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ISBN-13: | 9781847776679 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Carcanet Press, Limited |
Publication date: | 11/01/2012 |
Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 1000 |
File size: | 318 KB |
About the Author
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To Hell with Paradise
New and Selected Poems
By Gareth Reeves
Carcanet Press Ltd
Copyright © 2012 Gareth ReevesAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84777-667-9
CHAPTER 1
NEW POEMS
Airs
I
Clearing the gutters:
the surprise
of leaf skeleton,
intricate bird-bone,
skein of rib-cage,
delicate eviscerations
– friable, porous,
to no purpose except
the mind's distraction.
II
Shrink until you are
beside yourself
looking ecstatically down
on times before
the talk set in,
the forevers, nevers, maybes,
the buts, ands, if-onlys,
the conjunctions and conjurations.
III
It may be too early to begin this,
it may be too late,
it may be over,
it may not have started:
words that haunt, precisely,
with an uncertain music, not to be
unsaid or said again
in any idiom. Ungainsayable.
Nothing will take the words back.
IV
Feathery constructions
of breathless air float
in the mind's eye,
roving unstoppably
to undreamt-of horizons,
lands of speculation.
They do not compromise.
They say over and over
we are here, we are here.
V
Shaping themselves
to clouds that mount
in perpetual transport,
pellucid opacities,
giving a body
to nothing that lives
except in the head.
VI
Nothing that lives in the head
lives, or dies. Nothing
will take its place.
Conduct a music
of stolen airs,
you have nothing to lose.
Lost haunt of the intimate:
it comes over you daily,
undreamt indifference,
burgeoning inhospitalities,
unsayable vows,
uncertainties so pronounced
they leave no room for denial
– except retreat
back to the self, dark chamber
of self-preservation and regard.
VII
That give delight and hurt not.
Some hope.
That work themselves up
into a semblance of bitter sense,
scurried fantasias,
arrogant, uncompromising,
becoming their own distraction,
getting their own back,
running riot, thrusting, insistent,
unequivocally
barbed and bristling,
fertile, almost familiar.
VIII
Go on, give yourself airs:
I put on airs, you put on airs,
he puts on airs, she puts on airs.
Go on, conjugate it,
dress the words up,
the little bursts and flourishes,
the forevers and I love yous,
in sharp suits, in stealthy lingerie.
Put them on, give them
a new lease, watch them
take on a life of their own.
IX
The scenario is not
played out, it is not over,
it never is, it is forever, for
ever. What is that for
for, what is it doing?
Say what you will
the shemozzle doesn't settle,
the dust never settles,
it is unsettling, it is moving,
it moves to its own tempo,
it comes and it goes like this,
it flies off at a tangent,
then for no reason it comes up close
to sit on my shoulder and parrot
things it has got
but not by heart.
X
Rest assured, this is a put-on,
a way of saying the things people say
without meaning much
except the sense you make
of yourself to yourself.
Sink into them,
sink your teeth into them.
XI
No use now giving yourself airs,
no use now taking a deep breath,
no use now gasping for air,
no use now going with the knowing air
– and no use summoning the vacuities,
the blank circle tightens its grip:
you cannot take
anything back, things said,
unsaid, could have said,
pregnant pauses,
sterile silences, resistancies,
they are not yours now.
Keep them, give them away: you cannot.
They are not even yours to forget.
The Shape of Pain
What figure has the pain of the toothache, and our remembrance
of that pain? Is it triangular, or circular, or of a square form?
James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783)
Every day it gets a little less.
Wait for the vanishing point.
Parallels reach for infinity.
It goes on gnawing at the edge.
Somewhere out there it stops, it must.
Out there the blue intensifies.
Tomorrow remember it today.
Today imagine it tomorrow.
Look forward to the backward look.
Every day it grows a little less:
I want it and I do not want it to.
I give it a shape. I give it this.
Azure
You dare not say what happened,
it is not finished
or so you like to think.
Watch the vapour trail
slice the sky slowly, then
dissolve to a spine
of puff-blooms in
an extravaganza of desire,
and say precisely when
the last fleck fades
to nothing, if you can.
To be possibly
the object of no
speculation, to see
yourself reduced to
untraceable episodes,
a deep breath
in the air of denial,
in the azure absolute,
is a release,
a sort of life, if you will.
Absolute
These words for you,
these words instead of you,
in anticipation
of their rejection,
that they may return
to their owner pure
as when they set out,
unsullied by understanding.
We are as we are
they say, standing for
nothing but ourselves,
so do not read us, do not say us,
do not sing us, do not
show us to anyone,
that in isolation we may hold on
to whatever it is we know, barely
content but unflinching
in our absolution,
compensation
for you
instead of you.
Lost Clusters
If I could say this to you
there would be no need to.
I say it to myself therefore.
Therefore is a difficult word for
it speaks of after and before.
Now is the time therefore
to see it, say it, therefore
the dawn still gives of itself,
the sure hills know it,
and the sky they inhabit,
that this is no metaphor:
those sentences of air
tight-lipped or breathy
still rove the horizon,
indiscriminate, reticent, there.
Nacre
Lucent, iridescent lustre, mother-of-pearl ...
It sounds like its opposite: nacreous dark,
acrid flame, acid lake, sharp sand ...
'This one I swallowed raw,' she whispered,
enclosing in his palm the parting
gift of an oyster shell, barnacled, chipped,
mauve-tinted, purple-edged, brittle;
and he thinks of her on the seashore,
sliding the oyster, silky, bitter, slick,
into her mouth, before she knew
this was the gift she would give,
before he knew he would lie here
feeling the shell's satin convex,
would conjure her soft resilience,
her throat muscles working the flesh,
the salt taste, to this more-than-parting,
to this lustrous white-out,
this nacred hell of ending.
The Bullet
You have killed something,
you don't know why –
deliberately,
though you did not know it.
Having nothing to say
but the whole bang shoot,
you made do with
glances and ricochets,
until one stray
returned, direct.
It rankles,
it works in and in.
You can feel it gutting.
The harder you hunt
the deeper it digs,
this bullet, entering.
Abstracted
To my surprise I wish you ill.
Inside my head you go your way
my way, you feel pain
as I would have you feel.
I talk with the ghost of you
who are not dead yet,
though you soothe with dead gestures.
Burnt on cortex and retina
you fade and fade.
So leave me to my idea,
my first and last things,
and this chaos
I shall call my oasis.
I shall live here as long as I like.
Not to forget. To be forgotten.
Quake
I am your skeleton.
Do not open the door, I might fall out.
Often you glimpse me through chinks
though when I rattle you seldom listen.
Sometimes I think I must have made me up,
a figment of bones, a construction to get you.
But no, I am your constant monster.
Though barely articulate
laughably I try not to fall in a heap:
I must say my say, I must
stay in one piece, I must keep going.
Therefore I turn on my heel,
I give you the cold shoulder.
So do not worry, I am moving
slowly away now – although
first I would strip you to the bone
and shake you.
Figment
I was your wish made flesh.
I was the years thrown down,
marbles for you to skid on,
I glittered and you dived,
I filled your hands and fled.
I come to you now as abstract,
I shift and shimmer, I hesitate before you,
I flutter, I twist, I turn away,
I shrink, I beckon, I come close.
I am the life you have not led,
I am the life you will not lead.
I give a shape to your imaginings,
I am not here except you conjure me,
I float before you in no retina,
I swim in the mind's eye.
I live before and after.
You do not let me
and I do not let you go.
We want it
and we do not want it so.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from To Hell with Paradise by Gareth Reeves. Copyright © 2012 Gareth Reeves. 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,Acknowledgements,
NEW POEMS,
Airs,
The Shape of Pain,
Azure,
Absolute,
Lost Clusters,
Nacre,
The Bullet,
Abstracted,
Quake,
Figment,
Relief,
That's It,
Crowsfoot, there,
Therapeutically Speaking,
Static,
Messenger,
End Man,
Gremlin,
The Possible,
Still,
You and Not You,
PIN,
Self Efface,
She,
Knots,
from LISTENING IN (1993),
A Funny Smell,
Bob Tombs,
Gaps,
Mimsy,
Gadgets,
A Dying Art,
Mollusc,
Oxford,
Laid Back,
Freshman English, USA, 1970,
Making It,
Doggo in CA,
High Life,
The Cockroach Sang in the Plane Tree,
Travels,
Out of Season,
Umbilical Cord,
Going Blind,
1 Look, No Mirror,
2 Notching,
3 Sticks,
4 Touch Type,
5 Listening In,
6 Artwork,
7 The Entertainer,
8 Pentels and Smells,
9 Pots and Pans,
10 The Great Fire,
11 Daily Bread,
12 Deus ex Machina,
13 Tentacles,
14 Douane Syndrome,
from REAL STORIES (1984),
Stills,
Theme and Variations,
The Mentor,
England, my England,
English Lesson,
Out of Bounds,
Can We Interest You in God?,
End of Term Report,
The Graduate Trainees Take Off,
Regret,
Central Valley, California,
Rat Race,
California Sounds,
Pugilistic,
California Drift,
Melting Pot,
Pepper Tree,
A Slawkenbergian Tale,
Silence,
For Carole,
Paediatric Ward,
Stone Relief, Housesteads,
Blind Pianist,
Church Wall,
TRANSLATIONS,
Horace I, 11: Tu ne quaesieris,
Horace I, 37: Nunc est bibendum,
Catullus 2: Passer deliciae meae puellae,
from NUNCLE MUSIC,
Notes to 'Nuncle Music',
Index of Titles,
Index of First Lines,
About the Author,
Copyright,