We Could Be Anywhere By Now E-Book

Katherine Stansfield

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

Seitenzahl: 52

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Katherine Stansfield has made a name for herself both as a wryly witty poet of the everyday seen 'aslant' and as a popular novelist of crime and fantasy. Her second poetry collection, We Could Be Anywhere by Now, is pointedly full of poems about placement and displacement. After a childhood on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, she moved to mid Wales, and this book explores relationships between these two places along personal and linguistic lines, as well as notions of insider / outsider in Wales and England, learning languages, and the languages of learning to leave places behind. New horizons beckon: we voyage to Italy, Canada, the United States. Stansfield is never eager to pronounce but always approaches her subjects in an oblique, artful way, carefully avoiding cliché and relishing the strange, the overheard, the marginal, the accidental comedy and tragedy of the everyday."Katherine Stansfield writes poems that test language and our place in it, and show how the words that help us anchor ourselves in can suddenly cut us adrift. Perhaps that's why, whatever her subject, her words are so well-chosen, the tones so deftly-handled. These poems are multi-layered and full of surprising transitions: we never quite feel at home in them, yet wouldn't want to be anywhere else." – Patrick McGuinness"Katherine Stansfield's imagination uses logic and rhythm to push her poems into surprise. She dares to tackle one of the ultimate questions: daring to make a new home. Generously, her poems provide beautiful refuge for her readers." – Gwyneth Lewis

Leseprobe

We Could Be Anywhere By Now

For Sue Mitchell

We Could Be Anywhere By Now

Katherine Stansfield

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 Katherine Stansfield to be identified as

the author of this work has been asserted in accordance

with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

© Katherine Stansfield, 2020.

ISBN: 978-1-78172-567-2

ebook: 978-1-78172-568-9

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: ‘Arcitection’ by Eugenia Loli

Author photograph:Two Cats in the Yard

Printed in Bembo by Severn, Gloucester.

Contents

ONE

Fear of flying course

Iaith / Ilaeth

Tick ONE answer only

Misdirection

Against blood

Soundings, Newtown

after living in Walesmy voice

TWO

Beware Welsh learners

Second Welsh class

Welsh has no K

FOG

Ecoutéz la cassette

Klonjuze

Fourth Welsh class

Cornish / Welsh / space

Messages in bottles found at Tan-y-Bwlch, Aberystwyth

The suitcases

THREE

Old airfield, Davidstow

The local historian questions her life choices

Bodmin Moor time capsule

Talk of her

At the Minack

Alternative route

From the notes found in the wreckage of the university

and his daughter

You have to be easy-going as a Susan

At the Bristol half marathon

Poem for a wedding

Mars Girl

Soyuz

FOUR

One way

Flight risk

Fire at the National Library of Wales

Please don’t take me away from Morrisons

Amy, how to write poems

Soundings, Oxford

Spaghetti al Wittgenstein

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Châtignac

When I was at my most fortunate

FIVE

Vexiphobia

Relative distance

At a party in the States

Three beers in, Sunset Beach, Vancouver

The birds of British Columbia

Notes

Acknowledgements

ONE

‘First I thought it was by Katherine Mansfield and then I find

this is a young poet published by Seren. Is she Welsh or English?’

– Comment by leahfritz posted on The Guardianonline, 24th November 2014 in response to ‘Canada’by Katherine Stansfield as Poem of the Week

Fear of flying course

We have coffee.

We are encouraged to share our goals:

we would like to see Vancouver

we need to move to China where our wives and husbands

have new jobs

we miss our grandchildren in Auckland.

We have coffee.

We go to the loo and in the queue

we ask each other if we’re OK.

We wear rubber bands round our wrists which

we must twang when we imagine our plane deaths.

We are told to place our fear on a scale of one to ten.

We are all number ten: afraid.

We have coffee.

We are meant to discuss our attitudes to change but instead

we ask each other if we’re OK.

We must write down our biggest fears.

We write down fire, geese in the engines, the doors opening mid-flight.

We are more afraid than ever now.

We twang our rubber bands.

We have coffee.

We go to the loo and in the queue

we admire the welts on our wrists from the rubber bands.

We compare panic attacks: who shakes? Who falls down?

We have coffee.

We ask each other if we’re OK but

we have no time to go to the loo because we’re running late.

We recognise the therapist from Channel 4 and are impressed.

We do as she says, choosing strong colours to stand in.

We are told to be the best that we can be.

We must picture ourselves in cinemas where

we are watching ourselves die on screen in a plane crash.

We must play this film backwards in our heads to the Benny Hill

theme tune.

We are confused.

We have coffee.

We go to the loo, ignoring the clock, and in the queue

we slag off the therapist.

We go to the airport.

We twang our rubber bands.

We wait for the plane that is delayed.

We joke, this makes the practice flight like real life!

We are amazed that we can joke at a time like this.

We twang our rubber bands.

We board.

We ask each other if we’re OK.

We twang our rubber bands.

We sit in our strong colours, being the best that we can be.

We think of Vancouver, China, Auckland.

We open our eyes.

We see all the burnished gold

of Birmingham below.

Iaith / llaeth

After araf, which is slow, on the long mountain roads

that wound to the sea, pulling me to town,

the first word I learned to see was iaith,

which is language, because it is the world:

not just in the new sounds spoken around me but

written, worn – iaith on posters, t shirts,

on badges and graffiti

I saw but never said

and when others did I mixed it up with llaeth,

which is milk. Seems I’ve been putting iaith

in my tea ever since I arrived. It’s iaith

that fed my bones and set me walking home

again on the long, slow mountain roads.

Tick ONE answer only

Is she Welsh or English?

You know they sewed Olivia Newton-John

into those trousers in Grease

Is she English or British?

The talent show prize

was leaving home

to return

Is she British or Cornish?

to the place

she was born

Is she Cornish or Welsh?

In the online store, four cups

with her face on: $20

Is she Welsh or British?

Her mother cancelled

the plane tickets back

to Australia

Is she British or English?

told her it was good

to broaden horizons

Is she English or Cornish?

On stage, Sandy’s American

Is she Cornish or Welsh?

Olivia’s accent made her

Australian in the film

Is she Welsh or Cornish?

Starring:

Olivia Newton-Johnas herself

Is she Cornish or British?

Some nuts think Sandy drowns

at the start of Grease

Is she British or Welsh?

and the film’s a pre-death

hallucination

Is she Welsh or English?

At the end she’s flying

up to Heaven

Misdirection

Writing poems makes me bite