Tim Cumming was born in Solihull and was brought up in the West Country. His poetry collections include The Miniature Estate (1991), Apocalypso (1992, 1999), Contact Print (2002) and The Rumour (2004). His work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Forward’s Poems of the Decade, and Bloodaxe Books’ 2010 anthology of poetry from Ireland and the British Isles, Identity Parade. He made the acclaimed Hawkwind: Do Not Panic documentary for the BBC in 2007, has shown his film poems at cinemas and festivals in the United Kingdom and writes regularly about music and the arts for the British and international press.
 
 
 

 
 
“The Rapture (Salt Publishing, 2011) is the most visceral poetry collection of the year, from one of Britain’s leading cult writers, an acclaimed music journalist, filmmaker and a star of the small press scene for more than twenty years. His first collection since 2004, and drawing on a decade’s work — from the metaphorical delights of the Improvisations via the intimate, confessional poetry of Chapel of Carbon to the rich loam of landscape and memory fuelling First Music’s evocation of Dartmoor’s wild landscape — The Rapture is Tim Cumming’s strongest and most captivating book to date.”

 
 
*
 
 

“Tim Cumming’s The Rapture is a feast of juxtapositions. Through this most painterly of lenses, the reader finds vast panoramas and wonderfully observed detail, turbulences and stillnessness, pasts and present, the ordinary and the magnificent. In these poems, all five senses are engaged; no constellation escapes their ambitious sweep. These poems convince and delight by their extraordinary naturalness, inventiveness, cadence and intimacy.”
 
– Annie Freud
 
 
 
“Tim Cumming is a brilliant poet in many senses of the word: his poems are urbane, intimately well-observed, and evince a true wit in the sense that would have been understood by Swift or Pope: for instance as with his celebrated one-liners. The poems in The Rapture shine with an aesthetic that is pure in itself and pure satisfaction for the reader. But his work is nearly unique amongst contemporary poets in that, within this artistry, his subject matters, as they consider how a person may deal with a range of experience, are sensitive and profoundly humane. His is a perfect voice of the new times where art meets the heart.”
 
– John Stammers
 
 
 
“Tim Cumming’s urban landscapes are original, dreamy, surefooted with an intense filmic narrative. An acute sense of time and nature burns through these inspired poems.”

– Martina Evans
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Late Picasso

It was the morning after the house party.
Everyone had gone to work and she was rooting
through her handbag for cigarettes
and pills. I raised my head from a book
of Impressionist art I’d used for a pillow
and nudged a blister pack in her direction.
She bent down low and let me see her breasts
swing loose in her boyfriend’s work shirt.
‘Impressionism,’ she said, ‘The most
boring art movement in history.’
She was into abstract expressionism,
artists with a hairy back. She took a pill
and gave me a look. Chaka Khan was singing
in the kitchen and that’s how the day started,
falling open like a loose gown or prophetic book.
I pushed the book away, sat up and watched
her walk across the room on bare feet
and drop onto the sofa under the window,
legs falling open like the women in late Picasso,
the line of their haunches jerking
like a cardiograph, a catch on the line,
scribbled shapes bulging like tubers from the mind,
mouths agog, pulling her rosy mouth
to mine, lovers knotting through
the exhibition catalogue.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Flicker
 
 
Brass fanfares from the land of
complementary drinks and every
table nailed down. I can’t find
the colour for my colour. Her
reflection in too many mirrors.
It’s a cloudless blue morning
in September, the kind of day
that starts straight and ends late,
unfurling its sails from the sunset,
the bottle in its bucket of ice
tilted to the cross hairs
of plane trails and true north,
the silent movement of cables
below the surface. From this
point on it’s reclaimed land,
the marks on her wrist
like musical scales.
We’re singing in the shades of
Southwark, a bottle apiece and too
much echo, the heart loosening
like well-trodden boards,
the valve opening and closing
as if the world turned on a hinge
and nights it does, bolts of white cloth
spilling at her feet and no reason,
just a small turn of the shoulders
humming down the high wire,
the full frontal under the greatcoat,
the emperor’s clothes floating
down river, the strong room empty
and the mouth wide open, the heart
beating away at itself like the birds
under the station roof at midnight
fluttering over that famous clock.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Tarot Improvisation
 
 
He looked back twice, put his foot in it.
The cards were good. The reading
put a crown on his head and
sat him among the harmonies of
The Byrds’ first album, the bar chords
covered in fine dust. No one had
visited for seasons, the dead skin
under the mattress could have reconstructed
Monterey Pop. He loved those early Byrds LPs,
the mono soundboard, the Cold War passed
from speaker to speaker, frame to frame,
musical chairs of the Aquarian age.
He returned to the hotel and slept heavily,
bit his lip on lucid dreaming. Late the next
morning he’d put all that ribbon in a box
and close the lid on it, put a call through.
There was no distance she couldn’t untie
and lie out beside him as if it were the most
natural thing, like two pairs and an ace,
a winning combination.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
White City Improvisation
 
 
The White Cities were the queens
of France in the books of Joseph Roth,
Austro-Hungarian Jewish writer from between
the wars who died of drink and left us the legend
of the holy drinker and many other books.
I gave one to a lover on her birthday;
Confessions of a Murderer. When she gave
birth to twins her husband threw a big party,
handing out cigars and whistles and striding
around his view of the world like the ship’s
captain from Now, Voyager. I felt more
like Captain Bligh on Mars Voyager,
no new species discovered, just old gods
in hand-me-down shoes. I stood in the hallway
on the edge of nightmares too numerous
to mention, buffeted by the windsock
of the heart’s disease. The ease with metal
of really powerful storm systems rippling
from the jet stream was nothing to my love
for this woman. When we met that winter
it was a world gone mad, packed
and delivered for a flat fee, the stitching
worn from its shoes, the dimmer switch
on the whole scene like the resolution of
some improbable plot device. Backing tapes
were being changed, Hampstead cafés emptied
of old Europeans from the novels of Joseph Roth.
The road ahead had been cordoned off
for a murder investigation, forensics
and emergency bands, the traffic lights
acting as if nothing had happened.
There was no news from her news.
The moon was two days from full,
rising into the London sky from southern seas,
pulling to the curtains of the Pacific.
A water main had burst and I hung a right
down Polar Street, crossed the Harrow Road
into Kensal Rise and kept going, bullet holes
in the walls of the Magdala pub by Hampstead
Heath that winter night, going and gone,
the ghost of Ruth Ellis swaying in
the saloon. They put a rope around her neck
and watched the world turn away
over the depot buildings near the Grand Union
Canal where Eurostar carriages were cleaned
and sent back to service, the Scrubs across
the water and every traffic light turning green
across the city. She left with more than was started.
New characters, combinations stepping out of
the crowd that night, slipping into the
White Cities of Joseph Roth, the bag
on her shoulder, the tinny disco of earphones
full of love songs and flashbulbs, the voice
of the official guide from a long vanished tour
of the palace by the river, home to the king’s
own whipping boy. ‘His lordship
forbade windows from the rear.
He did not like to be overlooked.’
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Three Dartmoor Tales
 
 
The wind had dropped as the prison
medical officer turned onto the
Mortonhampstead road from Princeton
that night. He could hear the movement
of unseen animals, heavy livestock
on the long tarmac curve towards Bellever,
June 1921 speckled in a dressing mirror.
The writer’s valise is carried to his room,
the fire lit by the landlord’s boy Silus Sleep
and a lamp burns at the window. He reads over
the young woman’s account of the night’s events.
‘I awoke in the morning at three, overtaken
by a feeling of intense cold and creeping dread.
We’d parked for the night by the clapper bridge
near the old gunpowder works and there on
the glass I saw a huge pair of hairy hands
climbing towards the open window.
I remember the air was quite still and silent.
I screamed and made the sign of the cross
and just as suddenly, the hands disappeared.’
The prison medical officer was less articulate.
His daughters survived the accident
by jumping from the sidecar
and they too spoke of a fall in temperature.
The authorities blamed the road’s camber
rather than the girls’ talk of another
pair of hands taking control
As for the driver of the bus that left
the road at the same spot by the old
clapper bridge some 60 years later,
Powdermills in the rear view mirror,
he was dazed and said little immediately
after the accident. ‘Some thing grabbed
the wheel,’ he told the officer.
‘There was no one there but some thing
Other than me drove that bus off the road.’
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
The Ripe Charge
 
 
Tread carefully,
your ground is not solid.
Shelter from expectation
and select for your fire willow,
juniper, dogwood, birch.
Burn, crush, blend and churn
with sulphur, lead, saltpetre,
and you will have your ripe charge.
Keep it in mind. There are days
like these when we drift
through time, and memory
travels infirm, gathers like kelp,
shapes beneath the tide, time
rubbed in like an aromatic herb,
persistent images knocking
at the brain stem as if they
held the spike of creation,
battering thought in the
grease of self conception.
 
 
 
 
from The Rapture (Salt Publishing, 2011).
 
Order The Rapture.
 
Watch Tim’s videos.
 
 
 
*

  
 
“From urban nature poems to noir nightmares Adrian Slatcher’s Playing Solitaire for Money (Salt Publishing, 2010) provides a new take on our globalised experience, seeing us as small parts in ‘a colossal machine’. The poems range from the dark to the surreal to the amusing, and are deeply engaged with understanding our fast-moving information-rich world.”
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
The Death of the Grand Gesture
 
 
Something was broken with us, early,
          Like a hairline crack in an antique vase,
Unseen at that time,
          But now that it’s broke, we can see was always there.
 
Five years earlier and we’d have been the luckiest brood,
          Avoiding war, and getting funded through art school,
Free love, denim, David Bowie and punk rock.
          Five years later, and we’d be brimming with alcopops
Raving in Ibiza, Ugg boots and iPods.
 
What broke in us, was a collective curse,
          Like we were ladybirds in a jar,
Shaken for fun. Sick with the motion—
          Born for one world, yet not ready for another.
 
Only now, do we see the damage, not all of us,
          No way. There are survivors of the disaster,
Just as there are the survivors of any catastrophe,
          Living with their unearned guilt, quietly mourning
The death of the grand gesture.
 
And I am sick with it still, like radiation;
          We couldn’t avoid the taint
However often we marched. Our struggles are sadder
          For being our own, not validated by history.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
1983
 
 
In 1983 we look unlike our memory of ourselves.
It is long enough now to be a distinctive past.
The colours have all but faded from the photograph.
Demi-perms and tight jeans of a low budget movie poster.
None of us could have weighed more than ten stone.
The last generation to grow up before consumerism took hold.
There is innocence there, and the limits of our ambition.
The space shuttle launched—reaching escape velocity.
But we never had that sense of propulsion. The suburbs
     constrict us.
We were not a golden generation, but solid bronze, steady metal,
And we reconnect the random friendships of that time
Through a photograph posted on a website.
These two have married. And this one died.
The low quality scan of a 5 by 3 original
Cannot offer more than a surface image.
Memory, more than any photograph, has the deeper root.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Love and Death in the American Novel
 

Cars like buzzards preying on the carcass of the prairie;
Ragged Indian scouts broke-boned with ageing;
Slim orphans running the decks on the Mississippi paddles;
And the stiff-lipped patriarch seeing out his years;
 
Knowing only that with his death, so the Confederacy,
With its flag no longer flying but in tatters, burning;
The Chicago Irish and the New York Italians—
Or was it the other way round?—are gambling
 
At the ball game; clambering for a stake in Vegas;
Watching Jay Gatsby bet all on snake-eyes;
Cacti flowering in a desert canyon, snow-caked hills;
Lazy trailer children doing hop and for a dime
 
Stripping every stranger of his innocence.
It came to me in a picture house watching Fonda
Playing against type as Leone’s bad cowboy;
That whatever comes, comes to him that dreams . . .
 
Migrant victims of hope and war and money’s weak
Sense of what is good and right and true;
Of life and hate in American lives and
Love and death in the American novel.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
A Problem with Genre
 
 
Or was it a farce? I would like to think I played some part in
     an epic.
A thousand ships for Helen! Well, for you a thousand more,
And the men to sail them—but we were more a short,
Forgotten, shown for two nights only on a tiny screen,
 
I extemporised, preferred to work from the director’s mark,
Never that good at learning lines, I wrote them down—
You were wanting a film for all the family,
Whilst I had adult themes in mind.
 
Always you had a problem with genre, after all,
You’d played opposite a romantic lead, and I was merely colour—
A jobbing actor: worse, the second-line writer,
Coming in to doctor a script already beyond repair.
 
And had we done good box office and been showered with awards
I guess we could have stayed that way, a golden couple.
But the audience did not want to see you playing against type,
Ditching your domestic roles, unbecoming as the vamp.
 
 
 
 
from Playing Solitaire for Money (Salt Publishing, 2010).
 
Order Playing Solitaire for Money.
 
Visit Adrian’s blog.
 
 
 
*

          For Lia
 
 
When I tell my daughter I’m working,
she nods, pulls her chair right up
to mine, elbows out, breath hot
with cheese and onion crisps.
 
She chooses a red pencil, starts
chewing, sighs over her blank paper,
tells me to shush. She draws us, stick
mother holding stick daughter’s hand.
 
Look, she says. I try to concentrate
on my work but she’s learnt
from me too well. Really look.
Clumsy fingers twist my hair
 
until we fight. I say she has to go now,
to let me get on with Mummy’s work.
Outside she sits so close to the door
I hear every rustle, every sigh so loud
 
that the note pushed under my door
comes like a white flag. Dear Mummy,
my daughter writes. This is me.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Through Carved Wooden Binoculars
 
  
1.   I want to carve you some wooden binoculars.
2.   I want to sew you a suit from slivers of bark.
3.   I want to run up and down your body like an ant.
4.   I want to take each one of your feet and bury it in earth.
5.   I want you to stand still until you feel your soles bursting
      as you take root.
6.   I want to sleep under the canopy of your whispers.
7.   I want to wake up every morning and think, Why not?
8.   I want to paint each of my fingernails a different colour
      just to make myself smile when I type out these words.
9.   I want to watch my fingers making rainbows over
      the keyboard.
10.  I want the words to keep their coloured shadows once
      they’re typed.
11.  I want you to see how SEE ends on such a yellow burst.
12.  I want orgasms wrapped in blue silk.
13.  I want to untie them with gold ribbon, so so slowly.
14.  I want to open several blue silk parcels every night.
15.  I want to think, Oh I can’t, but then I will.
16.  I want to make a celebration from every day, especially
      this one, this day.
17.  I want a day where no news media uses the words,
      The problem with girls.
18.  I want to run my fingers through the hair of this man I see
      on the train.
19.  I want nothing else from him, especially not conversation.
20.  I want there to be a slight tangle, for my fingers to get
      caught, to have to pull and then set it free.
21.  I want to have brushed my daughter’s hair every time
      she asked.
22.  I want to have left my chores, my cooking, my work and
      picked up the brush.
23.  I want to have used the silver-backed hair brush my mother
      inherited from her mother.
24.  I want to keep my hair long, even when I’m an old lady.
25.  I want my daughter to brush my hair in my hospital bed.
26.  I want to use my mother’s silver brush.
27.  I want to eat a dictionary today.
28.  I want to take my time, to taste the particular sharpness
      of P for Pain and the slipperiness of C for Circumvent.
29.  I want to be able to put my hand on my leg so I can feel
      where Confess, Honour and Truth have got to.
30.  I want Pleasure in my belly.
31.  I want no words to hide in my heart.
32.  I want to be wearing a sleeveless red dress on a hot summer
      evening, I want to be luxuriating in the sensation of sun on
      my skin, and I want the friend I’m with to let out a gasp.
      I want to say, What’s the matter?
33.  I want her to point to my arm, in the flesh of my upper arm,
      where letters are appearing.
34.  I want them to be in Bookman Antique.
35.  I want my mother.
36.  I want to look up into the sky for so long I start to see
      the stars behind the stars I normally see.
37.  I want some people, the people I care about, to look at me
      that carefully, to see the heart beating behind my heart.
38.  I want to smell wood burning and think this is what
      the cavemen would have smelt. Exactly this.
39.  I want a perfect pear, sliced into four and eaten on a
      white plate.
40.  I want to spread rose petal jam on dark rye bread.
41.  I want to really believe that to be greedy is to be sexy.
42.  I want people to walk into my kitchen and stand still for
      a moment before saying, Hmmm, cinnamon and lemon
      and mint.
43.  I want to feel my blood as it runs round my body.
44.  I want to stick a label on each part of my body denoting
      previous owners: my mother’s index fingernail, my father’s
      nose, my grandfather’s feet.
45.  I want my body to have doors that creak open at the stomach
      like an old-fashioned wooden wardrobe.
46.  I want to look inside and see the labels, ‘Great Grandfather’s
      sense of humour’, ‘Great Grandmother’s strong lungs’.
47.  I want people to say, No one in her family has ever done
      a thing like that.
48.  I want those coming after me to think, Well, I can now.
49.  I want all the separate parts to come together like a portrait
      painted with a single brushstroke.
50.  I want to know what I want.
 
 
 
 
from You Do Not Need Another Self-Help Book
(Pindrop Press, 2012).
 
Order You Do Not Need Another Self-Help Book.
 
Visit Sarah’s website.
 
 
 
*

enclosing a space with its own laws
          of speed. It is some kind of head,
big-eyed, many-personed, rhythmically moving
          through empirical flatland, over which
 
we look sideways, as the train hurtles on.
          I can see yellow fields
partitioned by green. I cannot not think
          NORWICH CITY — the football club’s
 
colours, and a journey through England
          is like that: a grammar
that’s linking up puns. Even I was a word
          endowed with new meaning
 
when Ben, my guitarist, when
          we last met in London, worriedly
called me “too thin” — something I’d been
          ever since, though I’d eaten
 
and fattened up hurriedly. This weekend
          he said, when a song was not working,
“you’re looking much better”. A word
          and a curse, simply lifted.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Silent
and without a pen all day, I crave to bed you
with whatever words — but damn all words!
 
Reader of Carver, of Mina Loy, of the poet of Pearl,
 
I crave to silence you
in my bed, so that you may see me,
cry with me, silence me.
 
No silent girl
haunts me like you who, unobtainable,
perhaps, make me sweat, stretching for you, cry,
 
as light scattered in water falling
                    criss-crossing filigree showers
                              is streaming “outside”.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
I’m learning from you
not to trust too soon,
to have the courage
to feel hurt.
When I’m interrupted
or neglected, me
I’ll ride along
with the other
story, forget
mine exists.
You resist
kidnap of attention,
turn to who you
become. Some
conversations they have
are bullshit, but
I wouldn’t
dare to let them know
I think so, as you show
you do, the
volume
up on your earpiece,
simply looking down.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
what you have described there
is having to survive throughout childhood
a father with mood swings
this is the latest depth of my therapy
 
I’ve found that I’m not out of hell
that as an adult leaving home
was the dark wood awaiting
by giving it context you’ve found my text’s secret
 
always in fear of his mood changes
then, now the same in your flatmate
you’ve picked to touchstone this stage of the purge
secretly writing of secrets you know
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Reverie for a birthday
 
 
Shall I fall asleep again, I wonder,
          thinking that a dream about
being fired as Oliver Stone’s
          personal assistant does not need
 
to be recorded, and I think no,
          and wake up to record it.
5am. And I forgot
          I had a birthday card to post
 
and had meant to post it
          late last night, but forgot,
and can’t be sure to catch
          the right day’s post if I don’t
 
post it now. For an act of transmission
          there’s a lot of retrieval,
really, isn’t there, as I coat
          myself, in my bedclothes,
 
with my winter jacket,
          turn a quiet key in the lock
deferring to my neighbours.
          At the box I think
 
“7am? Someone might deliver it
          today!” But I know the Royal Mail’s
extremes, and think myself safe.
          I step back from the box
 
and look at a sole cloud form
          at “12 o’clock”, a thumbprint
disc, in TV signal lines, of the right
          summer morning’s frequency. It reminds me
 
of Honolulu, and every other dawn
          I’ve faced at the refuel stop
of an overnight flight, the
          low intensity pink-shot light
 
the earth is rolling into
          the whiter heart of for a day.
A rook (it sounds nice
          in the sound of things)
 
flaps at another speed horizontally
          south to north across a sky scrolling
west as the earth rolls east. I’d forgotten
          there were cars till the first
 
carries its heavy trundle past, left
         off camera, like the first car in the world.
I look up, the thumbprint
          thickened and diffused since I looked
 
and shot out streaks. In fact the
          upturned bowl of perceivable sky
was full of thin cloud, now
          dawned upon, and each is like dreams,
 
though they are the most minimal dreams,
          aloft on the sky
through trapping a share
          warmer than outside air
 
and therefore lighter. They are yesterday’s
          today’s are thicker, starting to rise,
among them noon’s among them
          tomorrow’s survivors.
 
 
 
 
from Mustard Tart As Lemon (Red Squirrel Press, 2011).
 
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Read more about Ira here.
  
  
  
*

  
Mark Waldron’s first book, The Brand New Dark was published by Salt Publishing in 2008. His work appears in Identity Parade, New British and Irish Poets published by Bloodaxe in 2010. He lives in east London with his wife and son.
 
 
 

 

“The Itchy Sea (Salt Publishing, 2011) is an extraordinarily vivid collection of poems which are, above all, entertaining. The poems each have a kind of freshness and cut-through that will hold the reader’s attention in a world that’s full of dazzling distractions. They are a protest against the well-founded idea that poetry has to be dull. Their concerns are sex, death, the soul and a chocolate car. Beneath their shiny surfaces they are an intense but carefree therapy session for all our infantile ids.”
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Were I to jump
 
 
or to fall, or were I pushed to my death
from a high window of an apartment block,
 
or from the edge of a cliff,
then, at the end of that fall, the ground will act
 
like a sieve, keeping my flesh and bones to itself,
as well as my clothing and any other belongings
 
which I may have about me,
such as my keys, coins and wristwatch,
 
while my soul (which I am riddled with)
will continue its downward journey for a little distance
 
(perhaps for a metre or so, depending on the height
of the preceding drop).
 
And then, relieved of its hot nest,
it will wear on its face the most abject expression,
 
not that of the exposed oyster as it’s sucked, sobbing
from its shell, but rather,
 
that which the fledgling wears underneath its feathers,
when it takes its flapping plunge into maturity.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Some Time Afterwards
 
 
Perhaps it was a sense he had
of missing something which made him realise
 
he’d handed her a weightless ball
of complicated moving light,
 
which looked, admittedly, very like
a special effect from that period.
 
It was of a size that would slip perfectly
into her palm (every slip is Freudian),
 
and when she looked down it lit her face
in a way that was reminiscent of a scene in a film.
 
The rest of the world’s light seemed then,
and still seems now, unaffected by what he did.
 
There is so much that is real,
such an abundance of it, that a tiny piece
 
of innocent spell like this is sanctioned
by the usually stern laws that govern things.
 
Everyone, even I, turned away
so he could give her his glowing, analogous stone.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Make Use of My Poem in Any Way You Like
 
 
Make an origami goose. Cut fine holes for the light
to glint through. Fabricate a paper chain of convivial men.
 
Make a dart, or a hat for a biggish bird or a cat.
Doodle freely in the margins if you will. Go ahead, jot
 
little notes on the more salient passages, cross-referencing
them with passages in other works of mine, picking up
 
on themes maybe, and noting how respectfully,
as well as snugly, it slips into a long-held-vacant slot
 
in the wider canon. (Notice, by-the-way how it somehow
seems to soften its important neighbours with an easy,
 
self-deprecating charm.). Make copies of it. Feel free.
Hand them out to special friends, maybe fold and slip them
 
into their shirt pockets saying something simple
and mysterious like, Check it out. Deconstruct it, help yourself.
 
Take it apart piece by polished piece, to see how it works,
to watch the keen little engine spin, lit with innocent heat.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
The Porcelain Dog
 
 
The porcelain dog,
despite his unruffled exterior,
despite his apparent serenity,
suffocates for want inside
his tight and glossy bag of glaze,
and so it is with me,
beneath this painted sack
that is my cloak of visibility.
 
 
 
 
from The Itchy Sea (Salt Publishing, 2011).

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Read more about The Itchy Sea here and here.
 
 
 
*

          And that woman dancing there will eternally burn.
 
 
You’re looking back on evening
from night, and hardly breathing,
as though the air were stone.
Perhaps your eyes are tender
and shrewd with new surrender
to love, but you’re alone.
 
When Leningrad is burning
the proudest heads are turning
from what has gone before.
And half of you is grieving
as half of you is leaving
the bonfires of the war.
 
They say you stand, pretending
love, without defending
those angered, sadder souls.
But sadness is a crime so
your eyes can never show
why swallowed words are coal.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
‘Photographer unknown: Chinese courtesan (?) c 1875′
 
 
     I.
 
He’s no more unknown than you
although his face is out of sight,
 
and you’re not your features’ sum,
caught by lens, intention, light.
 
Such is your round and powdered mask:
like a plate without a name
 
or number, tinctured by a past
unknown, engraved within a frame.
 
 
     II.
 
Wallpaper flowers bloom beside
the carved bench where you partly lie,
 
beneath a lantern, on your side
though frontal in some cynic’s eye.
 
You’re bound in silence. When and if
your trade, like his, is of such ilk
 
as makes you court exposure, know
he’s hard: you’re timeless, made of silk.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Sir Stanley Spencer, 1891 – 1959
 
 
They called you “the likeable eccentric” –
even as a boy it was the Bible
and Bach in the evenings. You had to be
a painter of the still, heavy things:
“The Farm Gate”, “The Last Supper, Cookham”,
and “Cookham from Englefield”. Always
you clung to the earth of your birthtown,
turned it incessantly to staunch
some longing for the holy. Painted it
the scene of a final resurrection:
introduced wan, washed figures
pushed up through lilies and roses:
the dead, emerging like neighbours,
knowing each other, not eroded.
 
Sacred things were somehow too perfect.
Flowers unearth and unwreathed
from graves heaved open, the shabbiest
beiges and greys of your landscapes,
show us how nearly you came
to knowing the beautiful unsaved.
Ever unchanged in advanced age
you occupied what you described as
“an interesting, lonely furrow” –
your grave life throwing its shadow
along this book where your loved ones
are ferried across leaden Thames
and onto the green banks of Cookham.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1869 – 1935
 
 
Scanning the faces of another time
to fill your lines with character and pain
you search, beyond them, for the mark of Cain,
the fatal flaw, the gestures of a mime.
Your men and women, like the bloodless leaves
of winter, sodden in the darkening rain,
stick to your pages; uneasily remain
to illustrate what each sick heart conceives.
 
Your dazzling suicides, divided men
and hermits relishing a dream of sin,
the crises of your heroes, tired of light:
these things compel you to take up your pen,
to pause, and sadly smile, and to begin
to wash the stains; to understand the night.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
In praise of loss
 
 
Lose
Until the loss
Feels right.
 
Lose at cards.
Fold.
Refuse to play.
 
Don’t respond
To provocations,
Words.
 
Don’t invest.
Be certain
That it doesn’t matter.
 
Hold yourself
Aloof; lose
The men you know
 
To other women.
Fold.
Refuse to play.
 
It’s no shame
To spare your neck.
Let it in,
 
The knowledge
Of this loss
That is dying, living.
 
 
 
*

© Image by Lyn Moir

 
 
Caroline Carver began writing poetry in the mid-1990s, and won the National Poetry Prize with a poem about killing a shark in 1998. Since then she has won or been placed in many competitions, winning the prestigious Silver Wyvern Award from Poetry-on-the-Lake in Orta, Italy, and the first Guernsey ‘Poems On the Buses’ competition. She was commended in the 2010 National Poetry competition.
 
Caroline was born in England, brought up in Bermuda and Jamaica, finished her education in England, Switzerland and France, and then emigrated to Canada for 30 years. Since she returned to England she’s travelled widely with her poetry. She’s a Hawthornden Fellow, resident poet at Trebah Gardens and very active in poetry affairs in Cornwall. 
 
 
 

 
 
 
“Tikki Tikki Man (Ward Wood Publishing, 2012) is Caroline Carver’s fourth collection and the first to be published by Ward Wood. It tells the story of how two children deal with the after effects of child abuse, as their lives take them from Jamaica to Paris, to Scotland and eventually the Canadian wilderness.
 
 
being Bluebeard
 
means submarines     doors clanging shut
sonic booms     furtive night messengers
 
means sealing of fire   water     wind
reduction by earth and its dark shovels
 
watch out man     I see you slipping in and out
of corridors     look like rats got your face”
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
“The vivid landscapes, real and imaginary, that these poems economically evoke, are never simply an exotic backdrop. Rather, their beauty and their ambiguities weave the reader into an unsettling, unsentimental vision of how childhood can be damaged, exiled from itself and finally, cautiously, returned to its place in the world. This is difficult material, delicately done, all the more powerful for its sure and subtle touch.”
 
– Philip Gross
 
 
 
“The poetry of Caroline Carver’s Tikki Tikki Man is spacious and at home in many landscapes. Its content is troubling, its beauty redemptive. It leaves the reader with a sense of the world as a larger, and warmer, place.”
 
– Alison Brackenbury
 
 
 
“… a stunning collection. I completely lost myself in the world you have created.”
 
– Dr Catherine Walters
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Maia holds to everything she knows
like a suit of armour
 
her world’s made of granite
there’s nothing else to learn
she’s lost her curiosity
 
if I wonder why flowers open in the morning
and shut again at night
 
or ask why some burst out with great breaths of joy
filling us with the scent of mangoes and wild honey
and then hold it in again for weeks
 
she looks at her fingers
as if they’ve only just grown on her hands this morning
 
she turns her eyes away as she talks
 
– perhaps when I’m grown up
I’ll stop remembering –   she says
 
we no longer climb trees
to spy on the world from our leafy hideaways
 
peep through half-open bedroom doors
stand on the beach wondering why the horizon
is always the same distance away
whether we are rowing our boat out to the reef
or standing on the ferry as it heads out to sea
 
when I persuade her to start riding again
she’s like a sleep-walker
a stone-like calm on her face
 
– even weeds are stronger than I am –
she says   – I’m not like them
I don’t want to push through concrete
I don’t want to find the light –
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
sometimes we go to the kitchens
where we’re not supposed to go
but everyone else is out
and today Maia cut herself when she fell off the donkey
 
the cook has also cut his arm
he picks her up
presses his dark skin against her freckles
 
– see   we’re blood brother and sister –   he says
– we’re the same under the skin –
 
we both love him as deeply
as we’ve ever loved anyone
 
but this was before the Tikki Tikki Man
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
we’re playing at her house
when there’s a knock on the door
 
it’s the Tikki Tikki Man
but her father’s not here
 
when he comes in
the scent of roses is replaced
by the prickle of Old Spice aftershave
 
we run into the garden
climb the mango tree
 
he’s too fat to come after us
 
prowls around the base
like an angry wolf
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
we’re shipwrecked
on this outcrop of seashell and reef
only aurelia aurita
the slow white jellyfish
doesn’t seem to mind
 
her pale calm reminds us
she’s named for the moon
 
but I’m afraid for her
there’s no food
and it’s six hours till the tide comes back
 
like a woman with a bucket
daylight draws water from her shallow pool
 
          the sun moves slowly
 
aurelia’s pale blue orifices
open and shut   open and shut
 
like the questing mouths of new babies
not sure which way to turn
in their self-contained worlds
 
– I’ll never have children –   says Maia
as we wait for the lifeboat
nudging its way in among sharp rocks
so it can throw a line to us
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
we buy tamarind balls in the market
before we go to the beach
 
but we’re not comfortable with the sight of men
in bulging bathing-suits
 
one of them scratches himself
and dark hairs creep into the sunlight
 
 
everything to do with men’s bodies
has a bad feeling to it
 
the sweet sour taste of the tamarind balls
prickles our mouths
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
– if you wear your hair like that –
says her neighbour
– someone’s going to rape you –
 
Maia goes home and looks at herself in the mirror
 
she takes the kitchen scissors
hacks at the hair which reaches to her waist
tears it from her head till her scalp’s bleeding
cuts the great swag away from herself
like a scythe of late summer wheat
trims   more slowly now
back to the fluff of childhood
 
then… gathering every last strand into a bag
she takes it out into the garden   sets fire to it
 
 
she’d thanked him for his thoughtfulness
now   she sees
he was warning her against himself
 
 
for the next seven weeks
the smell of burning hair stays with her
 
she never goes out
 
each night she dreams of a forest in flames
animals running into the desert
bodies singed with pain
radiating a terrible light
 
 
 
 
from Tikki Tikki Man (Ward Wood Publishing, 2012).
 
Order Tikki Tikki Man.
 
Read more of Caroline’s work at poetry p f.
 
 
 
*
 
 

“Lyrical precision and infinite jest, as funny and curious as it is poignant and moving. These are poems that teach us there is no dignity but in recognising our own ludicrousness; they teach us to drop our pretences and relax; then they pie us in the face.”
 
– Luke Kennard
 
 
 
“Vivid and tangible, there is a real wit that at times makes me laugh out loud, a true learning, and a gentle humanity to these tender-hearted poems.”
 
– Lee Harwood
 
 
 
“Andy Brown is one of our most interesting and exciting younger poets. With its love of ideas and language, his work demonstrates that there need be no barriers in poetry; that the philosophical, the lyrical and the playful can be combined in work of assured and generous vision.”
 
– John Burnside 
  
 
 
*
 
 
 
Clown in Space
  
In September 2009, Canadian clown Guy Laliberté,
founder of the Cirque du Soleil, was launched into
space from the Kazakhstan steppes.
 
 
Above the steppes I career into space
and wonder myself into darkness.
It is daytime down there, ‘broad daylight’
up here, but utterly dark. Below on earth
the atmosphere spins the sunlight into gold,
whilst up here there’s no atmosphere at all
to strike a glow between the stars—
there is nothing like darkness to remind you
you are extraordinarily alive, and alone.
 
The blue planet turns like a plate on a stick
underneath the Heavens’ billowing Top,
slung with a billion fairy lights and spots.
The stars perform their hypnotism act,
pulsing like the cities down below.
 
Although I’m the first of my kind into space,
my friends are all around in constellation:
Leo jumping through his ring of fire;
the Gemini twins in bareback balance,
riding around the ring on Pegasus;
the giant Betelgeuse and his team of red dwarfs;
the Sisters of the Pleiades, holding on
like the Severinis in their human pyramid.
Here is Orion, throwing knives at Venus,
and Hercules decked with his barbells and furs.
 
Impossible to juggle here—the balls simply float
from your hands, although tumbling is easy:
you set yourself in motion, spinning round
and round and round.
                              But this show is soon done
when Earth obscures the blue-eyed moon;
when my dreams slide down the thrilling slopes
of the Big Dipper; when the lit-up world floats by
and this audience of one returns to gravity
and stumbling jokes, as the ring-master Sun
calls closing time on the cirque du soleil.
 
 
 
*
   
 
 
The Clown’s Prayer
 
          In the prison of his days
          Teach the free man how to praise.
                                                 W H Auden
 
 
Oh Lord, oh Harpo Marx, oh Charlie Chaplin: glory be to the Insanity itself, for it is divinely inspired, it is carnival. Glory be to the messengers of mayhem, the anarchists, the silent performers. Glory be to the red flannel coxcomb and bells. Glory be to doing things the wrong way round. Glory be to juggling with a small dog at our heels. Glory be the mystery that deceived the Devil; the glee that leaps across our lives.
 
Oh Joseph Grimaldi, oh William Kempe, oh Pantomimus: where there is a rope on the floor let us wrestle it like a snake. Where there is a donkey or a pig, let us ride it home backwards. Where there is pomposity let us criticise the master and his guests; let us make fun of, be indelicate about, and rude towards, without fear of reprisal. Let us kill ourselves with laughter. When we stumble over the edge, commit us to imperfection.
 
Oh Harold Lloyd, oh Lou Costello, oh Oliver Hardy: blessed is he who trips across the line between the man he is and the man he would be. Blessed are they who float in the workaday world. Blessed are they who show what is wrong with the way that things are. Blessed is he who takes the pie in the face and gets knocked on the arse. Blessed are they who spank the crowd with a slap stick.
 
Oh Coco the Clown, oh Stan Laurel, oh Bud Abbott: teach me to wear freckles, warts, a big red nose. Teach me to stand in for the lion tamer; to touch freely on the touchiest issues. Teach me to look at myself in the mirror and find the trickster in a domino mask. Teach me to glance through the windows of the world I’ve missed. Help me be mischievous, not malicious. Teach me to ‘Sweep Up the Spotlight’.
 
Oh Puck, oh Nick Bottom, oh John Cleese: make me nimble and able whilst clumsy and dim. Help me mingle ecstasy and death. Make me the keystone that holds up normality’s arch. Help me to be wise enough to lead the deadpan troupe. Make me a tramp in patched and tattered clothes, then make the others do my bidding. Help me set up scenes that turn out droll. Make me wise enough to play the fool himself.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
A Clown in the Moonlight
 
‘There is nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight.’
                                                              Lon Chaney
 
 
How we feel about the clown
depends on where we see him—
a circus or party, no problem,
but ringing your doorbell at sundown?
 
That clown is a psycho killer,
a mirror of your fears,
knocking the world out of kilter . . .
and his laughter? It shears. 
  
 
 
*
 
 
 
The Adoration of the Magi
 
after W H Auden ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’
 
 
What we do results from where we are—
emerging from the landscapes of our lives
and of our dreams—just as what happens
in this world happens, mostly, without us,
unnoticed in the distant emptiness, where
the future hangs like something long forgotten.
We do not know what goes on and what we do
we often times ignore.
                              As in Bosch’s painting
The Adoration of the Magi, for instance:
how everything turns away from the unmoved
town at the mouth of the river, fringed by those
familiar dunes, where a traveller is mauled
by wild animals and a woman chased by wolves
through the blasted trees and untamed land,
their suffering ignored or passing unnoticed
in the wider details of the indifferent earth;
 
or how everything turns from the rotundas
and stupas of our homely town, turns away
from the ruinous gallows and the horsemen
galloping beneath the ensign of the moon,
insisting, instead, that this is all that matters:
 
how here there came on the fourteenth day
three Kings and Magi following a star, here
to this decrepit inn under the sign of the swan,
where Joseph kindles a modest courtyard fire
and a shepherd couple sprawl indecently
rubbing their eyes in the smokescreen
of ceremony;
                   how this is all that is the case,
rather than the truth of robbers hiding out
in wait for us somewhere in the spreading land,
or how each day oscillates between delight
and joy and other signs of unrest, violence:
the surface that could split at any time.
 
 
 
 
Note
 
‘The Adoration of the Magi’: Perhaps the best known of Twentieth Century painting-poems is W H Auden’s ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’, after another of the great Flemish master painters, Peter Breughel, and his painting The Fall of Icarus. Auden’s poem contains the line ‘In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster’, on which I have leant heavily in my own poem.
 
 
 
 
from The Fool and the Physician (Salt Publishing, 2012).
 
Order The Fool and the Physician.
 
Visit Andy’s blog.
 
 
 
*

I wanted to make stories from quite a young age. My first such memory was of sitting in my bedroom at about the age of six or so and making a book of poems. I still have it. It’s a little dog-eared now but it’s surviving. It has a cut-out of a rose stuck on the front and is rather inventively called ‘My book of poems’. Inside are a scattering of poems, in various colours of felt tip, about the seaside or flowers in a window box. And there’s an interesting type of binding which has somehow lasted more than thirty years – staples (now rusted).
 
I didn’t have to design or bind my short story collection Somewhere Else, or Even Here – thankfully my publishers Salt did that. I just had to worry about what was inside – the stories themselves.
 
Writing them was an intriguing, and, at times, difficult process. When I started out on the collection, about four years ago, I had no overall plan for it, no unifying subject or theme. I just wrote one story at a time and kept going. Each story was unplanned too. For me, there’s nothing better than feeling as if I’m in new, unknown territory when I’m writing – it’s like being an explorer. Only, you’re not discovering new continents or planets, you’re discovering something else – something new that you yourself are writing into existence.
 
The stories are all quite different – from child narrators to the elderly; failing relationships to failing health. And there are certain themes which have emerged in the collection too, such as astronomy, loss and hope. There’s a darkness to many of the stories, but, as with yin and yang, where there’s darkness there’s light. It’s strange how, as the writer, you don’t always see everything that the stories you’ve created contain. It’s like being blind to yourself. Which, I suppose, to a greater or lesser degree, we all are.
  
So what about the inspiration behind the stories? Well, sometimes there didn’t seem to be any obvious trigger at all. Stories such as ‘Sometimes Gulls Kill Other Gulls’ or ‘Overnight Miracles’ began after the first sentences dropped into my head, seemingly from nowhere. ‘Gulls’, about a girl on a beach who is lured away to a cave by a boy, just started with the words “A stick scraping over sand”, and from this I got the idea of a girl writing her name in the sand and a boy coming up to talk to her. It was only when I sat down to write it that the story began to open out in front of me, like a path revealing itself, one piece at a time.
 
‘Overnight Miracles’ was the same. This tells the story of a bereaved woman who starts performing magic rituals in a desperate bid to try to bring her dead husband back to life. With this one I just had the sentence “We are in the blackest part of night now”, and from this I somehow knew that this woman was in bed and aware of something lying next to her in the dark – a presence that she could only feel but not see.
 
‘Bone Fire’ had a more obvious genesis: this story of a troubled boy who drags a bonfire into the basement of his school was inspired by a visit to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. On the day I went there was an exhibition of photographs showing groups of children standing in front of some rickety bonfires they’d made. I jotted down my impressions of the exhibition in a notebook and when I later sat down to write, I wondered about what might happen if one of the boys decided to carry out an act of destruction using such a bonfire. The story was the result of those ponderings.
 
One aspect of writing the collection which really fascinated me was the effects gained from using different points of view. ‘Zero Gravity’ features a gang of girls, so it seemed logical to use first person plural (we) for most of the story, but to shift this to first person when one of the girls breaks free and begins to narrate the story herself. I enjoyed the feeling of writing in second person (you) as this gives a sense of dislocation, of separation, of being outside of things – something which can help to create an almost otherworldly atmosphere, giving stories a different kind of charge.
 
I loved going through the process of putting a collection together, especially when I didn’t even have the bones of a plan to hang the stories onto. It was a great surprise when my manuscript was chosen as one of three winners of Salt Publishing’s Scott Prize last year – something which I didn’t expect to happen but which I’m so glad has. I am going to continue to write more stories in the months and years ahead. New stories, slightly off-kilter stories, the kinds of stories that will hopefully give me that thrill of discovery again. It’s that feeling of being somewhere else that I want – that sense of being in another place. The thought that, while the landscape may seem somewhat familiar, it’s really no place that I’ve ever visited before.
 
 
 
Order Somewhere Else, or Even Here here, here or here.
 
Visit Andrea’s blog.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
A. J. Ashworth was born and brought up in Lancashire and has an MA in Writing from Sheffield Hallam University. Her short story collection Somewhere Else, or Even Here won Salt Publishing’s Scott Prize and was published by them in November 2011. Her stories have been published widely, in the likes of The Warwick Review, Horizon Review, Tears in the Fence and Under the Radar. They have also been listed in competitions such as The Willesden Herald International Short Story Competition, the Fish Short Story Prize and the Short Fiction Competition.