Unmade Roads E-Book

Alan Franks

• Herausgeber: Muswell Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

A collection of moving, witty and passionate poems about love, loss and landscape, about men and women struggling to find meaning in a land reeling from urbanisation. Here too are beautifully crafted homages to Donne, Arnold, Clare, Betjeman and many more.

Leseprobe

With gratitude to John Betjeman, Robert Burns, Stevie Smith, John Clare, Matthew Arnold, John Donne, Philip Larkin and Robert Frost.

The Contents

The Plumbing

Nothing To Give

Beckettian

I Might Have Been A Hippie If

Dorothic

Around The Time

Wrong End

Shakespearian

Land

The Rival’s Rhyme

Inverse

Transport

The Delivery Of Spring

The Reprieve

My Love Is Like

The Engaging Of Professionals

It Will Not Be Long

The Third Of Us

There Is An Absence

The Train I Am Not Travelling On

Recessional

Burns Run Dry

My Once Fond Love

Not Drowning But Waving

The Case Of John Clare

The Beach At Dover

The Light In Winter (Nocturne On Lucy’s Day)

Philippic

The Taken Road

In A Surrey Parish

The Old Tunes

Unmade Roads

Immanence

Unspiration

Report

Not Long For Here

The Church At Cwmyoy: Four Views

Fall Back

Town In A

Elsewhere

The Taking Down

The Plumbing

Charles the consultant, specialising in the diseases of the seriously wealthy,

Sees something untoward to do with the circulation,

A new resistance in the always complicated but hitherto healthy

System of arterial retrieval and distribution

Down in the dark and difficult gaps and barely get-attable junctures.

The cruel bathroom mirror returns his metaphysical pain,

Observes him consider analogies derived from the lumber puncture,

Then sees him relate to the basin water slowly circling the drain.

Barry, professor of pipes and pressure, Barry, physician of flux,

Pulls the air through clenching teeth as professional plumbers are said to,

Gives his candid prognosis - six more months or one year max,

Reckons the short-term solution lies in the blockages being bled,

Calculates a replacement will see the plump consultant out -

Incontinence’s consequences claiming us all at the last -

Eyes him and sizes him and knows too well to doubt

The reassuringly weak physique of the spreading middle class.

Nothing To Give

Your very stiff - some would say phallic -

Tall white invite in its gold

Surround stands, proud of itself,

With its multi-barrelled Italic

Statement of happiness foretold,

On what I call my mantleshelf,

Disdainfully eyeing the stale

Circulars and overripe bills.

It never expected to slum it

In quite such beyond-the-pale

Company as this. But still,

Now that it’s come, it

Gives, with its martial erectness,

That certain sense of rank

Which overdrafts somehow lack,

That straightening of the back

And appetite for correctness

One gets when one finds a tank

Parked on one’s so-called patio.

I’m delighted for your daughter

And of course for the son of the Hon

God-what-a-mouthful D.S.O. -

Much more appropriate than

The overseas hospital porter

Which did seem quite a phase.

Considering the family schism

Which left your lot as lords

And mine as drunks and frauds

With sundry other isms,

I’m actually quite amazed

To find I’m an invitee,

And can only conclude

That either, since you’re lumbered

With the fuss of a marquee,

And band, and flowers, and food,

You’re worried at being outnumbered

By strangers from the spear-side,

And are enlisting lapsed relations

As a general musters horse,

And are trawling pretty wide,

While hoping no confrontations

Will occur with the imminent in-laws;

Or else you are finally indulging

In a pleasure you’ve been saving,

Which is merely to instil

In me an awkwardly bulging

Social and material craving

Which I will never fulfill.

To stitch that kind of itch

Into a blood-linked adversary

In the guise of open-handedness

Is the brand of guilefulness

Much favoured by the very very

Well endowed and workless rich

Who tend to fill their idleness

With quite illusory tasks

Like ordering four plum cummerbunds

Or phoning the club to ask

How one gets one’s gun

On the night sleeper to Inverness;

Whose free money falls like leaves

And blows in under the doors

And, even in a receding

Economy, comes in sheaves,

Having produced yet more

By being self-reseeding.

Where were we? Ah yes, the wedding;

The Church of St. Mary the Virgin.

The place will be Englishly musty

And the bridesmaids distractingly busty

And some smart neighbour’s boy emerging

As front runner in the bedding

Stakes. There’ll be the mad aunt

And the thin one, flat as the brass

Of the much-rubbed Duchess of Thing;

The dowager with her two-chair arse,

The choir, who can really sing,

The congregation, who can’t,

And goodness and wholeness and piety

And that virtue where love meets duty

Will fall on your blameless child,

And the cream of local society

Will see real, if fleeting beauty

As she makes her way down the aisle.

But then there’ll be the reception

And that brother of yours in horses -

A quite unbelievable nincompoop

In a quite unbelievable income group;

And a boy who seems to own Epsom

And frightening old men from the forces.

The colossal party-patterned

Storm clouds of marriage gather.

It’s not just this dose of Iagos,

Nor the ascendancy of Saturn

Which would stop me accepting, but rather

The question of whether the car goes.

I can stand, I can listen and look,

And pretend I’m not inwardly fighting

The sheer weight of elders-and-betters

Than this would-be man of letters

Who believes that the only good book

Is the one he is still not writing,

And is therefore shamefully squandering

Such gifts as he did inherit

Of the immaterial type

Through his sad compulsion to snipe

And his very ungenerous pondering

Of this one’s or that one’s merit.

What’s this in the card? It’s another,

With the name and address of a store

With a list of consumer durables.

This bears the stamp of her mother

Whose shopping was always incurable

And whose family motto was “More.”

It’s a glorified hat going round

For gifts that won’t even surprise.

I remind myself to remember

How self-acceptance dies

In other family members’