Edexcel Poetry Anthology
Content
1.
Eat Me [Theme:
Power, control, fetish, body politics. A woman is force-fed by her partner
until she reclaims power in a violent reversal.]
2.
Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass [Theme:
Masculinity, destruction, nature vs. nurture. The chainsaw represents male
aggression trying to dominate the resilient femininity of pampas grass.]
3. Material [Theme:
Nostalgia, motherhood, loss of tradition. A daughter reflects on her mother’s
handkerchief as a symbol of fading domestic customs.]
4. History [Theme:
Memory, trauma, personal vs. global events. A father reflects on 9/11 while
watching his son play on a beach, contrasting innocence with horror.]
5. An Easy
Passage [Theme: Adolescence, transition, fleeting youth. A girl climbs
into a house—a metaphor for moving from childhood into adulthood.]
6. The Deliverer
[Theme: Gender bias, cultural critique, global injustice. A woman adopts
a girl child from India, exploring the brutality of abandoned daughters.]
7.
The Map Woman [Theme: Identity, memory,
female experience. A woman bears a literal map of her hometown on her
body—symbolizing how the past shapes our physical and emotional selves.]
8. The Lammas
Hireling [Theme: Guilt, folklore, transformation. A farmer’s hireling
brings both prosperity and a haunting secret—blurring reality and myth.]
9. TO My Nine-year-old
Self [Theme: Memory, regret, childhood. The speaker nostalgically
addresses her younger, freer self—mourning what age has taken.]
10. A Minor
Role [Theme: Illness, identity, performance. A woman reflects on her
marginal existence while battling illness and playing social roles.]
11. The Gun [Theme:
Violence, empowerment, gender roles. The presence of a gun transforms domestic
life—suggesting eroticism, power, and death.]
12. The
Furthest Distances I have Travelled [Theme: Travel, self-discovery,
youth vs. stability. A traveler reminisces about backpacking, finding meaning
not just in journeys, but in everyday life.]
13. Giuseppe [Theme:
War, complicity, morality. A soldier confesses to killing a mermaid during
WWII, symbolizing dehumanization and guilt.]
14. Out of the
Bag [Theme: Childhood perception, medicine, myth. Heaney recalls
thinking babies came out of the doctor’s bag—blending innocence and knowledge.]
15. Effects [Theme:
Loss, grief, working-class identity. A man contemplates his deceased mother’s
life through her personal effects—small items, big emotions.]
16. Genetics [Theme:
Family, identity, marriage/divorce. The speaker explores her parents’ failed
marriage through the metaphor of inherited hands.]
17. From the
Journal of a Disappointed Man [Theme: Masculinity, distance, irony. An
observer watches workmen at a pier, reflecting on masculine identity and
emotional detachment.]
18. Look we have
Coming to Dover [Theme: Immigration, identity, language play. A witty,
poignant take on British identity from the eyes of immigrants navigating their
new world.]
19. Please Hold
[Theme: Technology, frustration, modern life. A man trapped in an
endless customer service loop—a satire on digital alienation and automation.]
20. On Her Blindness
[Theme: Disability, dignity, parent-child relationship. A son observes
his blind mother’s pride and denial with tenderness and restraint.]
21. Ode on a
Garyson Perry Urn [Theme: Art, modernity, youth culture. A parody of
Keats’ classic—examining chav culture on a decorative urn to ask what endures.]
Patience Agbabi
Eat
Me
When I hit thirty, he brought me
a cake,
three layers of icing,
home-made,
a candle for each stone in
weight.
The icing was white but the
letters were pink,
they said, EAT ME . And I ate,
did
what I was told. Didn’t even
taste it.
Then he asked me to get up and
walk
round the bed so he could watch
my broad
belly wobble, hips judder like a
juggernaut.
The bigger the better , he’d
say, I like
big girls, soft girls, girls I
can burrow inside
with multiple chins, masses of
cellulite .
I was his Jacuzzi. But he was my
cook,
my only pleasure the rush of
fast food,
his pleasure, to watch me swell
like forbidden fruit.
His breadfruit. His desert
island after shipwreck.
Or a beached whale on a
king-size bed
craving a wave. I was a tidal
wave of flesh
too fat to leave, too fat to buy
a pint of full-fat milk,
too fat to use fat as an
emotional shield,
too fat to be called chubby,
cuddly, big-built.
The day I hit thirty-nine, I
allowed him to stroke
my globe of a cheek. His flesh,
my flesh flowed.
He said, Open wide , poured
olive oil down my throat.
Soon you’ll be forty ... he
whispered, and how
could I not roll over on top. I
rolled and he drowned
in my flesh. I drowned his dying
sentence out.
I left him there for six hours
that felt like a week.
His mouth slightly open, his
eyes bulging with greed.
There was nothing else left in
the house to eat.
Simon
Armitage
Chainsaw
Versus the Pampas Grass
It seemed an unlikely match. All
winter unplugged,
grinding its teeth in a plastic
sleeve, the chainsaw swung
nose-down from a hook in the
darkroom
under the hatch in the floor.
When offered the can
it knocked back a quarter-pint
of engine oil
and juices ran from its joints
and threads,
oozed across the guide-bar and
the maker’s name,
into the dry links.
From the summerhouse, still
holding one last gulp
of last year’s heat behind its
double doors, and hung
with the weightless wreckage of
wasps and flies,
moth-balled in spider’s wool…
from there, I trailed the
day-glo orange power-line
the length of the lawn and the
garden path,
fed it out like powder from a
keg, then walked
back to the socket and flicked
the switch, then walked again
and coupled the saw to the flex
– clipped them together.
Then dropped the safety catch
and gunned the trigger.
No gearing up or getting to
speed, just an instant rage,
the rush of metal lashing out at
air, connected to the main.
The chainsaw with its perfect
disregard, its mood
to tangle with cloth, or
jewellery, or hair.
The chainsaw with its bloody
desire, its sweet tooth
for the flesh of the face and
the bones underneath,
its grand plan to kick back
against nail or knot
and rear up into the brain.
I let it flare, lifted it into
the sun
and felt the hundred beats per
second drumming in its heart,
and felt the drive-wheel gargle
in its throat.
The pampas grass with its
ludicrous feathers
and plumes. The pampas grass,
taking the warmth and light
from cuttings and bulbs, sunning
itself,
stealing the show with its
footstools, cushions and tufts
and its twelve-foot spears.
This was the sledgehammer taken
to crack the nut.
Probably all that was needed
here was a good pull or shove
or a pitchfork to lever it out
at its base.
Overkill. I touched the blur of
the blade
against the nearmost tip of a
reed – it didn’t exist.
I dabbed at a stalk that
swooned, docked a couple of heads,
dismissed the top third of its
canes with a sideways sweep
at shoulder height – this was a
game.
I lifted the fringe of
undergrowth, carved at the trunk –
plant-juice spat from the pipes
and tubes
and dust flew out as I ripped
into pockets of dark, secret warmth.
To clear a space to work
I raked whatever was severed or
felled or torn
towards the dead zone under the
outhouse wall, to be fired.
Then cut and raked, cut and
raked, till what was left
was a flat stump the size of a
manhole cover or barrel lid
that wouldn’t be dug with a
spade or prized from the earth.
Wanting to finish things off I
took up the saw
and drove it vertically
downwards into the upper roots,
but the blade became choked with
soil or fouled with weeds,
or what was sliced or split
somehow closed and mended behind,
like cutting at water or air
with a knife.
I poured barbecue fluid into the
patch
and threw in a match – it flamed
for a minute, smoked
for a minute more, and went out.
I left it at that.
In the weeks that came new
shoots like asparagus tips
sprang up from its nest and by
June
it was riding high in its
saddle, wearing a new crown.
Corn in Egypt. I looked on
from the upstairs window like
the midday moon.
Back below stairs on its hook,
the chainsaw seethed.
I left it a year, to work back
through its man-made dreams,
to try to forget.
The seamless urge to persist was
as far as it got.
Ros Barber
Material
My mother was the hanky queen
when hanky meant a thing of
cloth,
not paper tissues bought in
packs
from late-night garages and
shops,
but things for waving out of
trains
and mopping the corners of your
grief:
when hankies were material
she’d have one, always, up her
sleeve.
Tucked in the wrist of every
cardi,
a mum’s embarrassment of lace
embroidered with a V for Viv,
spittled and scrubbed against my
face.
And sometimes more than one fell
out
as if she had a farm up there
where dried-up hankies fell in
love
and mated, raising little
squares.
She bought her own; I never did.
Hankies were presents from
distant aunts
in boxed sets, with transparent
covers
and script initials spelling ponce,
the naffest Christmas gift you’d
get –
my brothers too, more often than
not,
got male ones: serious, and
grey,
and larger, like they had more
snot.
It was hankies that closed
department stores,
with headscarves, girdles,
knitting wool
and trouser presses; homely
props
you’d never find today in malls.
Hankies, which demanded irons,
and boiling to be purified
shuttered the doors of family
stores
when those who used to buy them
died.
And somehow, with the hanky’s
loss,
greengrocer George with his
dodgy foot
delivering veg from a Comma van
is history, and the friendly
butcher
who’d slip an extra sausage in,
the fishmonger whose marble slab
of haddock smoked the colour of
yolks
and parcelled rows of local crab
lay opposite the dancing school
where Mrs White, with painted
talons,
taught us When You’re Smiling
from
a stumbling, out of tune piano:
step-together, step-together,
step-together,
point! The Annual Talent Show
when every mother, fencing
tears,
would whip a hanky from their
sleeve
and smudge the rouge from little
dears.
Nostalgia only makes me old.
The innocence I want my brood
to cling on to like ten-bob
notes
was killed in TV’s lassitude.
And it was me that turned it on
to buy some time to write this
poem
and eat bought biscuits I would
bake
if I’d commit to being home.
There’s never a hanky up my
sleeve.
I raised neglected-looking kids,
the kind whose noses strangers
clean.
What awkwardness in me forbids
me to keep tissues in my bag
when handy packs are 50p?
I miss material handkerchiefs,
their soft and hidden history.
But it isn’t mine. I’ll let it
go.
My mother too, eventually,
who died not leaving
handkerchiefs
but tissues and uncertainty:
and she would say, should I
complain
of the scratchy and disposable,
that this is your material
to do with, daughter, what you
will.
John Burnside
History
St Andrews: West Sands;
September 2001
Today
as we flew the kites
– the sand spinning off in
ribbons along the beach
and that gasoline smell from
Leuchars gusting across
the golf links;
the tide far out
and quail-grey in the distance;
people
jogging, or stopping to watch
as the war planes cambered and
turned
in the morning light – today
– with the news in my mind, and
the muffled dread
of what may come –
I knelt down in the sand
with Lucas
gathering shells
and pebbles
finding evidence of life in all
this
driftwork:
snail shells; shreds of
razorfish;
smudges of weed and flesh on
tideworn stone.
At times I think what makes us
who we are
is neither kinship nor our given
states
but something lost between the
world we own
and what we dream about behind
the names
on days like this
our lines raised in the wind
our bodies fixed and anchored to
the shore
and though we are confined by
property
what tethers us to gravity and
light
has most to do with distance and
the shapes
we find in water
reading from the book
of silt and tides
the rose or petrol blue
of jellyfish and sea anemone
combining with a child’s
first nakedness.
Sometimes I am dizzy with the
fear
of losing everything – the sea,
the sky,
all living creatures, forests,
estuaries:
we trade so much to know the
virtual
we scarcely register the drift
and tug
of other bodies
scarcely apprehend
the moment as it happens: shifts
of light
and weather
and the quiet, local forms
of history: the fish lodged in
the tide
beyond the sands;
the long insomnia
of ornamental carp in public
parks
captive and bright
and hung in their own
slow-burning
transitive gold;
jamjars of spawn
and sticklebacks
or goldfish carried home
from fairgrounds
to the hum of radio
but this is the problem: how to
be alive
in all this gazed-upon and
cherished world
and do no harm
a toddler on a beach
sifting wood and dried weed from
the sand
and puzzled by the pattern on a
shell
his parents on the dune slacks
with a kite
plugged into the sky
all nerve and line
patient; afraid; but still,
through everything
attentive to the irredeemable.
Julia Copus
An Easy Passage
Once she is halfway up there,
crouched in her bikini
on the porch roof of her
family’s house, trembling,
she knows that the one thing she
must not do is to think
of the narrow windowsill, the
sharp
drop of the stairwell; she must
keep her mind
on the friend with whom she is
half in love
and who is waiting for her on
the blond
gravel somewhere beneath her,
keep her mind
on her and on the fact of the
open window,
the flimsy, hole-punched,
aluminium lever
towards which in a moment she
will reach
with the length of her whole
body, leaning in
to the warm flank of the house.
But first she
steadies herself, still
crouching, the grains of the asphalt
hot beneath her toes and
fingertips,
a square of petrified beach. Her
tiny breasts
rest lightly on her thighs. –
What can she know
of the way the world admits us
less and less
the more we grow? For now both
girls seem
lit, as if from within, their
hair and the gold stud
earrings in the first one’s
ears; for now the house exists
only for them, set back as it is
from the long, grey
eye of the street, and far away
from the mother
who does not trust her daughter
with a key,
the workers about their business
in the drab
electroplating factory over the
road,
far too, most far, from the
flush-faced secretary
who, with her head full of the
evening class
she plans to take, or the trip
of a lifetime, looks up now
from the stirring omens of the
astrology column
at a girl –
thirteen if she’s a day – standing
in next to
nothing in the driveway opposite,
one hand flat
against her stomach, one
shielding her
eyes to gaze up at a pale calf,
a silver anklet
and the five neat shimmering -
oyster -painted
toenails of an outstretched foot
which catch the
sunlight briefly like the
flash of
armaments before
dropping
gracefully into the shade of the house.
Tishani Doshi
The
Deliverer
Our Lady of the Light Convent,
Kerala
The sister here is telling my
mother
How she came to collect children
Because they were crippled or
dark or girls.
Found naked in the streets,
Covered in garbage, stuffed in
bags,
Abandoned at their doorstep.
One of them was dug up by a dog,
Thinking the head barely poking
above the ground
Was bone or wood, something to
chew.
This is the one my mother will
bring.
*
Milwaukee Airport, USA
The parents wait at the gates.
They are American so they know
about ceremony
And tradition, about doing
things right.
They haven’t seen or touched her
yet.
Don’t know of her fetish for
plucking hair off hands,
Or how her mother tried to bury
her.
But they are crying.
We couldn’t stop crying , my
mother said,
Feeling the strangeness of her
empty arms.
*
This girl grows up on video
tapes,
Sees how she’s passed from woman
To woman. She returns to
twilight corners.
To the day of her birth,
How it happens in some desolate
hut
Outside village boundaries
Where mothers go to squeeze out
life,
Watch body slither out from
body,
Feel for penis or no penis,
Toss the baby to the heap of
others,
Trudge home to lie down for
their men again.
Carol Ann Duffy
The
Map-Woman
A woman’s skin was a map of the
town
where she’d grown from a child.
When she went out, she covered
it up
with a dress, with a shawl, with
a hat,
with mitts or a muff, with
leggings, trousers
or jeans, with an ankle-length
cloak, hooded
and fingertip-sleeved. But –
birthmark, tattoo –
the A-Z street-map grew, a
precise second skin,
broad if she binged, thin when
she slimmed,
a precis of where to end or go
back or begin.
Over her breast was the heart of
the town,
from the Market Square to the
Picture House
by way of St Mary’s Church, a
triangle
of alleys and streets and walks,
her veins
like shadows below the lines of
the map, the river
an artery snaking north to her
neck. She knew
if you crossed the bridge at her
nipple, took a left
and a right, you would come to
the graves,
the grey-haired teachers of
English and History,
the soldier boys, the Mayors and
Councillors,
the beloved mothers and wives,
the nuns and priests,
their bodies fading into the
earth like old print
on a page. You could sit on a
wooden bench
as a wedding pair ran, ringed,
from the church,
confetti skittering over the
marble stones,
the big bell hammering hail from
the sky, and wonder
who you would marry and how and
where and when
you would die; or find yourself
in the coffee house
nearby, waiting for time to
start, your tiny face
trapped in the window’s
bottle-thick glass like a fly.
And who might you see,
short-cutting through
the Grove to the Square – that
line there, the edge
of a fingernail pressed on her
flesh – in the rain,
leaving your empty cup, to hurry
on after
calling their name? When she
showered, the map
gleamed on her skin, blue-black
ink from a nib.
She knew you could scoot down
Greengate Street,
huddling close to the High
House, the sensible shops,
the Swan Hotel, till you came to
the Picture House,
sat in the musty dark watching
the Beatles
run for a train or Dustin
Hoffman screaming
Elaine! Elaine! Elaine! or the
spacemen in 2001
floating to Strauss. She
sponged, soaped, scrubbed;
the prison and hospital stamped
on her back,
the park neat on her belly, her
navel marking the spot
where the empty bandstand stood,
the river again,
heading south, clear as an
operation scar,
the war memorial facing the
railway station
where trains sighed on the
platforms, pining
for Glasgow, London, Liverpool.
She knew
you could stand on the railway
bridge, waving
goodbye to strangers who stared
as you vanished
into the belching steam, tasting
future time
on the tip of your tongue. She
knew you could run
the back way home – there it was
on her thigh –
taking the southern road then
cutting off to the left,
the big houses anchored behind
their calm green lawns,
the jewels of conkers falling
down at your feet,
then duck and dive down Nelson
and Churchill
and Kipling and Milton Way until
you were home.
She didn’t live there now. She
lived down south,
abroad, en route, up north, on a
plane or train
or boat, on the road, in hotels,
in the back of cabs,
on the phone; but the map was
under her stockings,
under her gloves, under the soft
silk scarf at her throat,
under her chiffon veil, a
delicate braille. Her left knee
marked the grid of her own
estate. When she knelt
she felt her father’s house
pressing into the bone,
heard in her head the looped
soundtrack of then –
a tennis ball repeatedly
thumping a wall,
an ice-cream van crying and
hurrying on, a snarl
of children’s shrieks from the
overgrown land
where the houses ran out. The
motorway groaned
just out of sight. She knew you
could hitch
from Junction 13 and knew of a
girl who had not
been seen since she did; had
heard of a kid who’d run
across all six lanes for a dare
before he was tossed
by a lorry into the air like a
doll. But the motorway
was flowing away, was a roaring
river of metal
and light, cheerio, au revoir,
auf wiedersehen, ciao.
She stared in the mirror as she
got dressed,
both arms raised over her head,
the roads
for east and west running from
shoulder
to wrist, the fuzz of woodland
or countryside under
each arm. Only her face was
clear, her fingers
smoothing in cream, her
baby-blue eyes unsure
as they looked at themselves.
But her body was certain,
an inch to the mile, knew every
nook and cranny,
cul-de-sac, stile, back road,
high road, low road,
one-way street of her past.
There it all was, back
to front in the glass. She piled
on linen, satin, silk,
leather, wool, perfume and
mousse and went out.
She got in a limousine. The map
perspired
under her clothes. She took a
plane. The map seethed
on her flesh. She spoke in a
foreign tongue.
The map translated everything
back to herself.
She turned out the light and a
lover’s hands
caressed the map in the dark
from north to south,
lost tourists wandering here and
there, all fingers
and thumbs, as their map flapped
in the breeze.
So one day, wondering where to
go next,
she went back, drove a car for a
night and a day,
till the town appeared on her
left, the stale cake
of the castle crumbled up on the
hill; and she hired
a room with a view and soaked in
the bath.
When it grew dark, she went out,
thinking
she knew the place like the back
of her hand,
but something was wrong. She got
lost in arcades,
in streets with new names, in
precincts
and walkways, and found that
what was familiar
was only facade. Back in her
hotel room, she stripped
and lay on the bed. As she
slept, her skin sloughed
like a snake’s, the skin of her
legs like stockings, silvery,
sheer, like the long gloves of
the skin of her arms,
the papery camisole from her
chest a perfect match
for the tissuey socks of the
skin of her feet. Her sleep
peeled her, lifted a honeymoon
thong from her groin,
a delicate bra of skin from her
breasts, and all of it
patterned A to Z; a small cross
where her parents’ skulls
grinned at the dark. Her new
skin showed barely a mark.
She woke and spread out the map
on the floor. What
was she looking for? Her skin
was her own small ghost,
a shroud to be dead in, a
newspaper for old news
to be read in, gift-wrapping,
litter, a suicide letter.
She left it there, dressed,
checked out, got in the car.
As she drove, the town in the
morning sun glittered
behind her. She ate up the
miles. Her skin itched,
like a rash, like a slow burn,
felt stretched, as though
it belonged to someone else.
Deep in the bone
old streets tunnelled and
burrowed, hunting for home.
Ian Duhig
The
Lammas Hireling
After the fair, I’d still a
light heart
And a heavy purse, he struck so
cheap.
And cattle doted on him: in his
time
Mine only dropped heifers, fat
as cream.
Yields doubled. I grew fond of
company
That knew when to shut up. Then
one night,
Disturbed from dreams of my dear
late wife,
I hunted down her torn voice to
his pale form.
Stock-still in the light from
the dark lantern,
Stark-naked but for the fox-trap
biting his ankle,
I knew him a warlock, a cow with
leather horns.
To go into the hare gets you
muckle sorrow,
The wisdom runs, muckle care. I
levelled
And blew the small hour through
his heart.
The moon came out. By its yellow
witness
I saw him fur over like a stone
mossing.
His lovely head thinned. His top
lip gathered.
His eyes rose like bread. I
carried him
In a sack that grew lighter at
every step
And dropped him from a bridge.
There was no
Splash. Now my herd’s elf-shot.
I don’t dream
But spend my nights casting ball
from half-crowns
And my days here. Bless me,
Father, I have sinned.
It has been an hour since my
last confession.
Helen Dunmore
To
My Nine-Year-Old Self
You must forgive me. Don’t look
so surprised,
perplexed, and eager to be gone,
balancing on your hands or on
the tightrope.
You would rather run than walk,
rather climb than run
rather leap from a height than
anything.
I have spoiled this body we once
shared.
Look at the scars, and watch the
way I move,
careful of a bad back or a
bruised foot.
Do you remember how, three
minutes after waking
we’d jump straight out of the
ground floor window
into the summer morning?
That dream we had, no doubt it’s
as fresh in your mind
as the white paper to write it
on.
We made a start, but something
else came up –
a baby vole, or a bag of sherbet
lemons –
and besides, that summer of
ambition
created an ice-lolly factory, a
wasp trap
and a den by the cesspit.
I’d like to say that we could be
friends
but the truth is we have nothing
in common
beyond a few shared years. I
won’t keep you then.
Time to pick rosehips for
tuppence a pound,
time to hide down scared lanes
from men in cars after
girl-children,
or to lunge out over the water
on a rope that swings from that
tree
long buried in housing –
but no, I shan’t cloud your
morning. God knows
I have fears enough for us both
–
I leave you in an ecstasy of
concentration
slowly peeling a ripe scab from
your knee
to taste it on your tongue.
UA Fanthorpe
A
Minor Role
I’m best observed on stage,
Propping a spear, or making
endless
Exits and entrances with my
servant’s patter,
Yes, sir. O no, sir . If I get
These midget moments wrong, the
monstrous fabric
Shrinks to unwanted sniggers.
But my heart’s in the
unobtrusive,
The waiting-room roles: driving
to hospitals,
Parking at hospitals. Holding
hands under
Veteran magazines; making sense
Of consultants’ monologues;
asking pointed
Questions politely; checking
dosages,
Dates; getting on terms with
receptionists;
Sustaining the background music
of civility.
At home in the street you may
see me
Walking fast in case anyone
stops:
O, getting on, getting better my
formula
For well-meant intrusiveness.
At home,
Thinking ahead: Bed? A good
idea!
(Bed solves a lot); answer the
phone,
Be wary what I say to it, but
grateful always;
Contrive meals for a
hunger-striker; track down
Whimsical soft-centred
happy-all-the-way-through novels;
Find the cat (mysteriously
reassuring);
Cancel things, tidy things;
pretend all’s well,
Admit it’s not.
Learn to conjugate all the
genres of misery:
Tears, torpor, boredom,
lassitude, yearnings
For a simpler illness, like a
broken leg.
Enduring ceremonial delays.
Being referred
Somewhere else. Consultant’s
holiday. Saying Thank you
For anything to everyone
Not the star part.
And who would want it? I
jettison the spear,
The servant’s tray, the terrible
drone of Chorus:
Yet to my thinking this act was
ill-advised
It would have been better to die
.[*] No it wouldn’t!
I am here to make you believe in
life.
[*]
Chorus: from Oedipus Rex , trans EF Watling
Vicki Feaver
The
Gun
Bringing a gun into a house
changes it.
You lay it on the kitchen table,
stretched out like something
dead
itself: the grainy polished wood
stock
jutting over the edge,
the long metal barrel
casting a grey shadow
on the green-checked cloth.
At first it’s just practice:
perforating tins
dangling on orange string
from trees in the garden.
Then a rabbit shot
clean through the head.
Soon the fridge fills with
creatures
that have run and flown.
Your hands reek of gun oil
and entrails. You trample
fur and feathers. There’s a
spring
in your step; your eyes gleam
like when sex was fresh.
A gun brings a house alive.
I join in the cooking: jointing
and slicing, stirring and
tasting –
excited as if the King of Death
had arrived to feast, stalking
out of winter woods,
his black mouth
sprouting golden crocuses.
Leontia Flynn
The
Furthest Distances I’ve Travelled
Like many folk, when first I
saddled a rucksack,
feeling its weight on my back –
the way my spine
curved under it like a meridian
–
I thought: Yes. This is how
to live. On the beaten track,
the sherpa pass, between Krakow
and Zagreb, or the Siberian
white
cells of scattered airports,
it came clear as over a tannoy
that in restlessness, in anony
mity:
was some kind of destiny.
So whether it was the scare
stories about Larium
– the threats of delirium
and baldness – that led me, not
to a Western Union
wiring money with six words of
Lithuanian,
but to this post office with a
handful of bills
or a giro; and why, if I’m
stuffing smalls
hastily into a holdall, I am
less likely
to be catching a Greyhound from
Madison to Milwaukee
than to be doing some overdue
laundry
is really beyond me.
However,
when, during routine evictions,
I discover
alien pants, cinema stubs, the
throwaway
comment – on a Post-it – or a
tiny stowaway
pressed flower amid bottom
drawers,
I know these are my souvenirs
and, from these crushed
valentines, this unravelled
sports sock, that the furthest
distances I’ve travelled
have been those between people.
And what survives
of holidaying briefly in their
lives.
Roderick Ford
Giuseppe
My Uncle Giuseppe told me
that in Sicily in World War Two,
in the courtyard behind the
aquarium,
where the bougainvillea grows so
well,
the only captive mermaid in the
world
was butchered on the dry and
dusty ground
by a doctor, a fishmonger, and
certain others.
She, it, had never learned to
speak
because she was simple, or so
they’d said.
But the priest who held one of
her hands
while her throat was cut,
said she was only a fish, and
fish can’t speak.
But she screamed like a woman in
terrible fear.
And when they took a ripe golden
roe
from her side, the doctor said
this was proof she was just a
fish
and anyway an egg is not a
child,
but refused when some was
offered to him.
Then they put her head and her
hands
in a box for burial
and someone tried to take her
wedding ring,
but the others stopped him,
and the ring stayed put.
The rest they cooked and fed to
the troops.
They said a large fish had been
found on the beach.
Starvation forgives men many
things,
my uncle, the aquarium keeper,
said,
but couldn’t look me in the eye,
for which I thank God.
Seamus Heaney
Out of the Bag
1
All of us came in Doctor
Kerlin’s bag.
He’d arrive with it, disappear
to the room
And by the time he’d reappear to
wash
Those nosy, rosy, big, soft
hands of his
In the scullery basin, its lined
insides
(The colour of a spaniel’s
inside lug)
Were empty for all to see, the
trap-sprung mouth
Unsnibbed and gaping wide. Then
like a hypnotist
Unwinding us, he’d wind the
instruments
Back into their lining, tie the
cloth
Like an apron round itself,
Darken the door and leave
With the bag in his hand, a
plump ark by the keel…
Until the next time came and in
he’d come
In his fur-lined collar that was
also spaniel-coloured
And go stooping up to the room
again, a whiff
Of disinfectant, a Dutch
interior gleam
Of waistcoat satin and
highlights on the forceps.
Getting the water ready, that
was next –
Not plumping hot, and not
lukewarm, but soft,
Sud-luscious, saved for him from
the rain-butt
And savoured by him afterwards,
all thanks
Denied as he towelled hard and
fast,
Then held his arms out suddenly
behind him
To be squired and silk-lined
into the camel coat.
At which point he once turned
his eyes upon me,
Hyperborean,
beyond-the-north-wind blue,
Two peepholes to the locked room
I saw into
Every time his name was
mentioned, skimmed
Milk and ice, swabbed porcelain,
the white
And chill of tiles, steel hooks,
chrome surgery tools
And blood dreeps in the sawdust
where it thickened
At the foot of each cold wall.
And overhead
The little, pendent, teat-hued
infant parts
Strung neatly from a line up
near the ceiling –
A toe, a foot and shin, an arm,
a cock
A bit like the rosebud in his
buttonhole.
2
Poeta doctus Peter Levi says
Sanctuaries of Asclepius (called
asclepions )
Were the equivalent of hospitals
In ancient Greece. Or of shrines
like Lourdes,
Says poeta doctus Graves. Or of
the cure
By poetry that cannot be
coerced,
Say I, who realized at Epidaurus
That the whole place was a
sanatorium
With theatre and gymnasium and
baths,
A site of incubation, where
‘incubation’
Was technical and ritual,
meaning sleep
When epiphany occurred and you
met the god…
Hatless, groggy, shadowing
myself
As the thurifer I was in an
open-air procession
In Lourdes in ’56
When I nearly fainted from the
heat and fumes,
Again I nearly fainted as I bent
To pull a bunch of grass and
hallucinated
Doctor Kerlin at the steamed-up
glass
Of the scullery window, starting
in to draw
With his large pink index finger
dot-faced men
With button-spots in a straight
line down their fronts
And women with dot breasts,
giving them all
A set of droopy sausage-arms and
legs
That soon began to run. And then
as he dipped and laved
In the generous suds again, miraculum
:
The baby bits all came together
swimming
Into his soapy big hygienic
hands
And I myself came to, blinded
with sweat,
Blinking and shaky in the
windless light.
3
Bits of the grass I pulled I
posted off
To one going in to chemotherapy
And one who had come through. I
didn’t want
To leave the place or link up
with the others.
It was midday, mid-May,
pre-tourist sunlight
In the precincts of the god,
The very site of the temple of
Asclepius.
I wanted nothing more than to
lie down
Under hogweed, under seeded
grass
And to be visited in the very
eye of the day
By Hygeia, his daughter, her
name still clarifying
The haven of light she was, the
undarkening door.
4
The room I came from and the
rest of us all came from
Stays pure reality where I stand
alone,
Standing the passage of time,
and she’s asleep
In sheets put on for the doctor,
wedding presents
That showed up again and again,
bridal
And usual and useful at births
and deaths.
Me at the bedside, incubating
for real,
Peering, appearing to her as she
closes
And opens her eyes, then lapses
back
Into a faraway smile whose
precinct of vision
I would enter every time, to
assist and be asked
In that hoarsened whisper of
triumph,
‘And what do you think
Of the new wee baby the doctor
brought for us all
When I was asleep?’
Alan Jenkins
Effects
I held her hand, that was always
scarred
From chopping, slicing, from the
knives that lay in wait
In bowls of washing-up, that was
raw,
The knuckles reddened, rough
from scrubbing hard
At saucepan, frying pan, cup and
plate
And giving love the only way she
knew,
In each cheap cut of meat, in
roast and stew,
Old-fashioned food she cooked
and we ate;
And I saw that they had taken
off her rings,
The rings she’d kept once in her
dressing-table drawer
With faded snapshots,
long-forgotten things
(Scent-sprays, tortoise-shell
combs, a snap or two
From the time we took a holiday
‘abroad’)
But lately had never been
without, as if
She wanted everyone to know she
was his wife
Only now that he was dead. And
her watch? –
Classic ladies’ model, gold
strap – it was gone,
And I’d never known her not have
that on,
Not in all the years they sat
together
Watching soaps and game shows
I’d disdain
And not when my turn came to
cook for her,
Chops or chicken portions,
English, bland,
Familiar flavours she said she
preferred
To whatever ‘funny foreign
stuff’
Young people seemed to eat these
days, she’d heard;
Not all the weeks I didn’t come,
when she sat
Night after night and stared
unseeing at
The television, at her inner
weather,
Heaved herself upright, blinked
and poured
Drink after drink, and gulped
and stared – the scotch
That, when he was alive, she
wouldn’t touch,
That was her way to be with him
again;
Not later in the psychiatric
ward,
Where she blinked unseeing at
the wall, the nurses
(Who would steal anything, she
said), and dreamt
Of when she was a girl, of the
time before
I was born, or grew up and
learned contempt,
While the TV in the corner
blared
To drown some ‘poor soul’s’
moans and curses,
And she took her pills and
blinked and stared
As the others shuffled round,
and drooled, and swore…
But now she lay here, a thick
rubber band
With her name on it in smudged
black ink was all she wore
On the hand I held, a blotched
and crinkled hand
Whose fingers couldn’t clasp
mine any more
Or falteringly wave, or fumble
at my sleeve –
The last words she had said were
Please don’t leave
But of course I left; now I was
back, though she
Could not know that, or turn her
face to see
A nurse bring the little bag of
her effects to me.
Sinéad Morrissey
Genetics
My father’s in my fingers, but
my mother’s in my palms.
I lift them up and look at them
with pleasure –
I know my parents made me by my
hands.
They may have been repelled to
separate lands,
to separate hemispheres, may
sleep with other lovers,
but in me they touch where
fingers link to palms.
With nothing left of their
togetherness but friends
who quarry for their image by a
river,
at least I know their marriage
by my hands.
I shape a chapel where a steeple
stands.
And when I turn it over,
my father’s by my fingers, my
mother’s by my palms
demure before a priest reciting
psalms.
My body is their marriage
register.
I re-enact their wedding with my
hands.
So take me with you, take up the
skin’s demands
for mirroring in bodies of the
future.
I’ll bequeath my fingers, if you
bequeath your palms.
We know our parents make us by
our hands.
Andrew Motion
From the Journal of a Disappointed Man
I discovered these men driving a
new pile
into the pier. There was all the
paraphernalia
of chains, pulleys, cranes,
ropes and, as I said,
a wooden pile, a massive affair,
swinging
over the water on a long wire
hawser.
Everything else was in the
massive style
as well, even the men; very
powerful men;
very ruminative and silent men
ignoring me.
Speech was not something to
interest them,
and if they talked at all it was
like this –
‘Let go’, or ‘Hold tight’: all
monosyllables.
Nevertheless, by paying close
attention
to the obscure movements of one
working
on a ladder by the water’s edge,
I could tell
that for all their strength and
experience
these men were up against a
great difficulty.
I cannot say what. Every one of
the monsters
was silent on the subject –
baffled I thought
at first, but then I realised
indifferent
and tired, so tired of the whole
business.
The man nearest to me, still
saying nothing
but crossing his strong arms
over his chest,
showed me that for all he cared
the pile
could go on swinging until the
crack of Doom.
I should say I watched them at
least an hour
and, to do the men justice,
their slow efforts
to overcome the secret problem
did continue –
then gradually slackened and
finally ceased.
One massive man after another
abandoned
his position and leaned on the
iron rail
to gaze down like a mystic into
the water.
No one spoke; no one said what
they saw;
though one fellow did spit, and
with round eyes
followed the trajectory of his
brown bolus
(he had been chewing tobacco)
on its slow descent into the
same depths.
The foreman, and the most
original thinker,
smoked a cigarette to relieve
the tension.
Afterwards, and with a heavy
kind of majesty,
he turned on his heel and walked
away.
With this eclipse of interest,
the incident
was suddenly closed. First in
ones and twos,
then altogether, the men
followed. That left
the pile still in mid-air, and
me of course.
Daljit Nagra
Look We Have Coming to Dover!
‘So various, so beautiful, so
new …’
Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’
Stowed in the sea to invade
the alfresco lash of a
diesel-breeze
ratcheting speed into the tide,
brunt with
gobfuls of surf phlegmed by
cushy come-and-go
tourists prow’d on the cruisers,
lording the ministered waves.
Seagull and shoal life
vexing their blarnies upon our
huddled
camouflage past the vast crumble
of scummed
cliffs, scramming on mulch as
thunder unbladders
yobbish rain and wind on our
escape hutched in a Bedford van.
Seasons or years we reap
inland, unclocked by the
national eye
or stabs in the back, teemed for
breathing
sweeps of grass through the
whistling asthma of parks,
burdened, ennobled – poling
sparks across pylon and pylon.
Swarms of us, grafting in
the black within shot of the
moon’s
spotlight, banking on the
miracle of sun –
span its rainbow, passport us to
life. Only then
can it be human to hoick
ourselves, bare-faced for the clear.
Imagine my love and I,
our sundry others, Blair’d in
the cash
of our beeswax’d cars, our crash
clothes, free,
we raise our charged glasses
over unparasol’d tables
East, babbling our lingoes,
flecked by the chalk of Britannia!
Ciaran O’Driscoll
Please Hold
This is the future, my wife
says.
We are already there, and it’s
the same
as the present. Your future,
here, she says.
And I’m talking to a robot on
the phone.
The robot is giving me countless
options,
none of which answer to my
needs.
Wonderful, says the robot
when I give him my telephone
number.
And Great, says the robot
when I give him my account
number.
I have a wonderful telephone
number
and a great account number,
but I can find nothing to meet
my needs
on the telephone, and into my
account
(which is really the robot’s
account)
goes money, my money, to pay for
nothing.
I’m paying a robot for doing
nothing.
This call is free of charge,
says the robot.
Yes but I’m paying for it, I
shout,
out of my wonderful account
into my great telephone bill.
Wonderful, says the robot.
And my wife says, This is the
future.
I’m sorry, I don’t understand,
says the robot.
Please say Yes or No.
Or you can say Repeat or Menu.
You can say Yes, No, Repeat or
Menu,
or you can say Agent if you’d
like to talk
to someone real, who is just as
robotic.
I scream Agent! and am cut off,
and my wife says, This is the
future.
We are already there and it’s
the same
as the present. Your future,
here, she says.
And I’m talking to a robot on
the phone,
and he is giving me no options
in the guise of countless
alternatives.
We appreciate your patience.
Please hold.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Please
hold.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Please
hold.
Eine fucking Kleine Nachtmusik.
And the robot transfers me to
himself.
Your call is important to us, he
says.
And my translator says, This
means
your call is not important to
them.
And my wife says, This is the
future.
And my translator says, Please
hold
means that, for all your
accomplishments,
the only way you can now meet
your needs
is by looting. Wonderful, says
the robot.
Please hold. Please grow old.
Please grow cold.
Please do what you’re told. Grow
old. Grow cold.
This is the future. Please hold.
Adam Thorpe
On Her Blindness
My mother could not bear being
blind,
to be honest. One shouldn’t say
it.
One should hide the fact that
catastrophic
handicaps are hell; one tends to
hear,
publicly, from those who bear it
like a Roman, or somehow find
joy
in the fight. She turned to me,
once,
in a Paris restaurant, still not
finding
the food on the plate with her
fork,
or not so that it stayed on (try
it
in a pitch-black room) and
whispered,
‘It’s living hell, to be honest,
Adam.
If I gave up hope of a cure, I’d
bump
myself off.’ I don’t recall what
I replied,
but it must have been the usual
sop,
inadequate: the locked-in son.
She kept her dignity, though,
even when
bumping into walls like a
dodgem; her sense
of direction did not improve,
when cast
inward. ‘No built-in compass,’
as my father
joked. Instead, she pretended to
ignore
the void, or laughed it off.
Or saw things she couldn’t see
and smiled, as when the kids
would offer
the latest drawing, or show her
their new toy –
so we’d forget, at times, that
the long,
slow slide had finished in a
vision
as blank as stone. For instance,
she’d continued
to drive the old Lanchester
long after it was safe
down the Berkshire lanes. She’d
visit exhibitions,
admire films, sink into
television
while looking the wrong way.
Her last week alive (a fortnight
back)
was golden weather, of course,
the autumn trees around the
hospital
ablaze with colour, the ground
royal
with leaf-fall. I told her this,
forgetting,
as she sat too weak to move,
staring
at nothing. ‘Oh yes, I know,’
she said,
‘it’s lovely out there.’ Dying
has made her
no more sightless, but now she
can’t
pretend. Her eyelids were closed
in the coffin; it was up to us
to believe
she was watching, somewhere, in
the end.
Tim Turnbull
Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn
Hello! What’s all this here? A
kitschy vase
some Shirley Temple manqué has
knocked out
delineating tales of kids in
cars
on crap estates, the Burberry
clad louts
who flail their motors through
the smoky night
from Manchester to Motherwell or
Slough,
creating bedlam on the Queen’s
highway.
Your gaudy evocation can,
somehow,
conjure the scene, without
inducing fright
as would a Daily Express exposé,
can bring to mind the throaty
turbo roar
of hatchbacks tuned almost to
breaking point,
the joyful throb of UK garage or
of house imported from the
continent
and yet educe a sense of peace,
of calm –
the screech of tyres and the
nervous squeals
of girls, too young to quite
appreciate
the peril they are in, are
heard, but these wheels
will not lose traction, skid and
flip, no harm
befall these children. They will
stay out late
forever, pumped on youth and
ecstasy,
on alloy, bass and arrogance,
and speed
the back lanes, the urban
gyratory,
the wide motorways, never having
need
to race back home, for work next
day, to bed.
Each girl is buff, each geezer
toned and strong
charged with pulsing juice
which, even yet,
fills every pair of Calvin’s and
each thong,
never to be deflated, given head
in crude games of chlamydia
roulette.
Now see who comes to line the
sparse grass verge,
to toast them in Buckfast and
Diamond White:
rat-boys and corn-rowed
cheerleaders who urge
them on to pull more burn-outs
or to write
their donut Os, as signature,
upon
the bleached tarmac of dead
suburban streets.
There dogs set up a row and
curtains twitch
as pensioners and parents
telephone
the cops to plead for quiet, sue
for peace –
tranquillity, though, is for the
rich.
And so, millennia hence, you
garish crock,
when all context is lost,
galleries razed
to level dust and we’re long in
the box,
will future poets look on you
amazed,
speculate how children might
have lived when
you were fired, lives so free
and bountiful
and there, beneath a sun a
little colder,
declare How happy were those
creatures then,
who knew that truth was all
negotiable
and beauty in the gift of the
beholder .
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