The Shaking City E-Book

Cath Drake

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

Seitenzahl: 65

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

The shaking city of Australian poet Cath Drake's debut poetry collection is a metaphor for the swiftly changing precarity of modern life within the looming climate and ecological emergency, and the unease of the narrator who is far from home. Tall tales combine with a conversational style, playful humour and a lyrical assurance.​ The poet is able to work a wide set of diverse spells upon the reader through her adept use of tone, technique, plot and form. She is a welcome new voice for contemporary poetry. "Cath Drake wants to grasp the world whole. When she looks at the past, it's with a big rambunctious energy that has implications for the present. These are restless and generous poems, full of the vivid reality of people's lives. Read them as a guide to staying clear-eyed, combative and caring in unsettled times." – Philip Gross "Cath Drake's poems deftly explore conflict and the future of our changing, imperilled planet – in a poem about climate emergency, the narrator muses wryly 'sometimes I hold world in one hand, my life / in the other'. This is a collection alive to dilemmas. Her writing is searching, witty and full of compassion, helping us navigate a shifting world." – Helen Mort "This joyful, exuberant, wildly imaginative collection exhorts us all to unmoor our minds, to 'live among the strange and shining." – Kate Potts "Its unfettered creativity and sharp, critical mind work alongside one another to deliver a poetry collection equal parts fascinating, essential, abstract and educational. The insights it provides into the major struggles of our era and the particularly intimate approach it takes in doing so create a truly worthwhile literary experience." – New Welsh Review

Leseprobe

The Shaking City

for John

The Shaking City

Cath Drake

Seren is the book imprint of

Poetry Wales Press Ltd.

57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3AE

www.serenbooks.com

facebook.com/SerenBooks

twitter@SerenBooks

The right of Cath Drake to be identified as

the author of this work has been asserted in accordance

with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

© Cath Drake, 2020.

ISBN: 978-1-78172-575-7

ebook: 978-1-78172-576-4

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 Books Council of Wales.

Cover artwork: Sadie Tierney, Las Vegas NY NY,

www.sadietierney.co.uk

Author photograph: David X Green.

Printed in Bembo by Severn, Gloucester.

Contents

1. The Shaking City

Sleeping in a Shaking City

Furniture

Why I Feel Queasy Scanning Rental Listings

The Conferrer of Honourable Badges

Truly, Deeply

What I’m Making With the World

How I Hold the World in This Climate Emergency

Dhanakosa, Scotland

The Flowers of Our City

Shaky School Album

2. The Glasshouse

The Glasshouse

A Respectable Life

Rolodex

Party Invitations

Mr Jacob Never Seemed to Have Much Backbone

Our Front Garden

Taking Care of Clothes

Bag for Life

Considered Questions

A Man My Father Played Golf With

The Circle Line

The Lady of the Basement

3. Far From Home

The Queensland Box Tree

House of Bricks

The Before

The Clock in Aunt Anna’s Lounge

There are Places to Remember Sadness

Great Uncle

The Drake

It Didn’t Happen Until University

The River People

Finding Australia

The Story

Island Bay, New Zealand

Watermarks

Rubber Dinghy with Glass-bottom Bucket, Rottnest

Bunyip on the End of My Bed

Bunyip in the Kitchen

When the Insects Disappeared

Jar, Grant Museum of Zoology, University College London

At Least

If I Could Wake

The Phone is Ringing

Acknowledgements

1

The Shaking City

Sleeping in a Shaking City

I’ll tell you how there is one chair then another

and that’s called sitting together.

I’ll tell you about small things hidden under beds

or in yoghurt containers dug into gardens.

About a stray cat who tiptoes across the back fence

and through the tiny bathroom window.

I’ll tell you how thin I feel; how the rain falls and falls

but still the charcoal stains won’t wash off.

Do you remember summers when cricket matches lasted

forever and seagulls tacker-tacked on the roof?

Or watching ants for hours, imagining the risk of falling

if each stair was so enormous?

How does a city gather its skirts before the dip of night?

Its powerdrills and refrigeration whirring –

there must be somewhere in this town that doesn’t shudder,

somewhere I can properly sleep.

Furniture

As he reads the chapter on how he suddenly left with no explanation,

when I was wobbly and my heart had cracks that took years to heal,

alone in a foreign country, and how I couldn’t make sense of it

in the skin I had on so I unpeeled and sat raw in the sun waiting

for skin to grow again, he falters, flashes red, stands up, says

he can’t go on. It has pierced him in a way it didn’t in the past.

I tell him not to worry, the past no longer drags at my heels.

He sits and reads again, his body swelling with it, but this time

when he stops, he’s quiet in a very different way as a heavy shelf

appears hovering in the air, and as he keeps reading, every time

he pauses, a new shelf appears, then a whole bookshelf, a desk,

a table, two chairs, until the room we stood in, the room he left,

is all there: chairs never sat on, mattress bare, shelves empty,

surfaces gleaming with streaks of sunlight.The indifferent furniture

is as solid as the bodies we must live within, inside my room,

our room, in a tower block of a city that is shaking.

Why I Feel Queasy Scanning Rental Listings

It isn’t my fault. It’s the ground. I never bother

getting furniture to fit. Nothing just fits: things

don’t find their proper place. Clothes, papers, shoes,

mugs, knickers, earrings get shoved from one day

to another.The giddiness, the seasickness is expected

and I lose things: cardigans, crockery, books. I lie in bed,

waiting for the floor to stop sliding away or pulling

in opposite directions between the lamp and couch.

It affects my sense of conviction, my resilience, my

relationships: men who stay over seem to shift oddly

by morning.There have been times when I watch

my hand rest on another’s, then see it drift away when

I was sure I was sitting still. I tell myself I’ll move to

somewhere stable soon, but I don’t pick these flats –

like someone who always complains of finding lovers

the same as their absent or violent father, I’m always

hopeful but keep finding flats where the floors move.

There was Wasley Street that had such an awful

twitching slant: I’d wake up shuffled into a corner.

There were three blissful months in a big-windowed flat

on the hill of Edward Street before it started, slow at first

but before long I was standing at the bathroom basin,

my face wet, watching my bedroom inch away until

it was almost at the back fence. I waited in my socks,

sitting on the edge of the bath, feeling sad. Sometimes

I dream of a simple life where I choose what to wear

from clothes that hang in the same place every day,

matching jewellery, a silk scarf perhaps, shined brogues

and dress in an uncanny stillness, then slowly eat granola

with strawberries like those pictures on cereal boxes.

The Conferrer of Honourable Badges

There’s a teacup with eyes, a clothesline sailing the high seas,

a chimney carried off by an eagle, a one-way street sign on a scallop shell,

a shield of dandelions. Fabric badges with metallic or fluorescent stitching

cover his ‘office’ window, a garage conversion – you can’t miss it –

there’s no explanation, no website. You have to ask. But if you

help out at the community centre, work for the council or a local shop,

he’ll know about you.The office door is ajar when he’s in consultation

and passers-by often loiter, pretending they’re not listening.

I heard a CEO cry when he was told ‘not quite’ and a punk rocker

sing to the end of the street, badge held high.There are no criteria:

he awards according to ‘a quality of dedication, a growth of spirit

you can’t really define, very individual, situation-dependent’.

The Returning Money Badge isn’t always bestowed when money

has been returned. The Hosting Strangers Badge is more nuanced

than the act of invitation.The Rescue Badge can apparently include

just yourself. The Travelling Alone Badge sounds straightforward

but it’s an enigma as no one has been awarded it yet, despite

a burgeoning interest in pilgrimages. Strangers approach each other:

How did you get that one? and share more about their life than they expect.

Badges are sewn on jackets and backpacks, framed in hallways.

One high achiever has made a hat out of them, another a flag.

We’re proud that they mark something otherwise unrecognised,

the reasons not entirely clear and it’s a relief that life for all us

is often a series of mysterious chances. It helps us carry on regardless.

Truly, Deeply

Of course, he’s not what he used to be,

this rickety old thing whose ribs, legs, tail,

neck and even some organs are replaced

by mechanics.The angles are never quite

the same: his hind legs jut from a wasted body

held up by his four-legged walker. I’m not sure

which parts of him are still dog.The way

he sneezes or itches isn’t very dog any more.

But I don’t mind because at 52 – older than me –

I’m so grateful he’s alive.When he sees me,

he still has that unmistakeable dog excitement,

though faint, in the white bloom of his eyes

and jiggle of limbs, his joints rattling.