency. She lived

the life for which I’d fight, but knew

no other way. Eventually the rain

will send me spoiling down the valley

into the fractious theatre of claims

but on her grave top I’m unmanned.

Here there is just the fact of her

bones cuddling under me;

spring lambs the hill over

and, around me, headstones:

their small, laconic messages.

Mergers and Acquisitions

Just as two dandelions choke in the web

a spider laid to trick his evening kill,

so do I flail in the net of being born

too near technology’s final coup.

At the windiest end of August,

in a cardigan upon the well-heeled hill,

I drink with my neighbours – the girl in boots,

the book swap and the gastro pie – and just

as my kingdom fawns on summer champions,

so does a child fasten to a catalogue and cry

methodically in yearning for this toy then that before

a rival craze gazumps it and the jilted thing

goes dusty in a warehouse, boxed.

I walk back past terraced homes I’ll not

afford in a prism of Sunday springs,

and just as the pension book signifies

a grizzled sexpot where the taste prefers

a salt-and-pepper dusting on the chin,

so in some quarters does my face belong

to colour supplements and record books.

I long to be free of the lurch

to September with its milksop gifts

but, just as the river excels in its bed,

so am I bound to be locked to it.

Just as I rail against the hour that the Web

started up its racket in the Logos slums,

so does a weaver take a mallet to his loom

and spurn it with a thump to halt the clock.

Nothing alters. This life proceeds

via botched conjunctions, portmanteaux,

through acronyms and bumf. And just as

my death in the eyes of the dying

is but a fissure in a knackered edifice

so does my country deserve no song

to mourn its impending eclipse.

Yes, this is hostile. This is flowers

battering like stags to breathe. But

just as the discovered tomb resolves

our vision of the Pharaoh’s court,

so may there come a day when gold

clarifies to the flesh it masked. So may

our shareholdings melt away and leave

the bullion of our livelihoods: warm bread,

purchased homes, and money a neutral liquid.

Poolside at Le Domaine

Brochures would dub those shutters cornflower blue

but me, I see a baron plunging out of them, the colour of his blood

pooling on the patio.

You’ve nipped inside to fix a drink or sleep, while

somewhere close a mower chunters through the noon. Bushes slur

with insects. But I keep the peace,

reclining on a lounger semi-nude

within the piscine walls, poster-boy for the new nobility

our parents have secured.

By nightfall we’ll be drunk as lords and hatching

desperate schemes of co-authored wealth, the cicadas hammering

distantly away like tills,

but now a bee razors the air along

my ear, and I scare as though caught in the midst of a low

and dirty act.

The handyman feeds the scrapheap. Your mother

sidles through, trilling dinner plans and tidings from Minérve.

Love, I have to jump

and break the water, the better to hide

these stretch-marks and the suspicion that in me you’ve made

a bad bargain.

True Eccentrics

As opposed to those who muck about

just outside the bull’s-eye.

So none of your neon-smeared

and perfumed chatterers with heads

forever turned to suss their public.

We’re talking here of double-twenty freaks.