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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781847774422 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Carcanet Press, Limited |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 72 |
| File size: | 237 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Parallax
By Sinéad Morrissey
Carcanet Press Ltd
Copyright © 2013 Sinéad MorrisseyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84777-444-6
CHAPTER 1
1801
A beautiful cloudless morning. My toothache better.
William at work on The Pedlar. Miss Gell
left a basket of excellent lettuces; I shelled
our scarlet beans. Walked out after dinner for letters —
met a man who had once been a Captain begging for alms.
*
The afternoon airy & warm. No letters. Came home
via the lake, which was near-turquoise
& startled by summer geese.
The soles on this year's boots are getting worn.
Heard a tiny wounded yellow bird, sounding its alarm.
*
William as pale as a basin, exhausted with altering ...
I boiled up pears with cloves.
Such visited evenings are sharp with love
I almost said dear, look. Either moonlight on Grasmere — like herrings! —
or the new moon holding the old moon in its arms.
Baltimore
In other noises, I hear my children crying —
in older children playing on the street
past bedtime, their voices buoyant
in the staggered light; or in the baby
next door, wakeful and petulant
through too-thin walls; or in the constant
freakish pitch of Westside Baltimore
on The Wire, its sirens and rapid gunfire,
its beleaguered cops haranguing kids
as young as six for propping up
the dealers on the corners, their swagger
and spitfire speech; or in the white space
between radio stations when no voice
comes at all and the crackling static
might be swallowing whole a child's
small call for help; even in silence itself,
its material loops and folds enveloping
a ghost cry, one I've made up, but heard,
that has me climbing the stairs, pausing
in the hall, listening, listening hard,
to — at most — rhythmical breathing
but more often than not to nothing, the air
of the landing thick with something missed,
dust motes, the overhang of blankets, a ship
on the Lough through the window, infant sleep.
Shadows
My shadow this morning on the station platform
looks impossibly stretched and beaten thin:
a stiltwalker's shadow, all legs and no torso;
a dun metal casing left after a hammering.
Late February sunlight, winter's filigree
still inside it. Beside me the bins
are casting vast apparitions
of themselves over the yellow line
while my head has lain itself down
across the tracks, the way it wanted to
all those years ago, in Amsterdam,
near the Leidesplein, before the see-through
boy with his quiver of arrows
could claim me as his own.
It jolts bolt upright as the Carrickfergus train
vanishes in the opposite direction.
I could be a dissident in a textbook in Soviet Russia
discovered after the print run
and painstakingly blackened out by each teacher,
or a stage set after the lights have blown
on a tinkly Victorian performance in reds and golds.
I could be blood in a black-and-white video.
The platform is shining with salt.
My shadow displaced at the waist is taking a bow.
Lady other, Lady mine, if I stood here all morning
I'd watch you retracting back like drowning soap.
Shadows of candles on church walls at Evensong
manifest not as flame, but smoke.
Shostakovich
The wind and its instruments were my secret teachers.
In Podolskaya Street I played piano for my mother
— note for note without a music sheet — while the wind
in the draughty flat kept up: tapping its fattened hand
against the glass, moaning through the stove, banging
a door repeatedly out on the landing —
the ghost in the machine of Beethoven's Two Preludes
Through All the Major Keys, that said they lied.
Later I stood in a wheat field and heard the wind make music
from everything it touched. The top notes were the husks:
fractious but nervous, giddy, little-voiced,
while underneath a strong strange melody pulsed
as though the grain was rigging, or a forest.
In all my praise and plainsong I wrote down
the sound of a man's boots from behind the mountain.
Photographs of Belfast by Alexander Robert Hogg
The year the Great Ship Herself
is fitted out
at the mouth of the Lagan,
her panelling
drilled through and threaded
with miles of electric cables
and her gymnasium
horses finally bolted
down —
fifty cubic tonnes
of soot
falls over the city
in drifts, in rain, in air
breathed out then in again,
re-textured as dust.
He notices
the stark potential
of tarnished water
for the glass-plate photograph:
how there are slate tones
and oiliness together
and how, in standing pools
and running drains,
it coats the children's feet
with ubiquitous, gritty ink.
Alleyways and back yards
snag on his mind:
he can barely pass an entry
without assessing
the effect the diagonal
of a porterhouse roof
beside a streetlight
might produce, whereas
to photograph a yard
on Little York Street —
its ruin of toppled bricks
and broken guttering,
the windows of its houses,
open holes —
is to cast the viewer out
onto the no-man's-land
of her own estate
and to prove the eye is banked
as much by what unravels
as by flint.
There is the tidy shop
he makes his tidy living in
selling a wallet
of possible poses
for posterity: the Father
with his watch-chain,
the Sailor on his stool.
But for this commission
from the Corporation
he's sending home
dispatches from Sebastopol
Street in which
a man by the railings
ghosts himself
by turning his head too soon.
One cannot tell
if the room in the photograph
entitled Number 36
is inhabited —
light from the missing
upper storey is shafted
by jutting planks,
the fire-black walls
are crystalline
and yet outside similar terraces
with crumbling masonry
and dark for doors,
in bedraggled
unspeakable arcs
he's conjured with his shillings,
each child strong enough
to manage it
carries a child.
Home Birth
The night your sister was born in the living-room
you lay on your bed, upstairs, unwaking,
Cryptosporidium frothing and flourishing
through the ransacked terraces of your small intestine
so that, come morning, you, your bedding, me,
the midwife even, had to be stripped and washed.
Your father lifted you up like a torch
and carried you off to the hospital.
You came back days later, pale and feverish,
and visited us in the bedroom in your father's arms.
You turned your head to take her in: this black-haired,
tiny, yellow person who'd happened while you slept.
And you were the white dot of the television, vanishing —
vanishing — just before the screen goes dark.
A Day's Blindness
December. The year at the back of it
blown and shrunk to dark
in the morning, dark in the afternoon
and the light in between
like the pale blue flicker of a pilot light
in a boiler's black intestine.
There was the usual breakfast
— coffee, soda bread, jam —
neither one of them speaking.
Her slept-on hair. The papers
still to go out for and a walk
to the top of the road and back,
past crows' nests fisted in trees,
to look at the Lough. It happened
at once: no jolt, no warning,
no shutter cranking low
over everything, no shadows
starting off on the periphery
like hares in fields
then gradually thickening.
He stood up to carry his plate and cup
to the sink and couldn't see.
He sat back down. The clocks
went on consuming Saturday.
He would have needed practice
at being blind to pretend to be sighted.
He had none, so she saw.
The son was away in Florida.
He asked her to leave, and for hours then,
as through the womb's wall,
he heard her about the house,
moving around upstairs,
using the bathroom, and perhaps
just once — or twice? —
saying something soft
and incoherent into the telephone.
Outside, at a quarter to four,
a watery sunset broke over
the squat hills. He couldn't tell
the lifting and the thud
of the returning dark apart.
He sat on at the table,
rolling crumbs beneath his thumbs
and waiting, either for what was taken
to be handed back —
the fridge, the kettle, his cuff-linked shirt —
or for the kleptomaniac visitor
he couldn't lock out
to be done with it, finally,
to sever the link —
to haul him up out of his chair,
into the hall, and through the brown door
to a garden ruined with hooves
and there would be
horses set loose from the Bond Yard
where his father worked
in the Hungry Thirties,
their coats engrained with soot
and their heads encased in steam,
accusing him.
Display
movement is life
— slogan of the Women's League of Health and Beauty, 1930–1939
Hyde Park, 1936. Cold enough for scarves and hats
among the general populace, but not for the fifteen thousand women
from the League of Health and Beauty performing callisthenics
on the grass. It could be snowing, and they of Bromley-Croydon, Slough,
Glasgow, Belfast, would don no more than a pair of satin knickers
and a sleeveless satin vest to spin and stretch and bow
the body beautiful. Athens in London, under a sodden sky,
and Winnie and Molly and Doris metamorphosed.
On the edge of the revolving staves of arms and legs,
pale as comfrey — an army not yet on the move but almost ready —
there are tents for scones and tea. Kiddies, brought to watch
in caps and plaits, wriggle on deckchairs. Their mothers
carry vast, forbidden handbags on their laps and smell
of Lily of the Valley. All around the periphery,
in huddled clumps of overcoats and smoke,
from offices and railway yards, men joke and talk, gesticulate —
but mostly they just look, quietly and sharply focused,
like eyeing up the horses at a racecourse, but with much more choice.
For those crammed in steaming picturehouses later, a commentator,
brusquely charmed, declares the perfection of British womanhood:
to them belongs the future! — while the ghost of Mary Bagot Stack,
whose dream this is, smiles back. Their hair cut short, slim,
co-ordinated as the League of German Maidens or a chorus set
from Hollywood, fit for birth, the women twirl and kick,
do foot-swings and scissor-jacks, link hands or fall
suddenly flat as pegs in a collapsible building, then bounce back
up again, for movement is life and they are keeping moving.
To hell with it, they may as well be saying. Twist.
To hell with Lizzie Evans and her bitching hate.
With blood and vinegar. With getting in the tin bath last.
With laddered stockings. With sore wrists at the factory.
I've got the fresh-air-body they promised me. Twist. Its electricity.
Fur
At 25 and 29 respectively, Hans Holbein's
burly furred ambassadors haven't got long to go:
the pox, the plague, the ague, a splinter
in the finger, a scratch at the back of the throat
or an infection set into the shoulder joint
might carry them off, in a matter of writhing
hours, at any instant —
Too obvious a touch
to set the white skull straight. Better
to paint it as something other: driftwood
up-ended by magic from the right-hand side
of the tesserae carpet; to let it hang
like an improbable boomerang just under
the clutch of pipes, the lute with the broken
string, still casting a shadow ...
For there is bewitchery in those brown beards yet —
in the (slightly) rakish tilt to the saucer hat
of the ambassador on the left.
Fool's Gold
For other men
the world is a woman
and their craving assuageable.
To say every waking thought
is surely to exaggerate,
but in my bowel
as much as in
my brain, my foremost sin
is gold. Its pristine glint and heft,
vaulted beneath my palace
in coins and necklaces,
masks, goblets,
was not enough
to stop the famished wolf
of my desire, to shut its throat.
So therefore, John Wright,
who stole and dipped
in your magic vat
a rose from my
buttonhole, smilingly,
and then lifted it out transmuted
into gold — you proffered
the key and did
not know it
to a blissful
plenitude, my soul's
ultimate, jubilant relief. I witnessed
tarnished candelabras
lowered as brass
come up licked
by the sun;
your workshop hung
with busts and angels, merchants' seals
and swords so luminescent
light itself sent
spies to steal
their secret.
And while chariots
and stallions and my own slick
mounted, radiant self bloomed
instantly in my mind,
I knew the trick
to set me there,
my newfound noble elixir,
the needle to be passed through,
the famed alchemical ingot
I could not do without —
was you.
Jigsaw
The Royal children have been sent a gift —
A map of Europe from 1766
Complete with longitude, painted onto wood,
Like any other map in brown and green and red,
But then disfigured: cut up into parts,
A disassembly of tiny courts
Strewn across the table. There is a key
To help the children slot, country by country,
The known traversable world in place:
Little Tartary, Swedish Lapland, France,
The Government of Archangel. The sea
Has been divided into squares, crudely,
As though the cast-iron sides of nations
Still applied (but with more attention
To geometry) while the engraver's signature
— A circle, his name, a folded flower —
Has been deftly sawn in half. If successful,
The three young princes and the oldest girl
(This is not, after all, a lesson in diplomacy
So she can play too) will, ironically,
Undo the puzzle's title and its claim:
Europe Divided in its Kingdoms
Shall be Europe reconfigured, whole.
They start in the top left corner with the scale
Then fill the other corners in: 'Part of Africa',
A scroll, the blank of simply 'Asia'
Rolling off to hordes and steppes and snow
Beyond the boundary. Outlines follow,
Aided by exquisite lettering:
'The Frozen Ocean' solidifies across the map's ceiling ...
And so the Royal children spend an hour
Staring and exclaiming, clicking together
(What joy!) the angled buttress of a continent —
Their own unlikely island on a slant
By its farthest edge, and in their trance ignore
What will no longer fit: Aortearoa, America.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Parallax by Sinéad Morrissey. Copyright © 2013 Sinéad Morrissey. 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,
Epigraph,
1801,
Baltimore,
Shadows,
Shostakovich,
Photographs of Belfast by Alexander Robert Hogg,
Home Birth,
A Day's Blindness,
Display,
Fur,
Fool's Gold,
Jigsaw,
Puzzle,
Photographing Lowry's House,
Migraine,
Daughter,
V is for Veteran,
Last Winter,
A Matter of Life and Death,
Signatures,
Through the Eye of a Needle,
The Doctors,
The Evil Key,
Yard Poem,
Lighthouse,
The Coal Jetty,
'Ladies in Spring' by Eudora Welty,
The Mutoscope,
The House of Osiris in the Field of Reeds,
The Party Bazaar,
The High Window,
Peacocks and Butterflies,
A Lie,
Blog,
Notes,
About the Author,
Also by Sinéad Morrissey from Carcanet Press,
Copyright,