A C. H. Sisson Reader
352
A C. H. Sisson Reader
352eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781847772855 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Carcanet Press, Limited |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 865 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A C. H. Sisson Reader
By Charlie Louth, Patrick McGuinness
Carcanet Press Ltd
Copyright © 2014 Charlie Louth and Patrick McGuinnessAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84777-480-4
CHAPTER 1
From The London Zoo (1961) and other early poems
On a Troopship
They are already made
Why should they go
Into boring society
Among the soldiery?
But I, whose imperfection
Is evident and admitted
Needing further assurance
Must year-long be pitted
Against fool and trooper
Practising my integrity
In awkward places,
Walking till I walk easily
Among uncomprehended faces
Extracting the root
Of the matter from the diverse engines
That in an oath, a gesture or a song
Inadequately approximate to the human norm.
In Time of Famile: Bengal
I do not say this child
This child with grey mud
Plastering her rounded body
I do not say this child
For she walks poised and happy
But I say this
Who looks in at the carriage window
Her eyes are big
Too big
Her hair is touzled and her mouth is doubtful
And I say this
Who lies with open eyes upon the pavement
Can you hurt her?
Tread on those frightened eyes
Why should it frighten her to die?
This is a fault
This is a fault in which I have a part.
The Body in Asia
Despite the mountains at my doorstep
This is a hollow, hollow life.
The mist blows clear and shows the snow
Among the dark green firs, but here
Upon the cold, scorched, dusty grass
The camels looped together raise
Their supercilious noses.
Upon the road the donkeys trot
And mule-teams with their muleteers pace.
The country lies before me like
A map I carry in my mind –
A wall built by the Hindu Kush
A plain that falls away to sea
I on the foothills here between
Sniffing the cold and dusty air.
Too long of longing makes me cold
The heart a tight and burning fistful
Hangs like a cold sun in my chest
A hollow kind of firmament.
I can imagine my exterior
The body, and the limbs that run off from it
But there is nothing in it I am sure
Except the ball of heart that weighs one side
Like the lead ballast in a celluloid duck.
And in my head a quarter-incher's brain
Looks out as best it can from my two eyes:
It can imagine how the country lies
To left and right, extensions of the limbs
But has no thoughts that I can understand.
Not only in this land I have felt it so
But on the Brahmaputra where
Bits of the jungle floated down
Black heaps upon the coloured river
When night fell and the sun
A red and geometric disk
Above its square reflection stood
For half a moment and then dipped:
I heard it sizzle in the water.
The flat and muddy banks, remote
Beyond the miles of plashing water
Diminished me
Till, smaller than the skin I stood in
I leaned against the rails and watched
The searchlights on the licking water.
The secret of diminishment
Is in this sad peninsula
Where the inflated body struts
Shouting its wants, but lacks conviction.
Conviction joins the muscles up
But here the body flaps and flutters
A flapping sail in a fitful wind.
In a Dark Wood
Now I am forty I must lick my bruises
What has been suffered cannot be repaired
I have chosen what whoever grows up chooses
A sickening garbage that could not be shared.
My errors have been written in my senses
The body is a record of the mind
My touch is crusted with my past defences
Because my wit was dull my eye grows blind.
There is no credit in a long defection
And defect and defection are the same
I have no person fit for resurrection
Destroy then rather my half-eaten frame.
But that you will not do, for that were pardon
The bodies that you pardon you replace
And that you keep for those whom you will harden
To suffer in the hard rule of your Grace.
Christians on earth may have their bodies mended
By premonition of a heavenly state
But I, by grosser flesh from Grace defended,
Can never see, never communicate.
In London
I float between the banks of Maida Vale
Where half is dark and half is yellow light
In creeks and catches flecks of flesh look pale
And over all our grief depends the night.
I turn beside the shining black canal
And tree-tops close like lids upon my eyes
A milk-maid laughs beside a coffee-stall
I pray to heaven, favour my enterprise.
But whether there is answer to my prayer
When with my host at last I redescend
After delicious talk the squalid stair
I do not know the answer in the end.
Sparrows seen from an Office Window
You should not bicker while the sparrows fall
In chasing pairs from underneath the eaves
And yet you should not let this enraged fool
Win what he will because you fear his grief.
About your table three or four who beg
Bully or trade because those are the passions
Strong enough in them to hide all other lack
Sent to corrupt your heart or try your patience.
If you are gentle, it is because you are weak
If bold, it is the courage of a clown
And your smart enemies and you both seek
Ratiocination without love or reason.
O fell like lust, birds of morality
O sparrows, sparrows, sparrows whom none regards
Where men inhabit, look in here and see
The fury and cupidity of the heart.
In Kent
Although there may be treacherous men
Who in the churchyard swing their mattocks
Within they sing the Nunc Dimittis
And villagers who find that building
A place to go to of a Sunday
May accidentally be absolved
For on a hill, upon a gibbet ...
And this is Saint Augustine's county.
Maurras Young and Old
1
Est allé à Londres
Monsieur Maurras jeune
From a land of olives, grapes and almonds
His mind full of Greek.
Under the shadow of the British Museum
He reflected on the many and foolish
Discourses of the Athenians
And on the Elgin marbles.
The fog settled
Chokingly around the Latin head
Of the eloquent scholar.
Quick like a ferret
He tore his way through
Scurrying past the red brick of Bloomsbury
To the mock antique portals.
The Latin light
Showed on the Mediterranean hills
A frugal culture of wine and oil.
Unobserved in their fog the British
toto divisos orbe
Propounded a mystery of steam
In France they corrected the menus
Writing for biftec: beefsteak.
Monsieur Maurras noted the linguistic symptoms
He noted, beyond the Drachenfels
The armies gathering.
2
The light fell
Across the sand-dunes and the wide étang.
In their autochthonous boats
The fishermen put out
And came back to the linear village
Among the vineyards and the olive groves
Place de la République
Rue Zola
In which names the enemy celebrated his triumphs.
Twenty-five years:
Beyond the Drachenfels
The armies gathered again
irruptio barbarorum
The boats are moored on the étang
For Monsieur Maurras
The last harvest is gathered.
A Latin scorn
For all that is not indelibly Latin
A fortiori for the Teutonic captain
Passing him on the terrace of the Chemin de Paradis
Enemy and barbarian.
Inutile, Monsieur, de me saluer
His eyes looked out towards the middle sea
He heard not even that murmur
But an interior music.
On the Way Home
Like questing hounds
The lechers run through London
From all the alley-ways
Into all the thoroughfares
Until, shoulder to shoulder, they vanish
Into the main line stations
Or the Underground traps them.
A moment of promiscuity at nightfall
Their feet go homewards but their attentions
Are on the nape of a neck or the cut of a thigh
Almost any woman
As Schopenhauer noted
Being more interesting to them than those
Who made their beds that morning.
Silence
Let not my words have meaning
And let not my bitter heart
Be expressed, like a rotten
Pomegranate. Guts full of pus
And a brain uncertain as a thunderstorm
Do not, I think, amuse the muses.
Ightham Woods
The few syllables of a horse's scuffle at the edge of the road
Reach me in the green light of the beeches
Les seuls vrais plaisirs
Selon moy
Are those of one patch between the feet and the throat.
Maybe, but the beeches
And that half clop on the gravel
Indicate a world into which I can dissolve.
Family Fortunes
I
I was born in Bristol, and it is possible
To live harshly in that city
Quiet voices possess it, but the boy
Torn from the womb, cowers
Under a ceiling of cloud. Tramcars
Crash by or enter the mind
A barred room bore him, the backyard
Smooth as a snake-skin, yielded nothing
In the fringes of the town parsley and honey-suckle
Drenched the hedges.
II
My mother was born in West Kington
Where ford and bridge cross the river together
John Worlock farmed there, my grandfather
Within sight of the square church-tower
The rounded cart-horses shone like metal
My mother remembered their fine ribbons
She lies in the north now where the hills
Are pale green, and I
Whose hand never steadied a plough
Wish I had finished my long journey.
III
South of the march parts my father
Lies also, and the fell town
That cradles him now sheltered also
His first unconsciousness
He walked from farm to farm with a kit of tools
From clock to clock, and at the end
Only they spoke to him, he
Having tuned his youth to their hammers.
IV
I had two sisters, one I cannot speak of
For she died a child, and the sky was blue that day
The other lived to meet blindness
Groping upon the stairs, not admitting she could not see
Felled at last under a surgeon's hammer
Then left to rot, surgically
And I have a brother who, being alive
Does not need to be put in a poem.
In Honour of J.H. Fabre
My first trick was to clutch
At my mother and suck
Soon there was nothing to catch
But darkness and a lack.
My next trick was to know
Dividing the visible
Into shapes which now
Are no longer definable.
My third trick was to love
With the pretence of identity
Accepting without proof
The objects 'her' and 'me'.
My last trick was to believe
When I have the air
Of praying I at least
Join the mantis at its prayers.
Nude Studies
They are separate as to arms and legs
Though occasionally joined in one place
As to what identity that gives
You may question the opacity of the face.
Either man is made in the image of God
Or there is no such creature, only a cluster of cells
Which of these improbabilities is the less
You cannot, by the study of nudity, tell.
Tintagel
The clear water ripples between crags
And the Atlantic reaches our island
A clout on the outer headland.
A small band gathered God into this fastness
Singing and praying men; while others
Climbed up the perilous stairway shod in iron.
In every clearing a mad hermit
Draws his stinking rags about him and smoke rises
From thatches lately hurt by rape or pillage.
Cynadoc, Gennys, names as clear as water
Each hill unfolds, and the sheep
Pass numerous through the narrow gate.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A C. H. Sisson Reader by Charlie Louth, Patrick McGuinness. Copyright © 2014 Charlie Louth and Patrick McGuinness. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
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