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ISBN-13: | 9781847777041 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Carcanet Press, Limited |
Publication date: | 02/01/2013 |
Series: | Oxford Poets series |
Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 160 |
File size: | 494 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
New and Selected Poems
By Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Carcanet Press Ltd
Copyright © 2013 Chris Wallace-CrabbeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84777-704-1
CHAPTER 1
NEW POEMS
Salt on the Tongue
We just can't do without it, watery friends,
acrid sodium chloride, the spice of our lives
adding that Certain Something as a poem does:
our mineral tang of wry intensification
used even by the scribeless tribes for money.
Lacking it, life would be insipid;
poetry zings on the lolling tongue
having crept up on you,
quiet as a glittering lizard
or the water swelling in at last
by parched banks.
Between these angular crystals and
their dark blue sea we live.
While Half Asleep
The muse of failed memory
takes no hostages,
her coiffure has long been
counter-curled by loss;
she drives you out beyond
the senior moment
crumpling the wrappers
of old familiar names
(Didn't he surely begin
with M or with P?)
and chucking them on the couch-grass.
Without
a mini-scruple she batters
and empowers you,
curt as a parade-ground
sergeant major
or the pink-faced, blond
Latin teacher at school,
who did however expect you
to remember
all the unspoken verbs
in their conjugations.
The muse of wilted memory
will certainly hint
at the general outlines,
vague geometry
of knowledge that ought to be
sharp as a pencil,
but leaving it more, then, like
slippage of dream.
Who wrote Thingo? you ask
when you need it,
only to get the answer
too bloody late,
over coffee. Yet she's the one
coming back up with
one big crazy
illumination
that shakes the back teeth
out of your head.
The muse of lost memory
will wheel you
into the whitewashed nursing-home
called Grief
and then console you there
with her smorgasbord
of all the lost items,
glittering
like those oddball gems
on Kim's memory tray
before which, though, she waits
like a blackamoor page
for your green, ardent, hopeful
tryings-out.
On the Lawn All Day
Friday. Takes more than this to interest
Rhode Island reds mechanically clucking and dipping
in their ramshackle corner of life.
Au revoir.
Dark prunus frames a bodgy bedframe here;
one poor cupboard tilts over the lawn
behind intricate heads of smokepink valerian.
The tumbledown garage is plumfull of chairs,
reject paintings, exotic bottles, the globe,
everything from a drumlike pouffe to books
deeply miscellaneous in cardboard cartons.
Here are the dregs of sticky liqueurs,
easel, cushion pile, radio cabinet:
archaeology of a mind,
cheek by jowl and higgledy-piggledy
but rather less dusty now than yesterday.
The Murano salad bowl glows like coral
and here's a neon tube, unattached;
somebody's tennis racquet has no strings.
A garden's long slope sighs round all such
reorganisation of a lifetime,
a raggedy sycamore flapping way above it,
and that swayed silver gum graceful as any harp.
Here's a burgundy Peugeot, crammed
with indescribable rubbish for
its daily trip to the tip-face, meeting there
gulls, avid ravens and dust. These boxes and boxes
provide the punctuation of departure,
crooked boughs are pumping out crimson apples,
Blackie still carols from the gingerbread rooftree
and the chooks peck-peck, like wind-up toys.
Spranto Lost
Once on a time
Time was a language
Once on a time
Old everybody spoke
In god's esperanto
Once in the language
They made a lot of bricks
A bric-a-brac of bricks
To stack and stick and stack
Way up to heaven
A tower in clouds
Aloud in the cloud
Stack rattle pop
And they all could speak
In god's esperanto
Not happy, little men,
Said the god like thunder
Booming broadly
Against that babble
Of people from Babel
So he broke their language
Like bits of firewood
And blew them all away
Across the desert
Of differing tongues
Off now they scattered
Camelback muleback
Misunderstanding
But yearning still for
The language umbrella
A Language
for Jacob Rosenberg
The summer streets run full of other diction,
Bright faces, differential skirt-lengths
And the bare tummies of young girls,
Which is a curious fashion
But Yiddish sits in the café on his own
Mouthing sweet syllables as they fade
Over the final piece of strudel,
His coffee gone cold as forgetting.
An Autumnal
When I come back to this garden after my death
will the black walnut tree have been cut down,
the brick-and-galvo studio made over into flats
reflecting what will have happened all over town?
I wonder just what my airy after-self will find
that the present me could even recognise
roughly, as being something we lived amid;
what will confront my hypothetical eyes
and spiritual vision? Will the bluestone paving
be there, tangled vines and archaic gingko tree?
I wonder how my grandkids' generation
will be getting along: at all familiarly?
If a posthumous person can view things with horror
will my airy unself shrink back from the tacky way
fashion can rot the linework of certitude,
making more of a mess from townscape every day?
Will the blackbird's descendant still be pecking, though,
at our patchy lawn? Parrots will squeal overhead,
I'm sure. The hedge may still murmur hints of us
or the corrugated tanks.
But I'll be dead.
Reverie of Dora Pamphlet
When I'm a-snooze in my basket
all the world's at peace
(whatever 'world' connotes);
maybe my basket is all the world
in dark-time.
Those bipeds reckon that I dream
but I don't entirely know
what they could mean by that.
In the morning, the two big ones
sip at their cups of tea
and I stretch pretty stiffly
half-ready to jump up
on their wide bed – if I still can.
After their morning paper thing
(whatever that is, really)
one of them scrambles up
and lets me out the back
or, now, their front door
where I have a welcome pee
somewhere familiar
carefully chosen.
Then I'm back in, safe as houses
under their kitchen table;
they have no meat at breakfast-time
for some creaturely reason.
Humans are regular animals
in my long experience:
they walk me and then go to work –
after my due biscuits.
Some days I even
go in to his lovely office;
it has difficult stairs, alas,
but those women spoil me to bits.
You'll always know me, of course,
by these perfectly white feet.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from New and Selected Poems by Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Copyright © 2013 Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Dedication,
Acknowledgements,
New Poems,
Salt on the Tongue,
While Half Asleep,
On the Lawn All Day,
Spranto Lost,
A Language,
An Autumnal,
Reverie of Dora Pamphlet,
Skins,
The Big Bad,
A Lowly Cattle Shed,
The Sharpener,
Surfaces,
Summertime,
Shadows,
More Swift than Stern,
The Dream Injunctions,
Robert Browning at Bundanon,
Gymnorhina Tibicen,
Glory Be,
Concerning Cheer,
Dear Class,
Epifania,
Chekhov Days,
Up at a Villa,
At Coswell,
The Left, the Left,
The Troubled Weather of Humanity,
Rendition,
Mayhem,
Air,
Quatorze Juillet,
Submerged Cathedral,
Father-in-Law,
Flowing,
The Poem of One Line,
That Which Is,
Selected Poems,
from The Music of Division,
Practical Politics,
Citizen,
The Wife's Story,
from In Light and Darkness,
A Wintry Manifesto,
Melbourne,
The Swing,
In Light and Darkness,
The Secular,
Wind and Change,
from The Rebel General,
Carnations,
Traditions, Voyages,
from Where the Wind Came,
The Centaur Within,
The Joker,
In Hay Fever Time,
Other People,
Signs,
Chaos,
Where the Wind Came,
from The Foundations of Joy,
Last Page from an Explorer's Journal,
The Wild Colonial Puzzler,
Hey There!,
Again,
The Foundations of Joy,
from The Emotions Are Not Skilled Workers,
Genesis,
The Shape-Changer,
Bennelong,
New Carpentry,
Puck in January,
Old Men During a Fall of Government,
Now That April's Here,
Introspection,
from The Amorous Cannibal,
Gaspard de la Nuit,
A Stone Age Decadent,
Mind,
Nub,
Squibs in the Nick of Time,
Exit the Players,
The Bits and Pieces,
Practitioners of Silence,
Words,
Sacred Ridges above Diamond Creek,
The Amorous Cannibal,
from I'm Deadly Serious,
There,
The Starlight Express,
Genius Loci,
Stardust,
The Mirror Stage,
God,
The Thing Itself,
from For Crying Out Loud,
They,
An Elegy,
Trace Elements,
The Life of Ideas,
The Inheritance,
Puck Disembarks,
Mental Events,
The Bush,
River Run,
And the World Was Calm,
For Crying Out Loud,
from Rungs of Time,
Autumn Lines for Michael Hofmann,
Drawing,
Sunset Sky near Coober Pedy,
Looking Down on Cambodia,
Reality,
Afternoon in the Central Nervous System,
Good Friday Seder at Separation Creek,
from Selected Poems (1995),
Ode to Morpheus,
What Are These Coming to the Sacrifice?,
Why Do We Exist?,
from Whirling,
Erstwhile,
We Live in Time So Little Time,
The Idea of Memory at 33 Celsius,
An Equine Prospect,
The Whistle Stop,
Timber,
Wanting to Be a Sculptor,
Memories of Vin Buckley, Spelt from Sibyl's Golden Leaves,
Years On,
The Crims,
Yabbying,
More Loss,
from By and Large,
Truth and Silence,
The Rescue Will Not Take Place,
Easter Day,
A Vignette,
Cho Ben Thanh: Richmond,
Brink,
An die Musik,
Out to Lunch,
In the Scent of Eucalyptus,
The Missing Lyric,
Between Dog and Wolf,
Toward Birregurra,
Kangaroos,
Lightness,
We Being Ghosts Cannot Catch Hold of Things,
New Year,
from Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw,
And Terror,
It Sounds Different Today,
The Domestic Sublime,
From the Island, Bundanon,
Daphne Fitzroy,
Delivering Tact,
Grasses,
The Speech of Birds,
Intermezzo,
The Stone's in the Midst of All,
Mozart on the Road,
A Summons in the Peak Period,
Loving in Truth,
Oh Yes, Then,
Index of First Lines,
Index of Titles,
About the Author,
By the Same Author,
Copyright,