Then E-Book

Alison Brackenbury

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 54

Beschreibung

Then draws on Alison Brackenbury's lifetime's experience of rural England, its people and its ways, and the threats to its survival. From the lapwings of her childhood Lincolnshire to the recurrent floods in Gloucestershire, where she has lived for many years, the poems reach urgently to both past and future, finding connections and disconnections. The signs of a changing climate are emblematic of larger erasures. The poems keenly focus the beauty and the harshness of the natural world. They remind us of our own fragility, and our responsibility: 'We are made of water. But we forgot.'

Leseprobe

ALISON BRACKENBURY

Then

Contents

Title Page

The Trent rises, 1947

Bath cubes

Translated

The shepherd’s son’s photo-album

Great-great-

I.O.W.

Edith leaves

Home leave

Frayed

Left

Binder twine

Ditches

The lunch box

Köchel 622

Suddenly

After the funeral

Fruit in February

On a February night

Out of the wood

On guard

The shed

At eighty

Giving way

Your signature is required

On the aerial

Leap year

Serena speaks of February

Lapwings

Victoria Coach Station, 11 p.m.

St Kilda’s wren

‘Song, though, is a uniquely human business’

To Mr W.S., from his agent

Too late

A quiet night

Leaving Cheltenham

Late at Long Eaton

Money

I want life to be more like poetry

Glazed over

Dessert

May Day, 1972

The cricket

Before breakfast

Bombus

Asleep

The second jab

The Shackleton expedition

In the Black Country

The Shaker chair

Near Russell Square

November 11th

The First Emperor

The Wallace Collection

Thermal

Diary of a stretcher bearer

Stubbs and the horse

John Wesley’s horse

Rosie

Take off

Harvest

In an August garden

At Needlehole

The nymph considers the garden

The jobbing welder

The button factory in Bologna

The Beatles in Hamburg

Mentioned in Minnesota

Getting up

Wilfred Owen at the Advanced Horse Transport Depot, 1917

5 a.m.

First

The twenty-ninth of December

Looking for the cat

In store

Flood

1. Flood

2. Mitchell

3. Bowsers

4. Litres

5. Switched on

6. Review

No

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Alison Brackenbury from Carcanet Press

Copyright

The Trent rises, 1947

When you heard the water whisper

in Crown Yard and Sailors’ Alley,

when your husband saw the river

no longer lazy – swollen, free;

what did you grab, to take with you upstairs?

What would I take with me?

Would I snatch letters from the flood,

so their clearest lines and kisses

did not meet condoms, tampons, mud?

Save bills? Saucepans? Water misses

no hidden, plastered wire. No kettle could

boil. The fusebox hisses.

Computers, in a leaky boat?

They hauled fresh water, tins. The swell

of river made the hall a moat.

Tortoise to bucket! Chickens fell

into their bath. Aboard the Co-op’s milk float,

the pigs raised merry hell.

Bath cubes

Lily of the valley, Devon violet, English rose

brought crumpled foil, white silk’s swirl, the gurgled names of those

great-aunts and godmothers, Edie, Phil and Gwen,

like the coarse white bath cubes, which will not come again

with harsh and gritty powder, oiled steam, the after-reek,

jasmine sliding past the river fish (then few) who did not speak.

I measured them like love, a flowering of the self,

not the final desperate present plucked quickly from the shelf

which no one told me then. No one ever told my toes,

creased and flushed from chilling water as the bathroom window froze,

lost in mists of fake French lavender, false lilac, summer rose.

Translated

Yet all I took from it was words.

How strange! It was a solid place.

Potatoes, like an old man’s face,

clay-caked, fell ruddy from the spade.

Huge sheep, the fruit-crammed pies they made,

now dwindle like the summer’s birds.

What did they say? ‘It’s fairing up.’

My grandfather, his hot blue eyes

pure Viking, watched clouds sweep from skies.

His younger son said ‘last back end’

for autumn, leafless, with no friend.

Silent, I stirred my steaming cup.

My mother sighed. They would not fit:

old words, new money. In my head

I hear what Margaret Thatcher said,

puzzling note-takers. MPs bayed,

she lost taught tones, Hansard’s ‘afraid’,

shrieked, to our schoolyard, ‘I’m not frit!’

The shepherd’s son’s photo-album

I could show you sad stories

as bright shy children peep

by wind-bent trees, grey ditches,

in crippled love that keeps

the girl a kitchen shadow

with fine hair, crooked teeth,

who, when brain tumours seize her,

rages into sleep.

The quick one fails all papers,

sits still, as clocks strike; eats.

But two work hard; one marries.

Here are the three fat sheep.

You laugh till pages quiver:

three perfect spheres with fleece

washed soft and deep as pom-poms,

three full moons stuffed with swedes.

They fill the narrow hill-lane

as marchers crowd a street.

They peer at us like judges.

They float on tiny feet.

Lined up with dangling nose ropes

they calmly wait their feast.

Only one glances sideways.

Beware a knowing beast.

Here I am, dandled. Orphaned lambs

strain to their bottles, deep

in rough grass by my smiling aunt

who has no child to keep.

My grandmother, in her long coat,

frowns till the ram stands meek.

Her youngest waves his camera

before his mind finds sleep.

My grandfather, his tallest son,

grasp ribbons, cups to keep.

Gone, gone. All waste. And yet they laugh.

Here are the three fat sheep.

Great-great-

I own your desk, Eliza, with your story,

the black-spined Bible with your flourished entry.

Your husband, our last farmer, dead at forty

took off the farm of crooked apple trees,

white pail upon the table in our picture.

But you moved on, with your plain kindly daughters

who settled down to marry their farm labourers.

Louisa’s anxious child was my grandmother,

Louisa died, bee-stung. Your Ls grew dashing,

lodged by the North Sea, mornings calm, nights lashing.

Life is before and after. Breath hides passion.

Your jet braids jutted out in reckless fashion.

Why did you give my grandmother the Bible,

your last girl’s youngest child, as in a fable?

Did you tip your black ink across this table?

I stroke its pool. I wish I was still able

to ask her of you, where small coals would glint

the desk in shepherds’ kitchens. She was sent

on trips for an old woman, strangely bent,

to village shops, which sold gunpowder then

which the old woman spooned out, smiled, despatched

each twist, rammed up the flue. Awed children watched

soots fall like rain, black laughter I can catch.

What good can one desk do? Give me your match.

I.O.W.

I have seen China, in its deepest cold,

Russia, where each platform showed for sale

a samovar, a soldier’s coat unrolled.

In Kenya, I heard lions breathe through the night

behind thin skin of tents. Now stiff and grey

I check late ferries for the Isle of Wight

which I saw once, once only, a faint smudge

my eyes strained after, from a darkened beach.

What does it hold? More beaches I could trudge,

Victoria’s house at Osborne, a brick city

where grief could wander down the garden walks,