The Observances

by Kate Miller

Overview

The Observances is Kate Miller's first full collection of poetry. As its title suggests, with the intertwining practices of watchfulness and remembrance these poems sustain their course. They follow an urge to locate in language, however tentatively, elements of a world that change or fade. Within her landscapes, the attentive eye and ear preserve the subject, fixing it in time and memory, renewing - through compulsive inspection - faith in the unresolved, even - in what Elizabeth Bishop called 'self-forgetful' attention - at the poet's own expense.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781906188283
Publisher:	Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date:	05/01/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	88
File size:	200 KB

About the Author

Kate Miller grew up in Hampshire and now lives in London. She studied Art History at King’s College, Cambridge, and Fine Art at Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design, London. In 2012 she completed a PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she taught in the English department. She has received a number of awards including the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Prize in 2008. Selected for the 2011 and 2013 Salt Best British Poetry anthologies, her poems have appeared in journals including Poetry Review, The Rialto, The SHOp, Warwick Review and the TLS, to which she also contributes an occasional introduction to a ‘Poem of the Week’. This is her first volume of poetry.

Read an Excerpt

The Observances

---

By Kate Miller

Carcanet Press Ltd

Copyright © 2015 Kate Miller
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-906188-30-6

---

CHAPTER 1

WAVE ... CLOUDS PASS

    Regarding a Cloud

    In the ground is an eye,
    satined and turtled,
    regarding a cloud.

    It studies the scene
    from a patch in the earth
    and reflects: I am part of that sky.

    Just a picnicker's spoon
    with no handle, exposed
    by a scalping of growth,

    and it's upside down,
    mortared in mud – as jewels
    were set in the eyeholes of gods

    till they fell from the temples.
    No-one thought twice about
    gouging them free.

    But it must be earthed here,
    as Antony says, to 'amplify
    concentration'

    holding the trees in its stare,
    balancing us on its shell.


    Promise

      The earth is scanty over London
    clay, sour with runoff, a swollen underpass
    of beige.
      I hoped it would be sweet enough
    for planting but already I'm forgetting
    the purpose of my dig.

      As a child I'd fossick
    at the beach or down the garden,
    reluctant – family photos show – to pose,
    back turned against the camera, absorbed,
    uncovering what lay below
      not far below.

      Now pebbles come to light,
    they bob up like small heads.
    I shuck them free of soil, saved
    from the stew of bones, sewer pipe,
    hardcore, next door's
      tossed-over glass.

      With thumb and fingertips
    I clean a clutch of gluey eggs
    – such promise
      in their ovoid forms, damp
    shells – although the shine's ephemeral:
    they never feel like stones.

      As shingle used to
    yield its netsukes,
      and sand its curios,
    so even this poor ground is inexhaustible.


    The Long Goodbye

    You always had a way with clouds,
    as if they'd started life with you, coddled
    in your arms, reared out of bonfire
    smoke or hay-steam from baked fields.

    Landscape painters looked to you to catch
    the best effects, clouds like leopards,
    lions, the great processions of a Byzantine
    October. Now there's little call for craft.

    Or colour – years since you bore flowers
    and drifted suns of pollen on the earth.
    Tip up your grizzled chins and sky-watch.
    Suck on your many pipes and offer me

    bassoon pronouncements
    on the drought, a fray of cirrus,
    freakishness of hail, last hurricane.
    Your old scars map a century of weather,

    the haul of water, how you leaned
    aslant the wind. You stand a long time
    dying, but before you die, old tree,
    let's drink another rain.


    Lines To Convey Distance

    Send me one hundred greys to catch
    the chill and whip of water,
    all those marine and aerial greys
    for squalls, cloud, waves
    in every cast of light,

    also to catch the skirling
    marks of different flights
    when birds take off in pairs or flocks,
    their streamlines paying out,

    and put in samples of some even finer
    greys, close quiet tones to suit
    hunched blots of waders
    who inspect their yards of mud
    for life, singletons, rain-dark.


    Longest Day

    Before you leave, before the sea returns,
    we draw out our walk as far
    from houses and the spire as we dare,
    collecting samphire,
    salt jade for the passage out.

    It grows on mud between the hulls
    where broken boats have gone to grass,
    become the settled parishes of wood and weeds
    I hoped would anchor us.

    And still we speak of journeying and home
    in port and starboard words
    until the pilot buoys and off-shore lights
    begin to roll the estuary tar-sleek,
    a metalled road beneath first stars.

    Nightfall on the longest day
    – it doesn't fall. Detaches,
    lifts the warmth away.


    Every Book is a Long Walk

    I remember starting one, a worn green hardback
    on a headland, warmed by sun but little visited.

    If at first I skipped a page, my eye was met
    by black-lashed wild pansies,
    staring from the carpet in the dunes.

    Here were horses, scrapping gulls – much like the book.
    Two characters slipped off along a Baltic beach,
    I sat by the Atlantic.

    Scanning the sea he talked of prospects,
    life not bound by trappings,
    pastimes or the filial duties of their age.

    And she believed the freedom he proposed
    would suit her, à la mode and bridal
    in the streaming lace of waves.

    I closed the book. I walked and saw her faintly,
    filmy in the shallows – then braving coarser surf,
    undone to her shift and shivering,

    grey as in a mirror
    in an unfrequented room – passing
    to and fro, passed by

    as if she were the shoreline
    ceding to, emerging from the tide.


    Couple in the Park with No Kids

    Beyond the scratchy skirt of yews
    my ambling dog has nosed, a couple lies
    engrossed, half-screened (have they skipped work?)

    pleasure-seeking in the dusty earth.
    High-shine, two cans askew in grass have given them away.

    Flies graze,
    a self-effacing moth lifts itself
    off scabious, those pale, heavy-headed flowers.

    At Kew one August we lay likewise side by side
    on tombs, behind a pall of rhododendrons. That afternoon

    a pride of pregnant women bloomed
    along the gravel paths, juggernauts of happy families
    drove swags of babies past.


    No Place

    Did you kip here on this lakeside bench, hunched
    kid with pepper hair? You're shaking, are you scared?
    Those are holes in your black trainers? Just begun
    your London life by sleeping rough? (I'm trying not to
      stare.)
    You're deaf to my 'Hello' and dumb.
    Eyes down, we both look sorry, blind to the pair
    of crested grebes, crooked like question-marks, who skim
    to a deserted clump of reeds, their nest year after year.


    The Hoopoes Have Come Home

    My father calls. He interrupts me
    folding down a family of shirts and stiffened sheets.
    He says the hoopoes have come
    home. His eye is on them

    now: they strut between the pines, prospecting,
    always doubling back to that
    patch where the tower burned.
    With banded heads like hammers

    they fine-pick in the dirt – wrecking
    where we used to sit; in spring, he sighs,
    it's only briefly green until the hoopoes come.
    Time for his old lament (I fumble

    the refrains) about the birds, forgiven
    for their grubbing-up but never
    letting him forget this was their field,
    ditch and scrub he cleared for house, sheds, folly.

    City birds, I say, behave as if our backyards
    were the hood: crow speared another frog,
    jays squabble three doors down, starlings
    scrape gutters for the moss,

    and all the while I'm watching skipping tits forsake
    the ivy's closeness and flit
    quick, flicker like matches lighting.
    I do not ask after Mother.


    Against This Light

    You ask me, Marie-Amélie, am I the youth
    who said goodbye last month?
      To answer you
    I'll paint myself against this light, immersed in
    your first words from home, tempered in the blaze of blue
    and gold that is an April sky in Rome.
    In my high-ceilinged room the window opens
    on a crinkled map of roofs and parapets.
    Swallows clip the sill. In their bright air
    I thrive.
      I ache to think of you – confined,
    the Cast Room stove not lit since Easter,
    among the plaster limbs the master favours – frozen
    forms I've left behind.
      Everything I see
    if I go down to watch the market in the Campo
    moves: knives and scales flash at fish stalls
    decked with lemons, to the thrum of forge and stable,
    fresh stone-dust loads loaves and cheeses, and a girl
    in carmine slips into the shade beyond a column,
    out of the flap of sun-bleached linen.
      I own I've fallen
    more than half in love with Romans. Young or old,
    they hold themselves as proud as any figure in a frieze.
    I'm hungry for the way a woman turns her head,
    the telling language of a trader's hand.
    Alive or carved, they're definite and grand,
    even in the shadows of an alley, warm.


    all'antica

    Hot with pink, fruit trees strip, slop blossom
    on the rubble wall, when out [through garage doors]

    across our path is thrust the gleaming barrel
    of a mare – not a battered motorino – oiled

    flanks, arched tail swinging from the bronze
    rump like a sign above a shop.

    Her handler's swearing as she bucks,
    hooves ringing on the stones.

    Between the trees stooped gardeners turn to look,
    then go on, unconcerned, the tools to hand

    unaltered since the year the Empress indulged
    her husband's whim for orchards.


    On Lower Marsh, the Wallflowers

    self-seeded, streaky oxblood/English
    mustard, breeze along hot bricks
    in sunshine. Their sweet smell of sherbet
    coaxes from the pissed-on wall
    another possibility:
      substitute hibiscus
    for the small pink swimsuit
    draped where it was found and left
    to fade.
      Under the arches in olive green
    a man shouts out he always likes to
    see a woman's collarbones. Only
    April but she's taking off her cardigan
    to be presented with a sheaf,
    liver-dark in her white arms,
    of wallflowers.


    Not Dormant Now, la Belle au bois

    If you want her, try the attic
    where she won't be dressed much longer
    in a painting shirt, old canvas shoes.

    She's all for mingling
    in the evening's passeggiata
    among a crowd in pink and gold

    escorted by a crocodile of cupids
    on little clouds that sail
    from Titian to the Biennale.

    She's going to ride in water taxis
    to and from Murano,
    squander all her savings

    on a longed-for chandelier.
    I guess when she returns
    she'll keep the house and garden

    just as crummy as the locals do
    in Venice. Let the cupboards smell
    of must! I don't believe she ever will

    replace that red ill-tempered rose
    with one less spiky. Anyway, she rather likes
    the scratch of briars on glass.


    Passage

    Within the wood a century is all
      but lost, graves overgrown, headstones
      tumbled, going-nowhere stairs,
      disconnected from the distant dome and towers,
      the rush of comfort from a passing train.

    Wind and a pigeon hurry overhead
      along green pipes of ash and elder.
      Two branches hold the moment of their passage,
      lacing, give them lease, like lungs.
      Two paths diverge.

    One leads a slow life
      lying lush beneath the polished ivy,
      the other has a pelt of sorts,
      a rug of mulch, rag and bone of littered leaf.
      Dog detects a trot of fox, the stop of feet.

    And the path you'll take
      meanders. Punts its snaky trace through weed,
      as a boat – responding to the river's pull –
    cleaves a road, rich and dark as bread, that carries
    someone home
      at first light, before green closes over.

CHAPTER 2

LIFE CLASS

    Patient at Paimio

    Dusk lasts till midnight, dawn lights up at two,
    long-drawn days – I follow Keats
    and if a sparrow come before my window
    I take part in its existence
    and pick about ... On this path lingonberries
    grow, where needles drop from feathered pines
    to lie in rafts, browning, as my fellows do,
    on the sun decks of our forest ship.

    We never seek landfall – only I
    take in the creak of woodland, thump of water
    in the purifying plant, bird squawk, infrequent
    engine thrums. A laugh drifts from the sauna
    – some acrid edge of resin in the steam
    triggers the old impulse to cough
    as if bacilli kept on doubling daily,
    shoving, crowding into the lift of my lung.

    After the sweats, white nights, snow-blank
    ... so many passing hours scarcely sensed,
    today I'm breathing – ozone – and I smell
    the warming bark of leafless birches
    budding in the light.

    I'm in a clearing when I feel
    the swell inside my sunken back,
    a readying of wings.


    Observances: The Chapels at Paleochora

    In every tiny church
    a tattered mat,

    an old pair of plastic
    or rush-seated chairs
    placed neat and straight

    before the vestiges of murals.

    * * *

    We have climbed the hill
    and visited fourteen,

    each with its whitewashed apse
    each nearer to an empty
    larder than the last,

    preserving on a shelf,
    beside a shallow dish of oil,

    thin candles for a prayer,

    a water bottle much re-used

    and ironed red plaid
    cloth on which a faded holy image rests.

    * * *

    Outside a nearly hidden door
    where fig-leaves droop

    old trees are proffering
    black fruit.

    Fallen almonds
    still in thick grey coats
    dry in the dust.

    * * *

    Silver-gilt, on thorny stalks,
    tall brittle weeds,

    brass umbrels

    and a fence of blood-brown sorrel
    spikes thrust from the verge

    lances and arrows of desire.

    * * *

    A pilgrim's button, broken
    mother of pearl, seeks to be blessed,

    set down to dress a shrine.

    Compelled, palms cupped,
    we gather up and ferry
    into cool stone rooms

    simplest of gifts, the offerings.


    The Deposition

    A ladder has its old feet taped
    to keep from scratching
    parquet in the gallery.

    How often it has stood there
    flecked with paint, stiff as a tree,
    beside the other ladder's picture

    in the presence of familiar
    tools from daily life:
    nails, rope, bucket, knife.


    From the Gods at Oz Adana, [Pas de
    deux

    a ritual observed

    Light enough for us to see her
    settling like a large gull to its ledge,
    her shalwar faded to the once blue
    colour of the bench

    and light enough for him to go on
    weeding rows of beans. Beneath
    the vine she's shelling beans
    he brought her in a basin.

    Dusk gathers its brown air
    above the earth they tended.
    Insects hush
    as bats begin to net the sky.

    She goes indoors. A little light, perhaps
    a single bulb, illuminates the room
    where almost nothing's set
    upon the table or beside their bed.

    He cleans and stows his tools,
    she brings outside two bowls.
    A canopy of grapes is not so dense
    it stops the moon

    tracing their duet. Shooting stars
    flare overhead and they look up.
    He helps her to her feet. They step
    into the garden, bowing to the night.


    Pilgrimage

    to the Palominos, Zippo's Circus

    Unharnessed in the sun
    they splay like Calder's sculptures
    being placed by crane, and where they hover

    muzzles scan the earth,
    mole-skinned, mumbling at the turf.
    One paws, another makes a stream of piss.

    Heads up, one bites a rival, the pretty blond
    kapok of shaken manes can't veil
    big teeth which grip the gully of a corded throat.

    Composed again, the tables of their spines
    and buff boiled-egg behinds are suntraps,
    sands smoothing dunes.

    They'd overwhelm their devotees,
    small girls on pilgrimage, but for CCTV and wire,
    electrified, to keep the awestruck out.


    The Apple Farmers' Calendar

    And after all these years she wears
    a skin of dirt. He didn't take her
    down at the millennium,
    too fond of letting his eye
    run to her pale belly,

    a quince compared to stripy
    watermelons that block the light
    beside the dented pewter bowl
    weighed low by a pumpkin
    heaved on the scales.

    The woman at his stall
    haggles for a better price
    while, inches from the plank
    where he wraps figs
    in fig-leaves, Eve regards him

    with her usual calm.
    The apple in her hand
    is coated in a powdering of dust,
    swirled by the growers' trucks
    that labour up the mountain.

    Delicate, she offers it
    time after time. If now and then
    she slips, her painted toes
    just touch the bluish paper
    he keeps to parcel eggs.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The Observances by Kate Miller. Copyright © 2015 Kate Miller. 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

1 WAVE ... CLOUDS PASS,
Regarding a Cloud,
Promise,
The Long Goodbye,
Lines To Convey Distance,
Longest Day,
Every Book is a Long Walk,
Couple in the Park with No Kids,
No Place,
The Hoopoes Have Come Home,
Against This Light,
all'antica,
On Lower Marsh, the Wallflowers,
Not Dormant Now, la Belle au bois,
Passage,
2 LIFE CLASS,
Patient at Paimio,
Observances: The Chapels at Paleochora,
The Deposition,
From the Gods at Oz Adana, Pas de deux,
Pilgrimage,
The Apple Farmers' Calendar,
Girl Running Still,
Under the Hill,
Life Class,
And now you,
Isolated Vocal Track,
3 VIGILS,
Landscape in Light Cast by the Moon,
Minding the Antiquarian Bookseller's House,
From the Sleeping Car,
God of Flame,
Colour Beginnings,
At the Root of the Wind is Strife,
Single Figures,
The Realism of Late Roman Portraits,
Solo,
Emergency Landing,
4 ENTER THE SEA,
Enter the Sea,
As It Was,
At the Dew Pond, West Dale,
The Shift,
Of Vertigo,
Sallyport,
After the Ban,
The Sea is Midwife to the Shore,
House at Sea,
Nelson's Last Walk,
Sea View and Separation, Sole Bay,
Stay,
The Crossing,
Again (reprise),
Notes,
Acknowledgements,