The Hitting Game E-Book

Graham Clifford

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

Seitenzahl: 38

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The Hitting Game' is the first collection of poems by the London-based young poet Graham Clifford. The vibrancy of the poet's voice and the immediacy of his claims upon our attention are clear. These poems provoke as well as delight. Characters arrive as 'you' in 'Obvious Constellations' 'Amazing' and 'Trying'. Incidents are approached from disarmingly intimate and also entertainingly oblique angles. These are urban poems where nature appears like a strange intrusion: a flock of swallows 'flick about dust like black flames'. There is also a gentleness and empathy, particularly in regards to children, as in 'About my daughter' where the word echoes: 'the er-ing sound of doubt/mixed with ought.' There is humour and pathos as in the poem about a chimp and her keeper. These are poems full of minor dramas and fresh enchantments.

Leseprobe

Seren is the book imprint of

Poetry Wales Press Ltd.

57 Nolton Street, Bridgend,Wales, CF31 3AE

www.serenbooks.com

Twitter: @SerenBooks

facebook.com/SerenBooks

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

© Graham Clifford 2014

ISBN: 978-1-78172-165-0

e-book: 978-1-78172-166-7

Kindle: 978-1-78172-167-4

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 by:

Printed in Bembo by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow

Author’s Website: www.grahamclifford.co.uk

Contents

On the Dispersal of Water

Swallows

Towards Morning

In Love with Mr Jiggs

Song for Empty Rooms

Milt

Santa and Sand Flea

No Alternative Now

Trying

Stealing Summer

Child Development

What I Wrote

The Hitting Game

Newborn

How to Hurt

Indispensable

What I Really Want to Do

Silage

A Man Who Had Formed His Adult Self According to Questionable Parameters, Initiates Change

Skinned

On Being Temporary

Bitumen and Rust

Anger

Bookshelves

The History of Patches

Lines of Desire

Amazing

Under What We Live On

Running-up

Minor Poet for the 21st Century

Drawing Circles

About my Daughter

Talking about Gravity with Great Danes

The Dust That Cuts

Metamorphoses

Protection

Proof

Returning

In Cars

Restoring “graham”

The Best Poem Ever Written

No-one, Son of Nobody

Sex and Death

B Movie

The Oxygen Thieves

Shorn

Obvious Constellations

The Door

A Train on the Street, October 22, 1895

Tempus Fugit

Cast

Acknowledgements

On the Dispersal of Water

It’s 1:30 am.

He takes me away from the others unpacking,

opens the front door to the first night

in our first home and squirts WD-40

over both hinges, explains

WD is water dispersal,

NASA concocted this stuff

to keep fields of rockets

from turning orange, then burnt umber.

He heard this on his pocket radio

cycling along blustery city avenues

that curve between the reservoirs,

buffeted by daydreams of microwaves

and languorous AM waves,

walloped by the slipstreams of juggernauts

that don’t recognise bike lanes

on B roads where streetlights refuse to work.

He holds up my key and lubricates it

with a quick squirt of the clear oil,

slips it still wet in the lock

to revitalise inner gubbins:

he knows all the proper names.

When I turn my back to go inside

this kind man takes the squeak from the gate.

Swallows

These birds, each only a slim book’s weight,

are strong, years old

and flick about dusk like black flames.

They have shoulders and attitude.

Tensing their sector of umbrella

jerks them across the path,

passing my face so close

I feel the chill from air sliced.

They seem to want to cut me up.

It is as if they’re bitter

and are demonstrating the impatience of fathers

sick of working smoking bitumen

into holes in roofs or tar into roads.

I’m doing nothing to them

but it’s as if my leisure looks like disrespect

and I am, therefore,

asking for it.

Towards Morning

I’m searching for sleep, for its AM frequency.

I wind down, thumbing focus onto

purple throbs, over a serious clicking –

it’s that satellite in a deteriorating orbit.

I carry on through the numbers, find

an analogue sitcom in Urdu

recorded under a duvet

then a Dalek commentating on hurling

from inside a baked bean can, then

there’s a channel dealing in clean-cut chat,

talk in a forever rising tone that suggests

an answer just around the corner, or, if not,

then definitely round the next.

A fifties heat ray wipes everything out

except machinery

by some fluke transmitting its own chug,

chug

and I’m one foot in the Land of Nod

until the fast, crunchy beat of a speeding heart

that bleeds ever outwards. I move on,

get the end of a theme tune

always humming at the centre of me, then arrive

at the proper AM doldrums:

an outdoor conference in the rain in Paris,

Alpha 60 broadcasting to The Lands Without,

a brass band on its own in a barn, poised,

world-shattering formulae hastily chalked up,

glass rims keening, congress erupting a corridor away,

a Theremin concert audience in corduroy

being seated without word or cough,

real Morse code, trains, rain tutting on a tent,

a stylus shushing when the last

of the spiral becomes a circle in vinyl.

In Love with Mr Jiggs

This man loves his chimp,