The Crossing Fee E-Book

Iain Bamforth

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

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In The Crossing Fee Iain Bamforth re-stages the odyssey of the legendary German hero who falls into a lake in the Black Forest and emerges in the China Sea. Circulating between Europe, the Philippines and Indonesia (where Bamforth worked for five years as a health consultant), the poems sound the plummet and allure' of life on both worlds. Grounded in myth and also in close observation, The Crossing Fee records a momentous exploration of space and history: 'For the tides are always bringing / news of something strange.'

Leseprobe

IAIN BAMFORTH

The Crossing Fee

Contents

Title Page

Psalm

A Letdown

Victor Segalen

Lenz

Memories of Holland

¡Que Viva Mexico!

Luther’s Fig-Tree

Promises, Promises

Statistics and the Novel

Ear Eats Mouth

Household Gods

Germany 1636

Skin Deep

Turin

Theogony

Pyro Tyro

Mediation and the Sunflower

Anorexia

Trauma Years

Robert Musil to his Critics

Names and Numbers

Two Propositions about Time

Quartz

Buddha for the Born Again

Sympathy in Silver City

Telephone from the Beyond

Viaticum

Baudelaire: The Ransom

An Old Film

Gospel Commentary Nightmare

Larval Elements

Victor Hugo: Open Windows

Flaubert in Egypt

Ode to the Potato

A House in the Var

The Reef of Natural Causes

The Desert in Them

Blossom

Midsummer on Shetland

Real Estate

Woodwork as an Act of Ostension

At Mummelsee

Cave-Diving in the Pacific

Lepidoptera

Teacher’s Day, Singapore

Flying Garuda over Java

Primal Unction

The Crossing Fee

Kite-Flyers of Cengkareng

Six o’Clock

Docked Ships at Sunda Kelapa

Base Matter

Kiblat

On the Language without a Copula

Ironwood

The Mud Volcano

On a Floating Island

Iconography of the Early Philippine Church

Stranded Whale

Dawn in the Monkey Forest

Acknowledgements and Notes

About the Author

Also by Iain Bamforth from Carcanet

Copyright

Psalm

I called out to you, from the root of the mountains,

from the mountains fallen in on themselves even unto Rotterdam,

where the very earth itself is of the nature of folding.

I called, out of my distress, and hoped to hear you

though circumstance closed upon me, with no place to stand

in the depths of the pit, in the region dark and deep.

The Alps saw and trembled, for even the mountains melt

when your wrath lies upon them, the fire gone before.

I wanted to break forth, and shout for joy, and sing psalms;

but you hid your face in the days of my affliction

lengthening now like shadows in the sere grass.

Ashes are the bread in my mouth. The nations are destitute.

And I am become a pelican of the wilderness;

I am as the philosopher’s owl disengaged by dusk.

A Letdown

Venerable city, he called it,

and though he went far from Teviot Row

it would always be home –

the heart remembered by a lad of parts.

His northern circumstance, in all its flux.

Disembodied land of the mind,

it broke like a cloudburst on his plans

to walk the earth’s low curves.

Why should the passage back be difficult?

Hadn’t his father given him a map

so that he, eluding the past, might step

into the now-forever Land of Uz?

There were nettles at the gate

and in the great house a boy rehearsing

reasons for his lifelong trip

across the trapdoor of the mind.

Home was the House of Shaws, a place

of Gothic design and catastrophic

letdown. ‘To set a stranger mounting

was to send him [ ] to his death.’

Night lengthens on his prospects

and those figures standing in the garden.

He has gone to live his calling

where only the irretrievable can be saved.

Victor Segalen

Anti-touriste de la terre-boule –

it would take another life

now the age of endeavour is synopsis

and history exploring epilogue

to find you in that navy uniform

at the missed death-bed encounter

(Gauguin in the Marquesas)

and recognise travelling for what it is.

‘Space is rapt, the new conceptual rage.’

Enter it. Abandon the ocean

for the trek that calls itself China,

a relentless pilgrimage up the Yangtze.

Be seasick, even on horseback.

Write orphics with Debussy

and scorn that pimp of the exotic,

Loti, for his cheap effects.

Ease yourself now out of torpor,

alone in the forest at Brocéliande,

contemplating the not-you

and the book that couldn’t be written.

Lenz

‘A great era to be alive in,’ he proclaimed,

climbed to the top of Strasbourg’s sheerest Gothic,

then hung about Goethe like a bad critique;

posed for his silhouette, went mad in the Vosges,

got written off as dead a decade before he was,

went home to face his father’s silent scorn;

tried to raise Friedericke’s namesake from the dead,

was douched in a strapped seat for the mad;

took the pain of others into himself,

a pain so enormous he lost all sense of decorum

though recouped enough of it to play the fool at Weimar

where Privy Councillor G. cut him with contempt.

Memories of Holland

from the Dutch of Hendrik Marsman

Thinking of Holland

I see broad rivers

slowly chuntering

through endless lowlands,

rows of implausibly

airy poplars

standing like tall plumes

against the horizon;

and sunk in the unbounded

vastness of space

homesteads and boweries

dotted across the land,

copses, villages,

couchant towers,

churches and elm-trees,

bound in one great unity.

There the sky hangs low,

and steadily the sun

is smothered in a greyly

iridescent smirr,

and in every province

the voice of water

with its lapping disasters

is feared and hearkened.