Tripping Over Clouds

by Lucy Burnett

Overview

Tripping Over Clouds issues a bold challenge to Ezra Pound's maxim to 'go in fear of abstractions'. Underpinning this is a re-imagining of abstraction as a prior state of possibility and potential from which the world and ourselves are constantly re-emerging – as abstraction to, not from. Both philosophical and fresh, the poetry trips off and back onto the page, like the fellrunner in its opening section: 'to talk about / the pleasure principle / of falling downhill fastly'. Lucy Burnett's second collection explores how we fetch up with the world in all its variety, difficulty and beauty, ranging across encounters with mountains, love, contemporary politics and visual art. Ultimately this is a poetry which asserts hope, and playfulness, as strategies for navigating an inherently changeable sense of now.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784107444
Publisher:	Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date:	07/08/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	64
File size:	281 KB

About the Author

Lucy Burnett is from south-west Scotland, and in recent years has been based in the north of England. She currently lives in Cockermouth, where she gets out in the fells at every opportunity, and works as Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Cumbria. Previously she has worked at Leeds Beckett, Salford and Strathclyde Universities, and before that as an environmental campaigner for organisations including Ramblers Scotland, and Friends of the Earth. Apart from writing and academia, she is a photographer, a keen fellrunner and recently completed climbing the Scottish Munros. Her website can be found at: www.lucyburnett.net.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

or is this day a day this mountain and the ways of wind against air and the time of did you love the moment or did you ever choose to love the moment you see me dare to hope the best to touch of solid air and until further then to mountain

Big Sands

The grains were small as the storm had thrown them
– over – and I was waiting for the weather and strong legs to return me to a mountainversion of myself that the years had carried elsewhere.

Can you hear the rustling of grasses and the cries of crooked-angled gulls as they unbecome the wind and the individual storms in-fighting for their portion of morning?

This is a not a day for the beach but of the seashore.

The sand makes gritted seaweed from my hair as an elongated snail traverses machair to a predetermined nowhere. Wagtails line the roof of a boarded hut while a kite spears the clouds like an inverse sunbeam; a tern nibbles the edges of some barbecued wood and the tumbled laundry of a down-day is crafting the motions of a 'pound for fourteen minutes' of waves.

This is a place of uncalled-for space and by the grace of the big sky,
and the serrated under-silhouette of Skye,
an invitation to the sea unfolds to come and dine with mountain.


The fellrunner

to talk about the pleasure principle of falling downhill fastly

I agree with running
  mainly

      the condition of mud
      as controlled slippage

    feet dancing
    to the score of impulse
    dripping rainbows from my smile

      my innocence

implies a headlong gravity:

  mountain
  heartbeats failing
  drowning saltwater

    I sometimes even think

  how little
  death might be

    but barely

      foot-studs

stopping-up the past participle to fall


Brig-hills

Brag before brig and the hillsides flatten you

  each its part apart from our slow slow-way –
we chased our shadows into mist and danced away the final gravities –

  down the furrowed foreheads of ancestral pathways –
ancient droves the cows had cut to slipping gutturals

  each pelt of rain unseaming
  seems of early autumn.

To speak of nature – then – would have been to ridicule such clarity of body and the pain-paving descant of the fells

  the runners are fledged
  cattle bellow
  the fells improvise their own decay.

Our lines were memorised
(muddied and returned forgotten)

    such hurdling sway
  to brag before whose vowels flattening.


Pendle

from the cumbric word
'pen' meaning hill or head

I did not dream euphoria of hillsong failing nothing but

if the heart might stop a moment like a photograph

my questions wore the hillside from the poem and this pulse of pen

a hill a head

the passage of our feet eroding moments:
if my failures were a kind of memory I put my heart into

Dunmail Raise

wait awhile not yet not yet the morning these herdwick bone-broke heathers chill to the wind where my seat is but a sandal to the sky now drops to water take this mountain mind one eye-step further to the climb the curve of shoulder nethermost and opening upon such yellowness: dun moorland edges at the cliff-raise wake the caw of dunmail – thermals crowning contours rising early leave displacement touches on a summit cross-cairn and the crow-stole day

I purchased wisdom

from the strands of moorland grasses brushing up against my forehead at the someplace where we lost the wind

the blue sky opened to butterflies and wildflowers and the sunshine cuffed my shoulder where my body met my skin

this blade of grass this bone an imprint of a moorland and the moorbirds calling still this solitary moment not alone

this blade of bone this grass this calling into stone and still this sometime sometime where the grasses grasses will


Stoodley Pike

There is no measurement of mist as long as my imagination continues emptying –

  we swam the unbounded edges of the common moor

   (no beginnings nor endings woken from the mist)

  everything we could not see contained the weight of water

  built
  before
  our eyes

  an obelisk
  of disappearance
  drawing weather
  from stone

   (now you can
  see through me
  now you don't – the sublimity
  of translucent bone)

I cannot extend to you much further than this memory withheld within the hollow monumental shell of things


Shepherd's Skyline

spared length tributaries –
sharp passage

  a spine's brain offering of long miles spilling the fast of the dipping hill's horizon to my corporeal quick

  to speak of skin and muscles
  and the address of isolated limbs –

    I wore the speed
    of the shepherd's skyline like sciatic fell

    posterior chains
    of falling exhilaration
      a multiplicity of erosions
    and the metallic taste of lactic frost

to be alive is a free submission –
a reduced pain threshold of tomorrow always comes and the foreground heartbeat travel of the mud-bleak moorland smiles


Three things I love (and three things over)

I wish to speak to you

of happiness and many other little things –

what's the collectivity of that much smile?

the faraway springtime fields the potential monotony of

  against walls
  against clouds
  against the road end

or where cows masticate the green green grass

  and if there's nothing funny
  about the shape of the wind

then what's your preferred form of loss?


Bat-running

(the Calderdale Way)

we run out of the night sky with our brains slanted holding fast to the acceleration of black earth and the weather receding from our outheld grasp

when we hit the moor the speed of stones overwhelms the grass in search of music

  colder

    calder

      calmer

and while my compass undoes our instinct for direction our headtorch beams lead onward down the paving slabs of Pennine night –

there is no single word to capture the sense of valley shadow-swimming

   (what if permission to continue becomes
  more interesting than permission to change?)

my fascination with a rusted barbed wire fence has little to do with constant corners moonlit cloud banks promises of rain


Newlands

I ate the valley that tried to get away

I was already running late but it had this look about it

so juicy green

you asked if we could drink a gluttony of sun

and fuck tomorrow as if we literally meant it

the valley had this look about it that took my guts away we built ourselves a home from bone nests and we ate that too


Crow Hills

barely space for namesakes between driving weather

two crows' unconscious recollections fall into reflection of displaced memory:

  the encephalisation quotient of a moorland outlives the future of
  sexual dimorphism which gathers in large communal roosts of
  intelligence – and if you can still differentiate then murder is not
  monogamous – how wonderful!

the omnivorous moorlands joust with dense fossil omens

– two hills two hills –
amidst the close proximity of others –


Flower Scar

of what there is but and the turbines cut the tussocks of my eye and all this purity

  adrenaline was shitting it

I'd willingly give my insides to the flower that scarred a mountain

   (I even dreamt of stopping-
  up the hillside with sky)

the peewits are like sugar-acid burning through the bog-moss veins

  and the eerie sibilance of electric wind becoming

  breath

I extended my flower-scarred body to the moor and ran with it


Marathon

after Nicolas de Staël

Harsh way on the long concrete path –
the athletic equivalent of stone-throwing.

The marathon runner's body wore the echo of his physicality in explosive fits and starts –
sinews of red green white on a dull background beat of grey.

Muscles composed upon the reverse of themselves – canvas on oil –
an anxiety of colour finding expression in 26.3 long strokes of irregular emotion:

  the runner wears the awkwardness of co-existence in an impasto of symbolic gesture encoding meaning in convention alised movements of please –
will you never take my hand?

The more I looked the less I seemed to understand. The runner took a palette knife to his prodigal return and crafted his excess from it.


Fascia

Of course it was always inevitable.

My inflamed tread on the mountain became a torn connective tissue – bog tendons –
a ruptured insertion of nerve-bracken

yet still the frontal lobes of rocks lay still

  prone to abstraction –

(other worlds lie flat to prevent the earth from running?)

  The mountain's eyes
  remained resilient
  as the passage of granite.


Sleep-standing

I have this to say to knowledge

of the kind that woke the horse

where it stood

  still
  sleeping

and realised that the day had begun before it

  and if the dew feels cold as diamonds on the neck

  or your limbs leaf-shortened as the trees

then look!
there still, the valley

  look! the sun


So much mountain

i. Lurg Mhor

beyond fear is a remote kind of freshwater electricity lacking comparative grandeur

  beyond the corrie of the fallow cattle sharp slabs of moss slip through the cliffs of the long ridge alone

this is the place of nameless rivulets untrodden flanks of mountain antler spine –

  the mist is lost inside itself and while my blood tastes of mercury my slightness echoes in my ears like dam-shadows –

the future runs fast as closure and the reservoir's blind eye

ii. Sgritheall

from screel to sgritheill as a linguistic traverse of everything I've ever loved from south to north

mountains wearing sky and purpling –
heather embodied in rising rock-water –
stones fall from my feet like I am shooting meteors

iii. A'Mhaighdean

you want names and I give you names –
the pure hard matter of them

I did not see a single person and the pinnacles fell into the sky like stalactites and me out here alone with rocks for boots and the clouds enclosing on me and I dare you to tell me that anything is not now possible. A maiden is a mountain. My thoughts are stacked and ruddy. The lochan is black and white and yesterday's rain already sprouting from me.

Lochan

at the end of the speed of sound

  where just the early morning hum of tree traffic and mist-clothed hopes of yet another day to come and another yet gone –

heart as little exhibit as a brain of cumulus where forests strip mountainsides of timber long as cul de sacs

while steam inversions of a world in negative cause the largest stones to float –
a dream is a dream is –

not even yet a loch that took the place that was no place at the end not yet a road and still a kind of depth we might have swum with it

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Tripping Over Clouds"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Lucy Burnett.
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.

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Table of Contents

Title Page,
Dedication,
Tripping over clouds,
I,
Big Sands,
The fellrunner,
Brig-hills,
Pendle,
Dunmail Raise,
I purchased wisdom,
Stoodley Pike,
Shepherd's Skyline,
Three things I love (and three things over),
Bat-running,
Newlands,
Crow Hills,
Flower Scar,
Marathon,
Fascia,
Sleep-standing,
So much mountain,
Lochan,
II,
At,
I love nobody but,
How doth the moon,
Birdsong,
Lavender Mist,
We begin again,
The incremental lightness of love,
Gibbous moon,
The narrow handle,
Sacking and Red,
Girl with a basket of fruit,
Sunset, revisited,
The infinity of nothing,
Untitled,
The Poetess,
Sticks,
Seeing Round Corners,
A near-continuous accumulation,
Beer for two in Brockler Park, Berlin,
III,
i. Fin de siècle,
ii. A hermetic landscape portrait,
iii. From the inside of a water lily out,
iv. If the subject cannot count,
v. Towards Newton,
vi. Before time,
vii. Me and the Moon,
viii. Composition,
ix. Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses,
x. Orthogonal,
xi. The wooden mannequin,
xii. I am plant hammer,
xiii. 5 x 5 = 25,
xiv. Cinema Dance Hall,
xv. Redesigning the building house,
xvi. Bird in Space,
xvii. The Birth of the World,
xviii. Morning Henri,
xix. It's all over the city,
xx. At the edge of August,
xxi. Of texturology,
xxii. Homage,
xxiii. Full Fathom Five,
xxiv. Painting,
xxv. Untitled / and dancing,
xxvi. Seagram,
xxvii. Onement,
xxviii. Reflections on the materiality of abstraction,
xxix. White Field,
xxx. Blue,
xxxi. Alphabet,
xxxii. Plight,
xxxiii. Neo-untitled,
xxxiv. The figurative abstract,
IV,
Apropos of nothing,
Me and my sister,
Where is winter?,
Antarctic skies,
Although the visitants wore fedoras,
Sotto voce,
Application to be a war artist,
Ben Hope - a direct plebiscite,
Painterly Realism of a Football Player,
The brexfast after,
The birds still singing,
Despite the negative press covfefe,
The dripping tap,
The necessity of the intellect,
The flight of the guillemet,
The thing about eggs,
De-named,
Mouvements,
Cryptic,
Dead time,
The Electric Press,
Big Friday,
Of the roses,
About the Author,
Also by Lucy Burnett,
Copyright,