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- Herausgeber: The Poetry Business
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Weighing the Present includes poems about family and wider society, often through brilliantly evoked particular details and specific scenes from 'everyday life'. Short linked poems, which amount almost to sequences, deal with difficult material - elegies for lost friends for instance - while still remaining somehow lifeaffirming. At the heart of the book are tender but unsentimental love poems. A new collection from Michael Laskey is always a cause for celebration.
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Weighing the Present
Michael Laskey
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the editors of the following magazines and websites: Arete, The Dark Horse, The Poetry Review, The Rialto, The Spectator and Poetry International Website. Special thanks too to The Poetry Trust for commissioning 'Treatment' as part of a residency in 2009 at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital and to the artist Ian Starsmore for commissioning 'Ladder' to accompany his 2013 exhibition at Cambridge University Library.
Published 2014 by
smith|doorstop Books
The Poetry Business
Bank Street Arts
32-40 Bank Street
Sheffield S1 2DS
www.poetrybusiness.co.uk
Copyright © Michael Laskey 2014
Digital Edition © 2015
ISBN 978-1-910367-24-7
Michael Laskey hereby asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Repairing the Bicycle by John Quinton Pringle
Author photo: Claire McNamee
smith|doorstop Books is a member of Inpress,
www.inpressbooks.co.uk. Distributed by Central Books Ltd., 99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN.
The Poetry Business is an Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation
Not That He Wrote Poems
but in the dream he’d been giving a reading,
launching his latest collection,
and once he was finished, with the audience
drifting off, he wondered out loud
if he’d sold any books. Oh dear friend.
Not only no queue, not a single
hanger-on to shield us from the view
of the stacked table. Precious few
dreams bring him back and yet
what did I go and do, but pretend
not to hear, then making myself wake up,
left him friendless, diminished there.
The Unexamined Life
I didn’t look at the carcass
stretched on the road by my gate
any more than I had to know
the open-mouthed head and neck
twisted back was muntjac.
I wrapped myself up in the word,
a muffler against the cold,
and keeping close to the kerb
rode past on my bike,
intent on making the baker’s
before they sold out of small browns,
loath even to imagine
bone spikes sliced through muscle
or the belly a staved in barrel
spilling out stuff.
And while I was gone, someone else –
from pity or driven to it
by the hold-up to the traffic or knowing
what venison’s worth – got a grip
on its hooves, I suppose, and removed it.
Must Be About Now
she’s due to go in for her hip
it occurs to him – he’ll give her
a ring, although who knows,
she may already be home,
more or less able to hobble
along that hall to the phone.
An email would be better –
he might have an address,
he could check – but of course
what she’d like best, his old-
fashioned friend, is a letter.
How kind of him to have written,
to have taken the trouble, he imagines
her thinking as she unfolds it,
though he hasn’t, and isn’t, and won’t.
Catch
Winter, dusk falling, long snow
frozen stiff in the tractor tracks
on the stubble field opposite,
yet it could still happen again,
you could drive through a city you’re new to,
past parades of stubborn shops –
a butcher, hairdresser, chippy –
