The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

  on the single eye

  of Johann Uhr,

  the Royal Armourer.

  And thus it was

  that she was eaten by a swift

  fleeing

  from the fires of Estrées.

  GEOFFREY HILL Ovid in The Third Reich1968

  non peccat, quaecumque potest peccasse negare,

  solaque famosam culpa professa facit.

  (AMORES, III, XIV)

  I love my work and my children. God

  Is distant, difficult. Things happen.

  Too near the ancient troughs of blood

  Innocence is no earthly weapon.

  I have learned one thing: not to look down

  So much upon the damned. They, in their sphere,

  Harmonize strangely with the divine

  Love. I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir.

  GEOFFREY HILL September Song

  born 19.6.32 – deported 24.9.42

  Undesirable you may have been, untouchable

  you were not. Not forgotten

  or passed over at the proper time.

  As estimated, you died. Things marched,

  sufficient, to that end.

  Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented

  terror, so many routine cries.

  (I have made

  an elegy for myself it

  is true)

  September fattens on vines. Roses

  flake from the wall. The smoke

  of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.

  This is plenty. This is more than enough.

  ROY FISHER As He Came Near Death

  As he came near death things grew shallower for us:

  We’d lost sleep and now sat muffled in the scent of tulips, the medical odours, and the street sounds going past, going away;

  And he, too, slept little, the morphine and the pink light the curtains let through floating him with us,

  So that he lay and was worked out on to the skin of his life and left there,

  And we had to reach only a little way into the warm bed to scoop him up.

  A few days, slow tumbling escalators of visitors and cheques, and something like popularity;

  During this time somebody washed him in a soap called Narcissus and mounted him, frilled with satin, in a polished case.

  Then the hole: this was a slot punched in a square of plastic grass rug, a slot lined with white polythene, floored with dyed green gravel.

  The box lay in it; we rode in the black cars round a corner, got out into our coloured cars and dispersed in easy stages.

  After a time the grave got up and went away.

  ROY FISHER The Memorial Fountain

  The fountain plays

  through summer dusk in gaunt shadows,

  black constructions

  against a late clear sky,

  water in the basin

  where the column falls

  shaking,

  rapid and wild,

  in cross-waves, in back-waves,

  the light glinting and blue,

  as in a wind

  though there is none,

  Harsh

  skyline!

  Far-off scaffolding

  bitten against the air.

  Sombre mood

  in the presence of things,

  no matter what things;

  respectful sepia.

  This scene:

  people on the public seats

  embedded in it, darkening

  intelligences of what’s visible;

  private, given over, all of them –

  Many scenes.

  Still sombre.

  As for the fountain:

  nothing in the describing

  beyond what shows

  for anyone;

  above all

  no ‘atmosphere’.

  It’s like this often –

  I don’t exaggerate.

  And the scene?

  a thirty-five-year-old man,

  poet,

  by temper, realist,

  watching a fountain

  and the figures round it

  in garish twilight,

  working

  to distinguish an event

  from an opinion;

  this man,

  intent and comfortable –

  Romantic notion.

  1969MICHAEL LONGLEY Persephone

  I

  I see as through a skylight in my brain

  The mole strew its buildings in the rain,

  The swallows turn above their broken home

  And all my acres in delirium.

  II

  Straitjacketed by cold and numskulled

  Now sleep the welladjusted and the skilled –

  The bat folds its wing like a winter leaf,

  The squirrel in its hollow holds aloof.

  III

  The weasel and ferret, the stoat and fox

  Move hand in glove across the equinox.

  I can tell how softly their footsteps go –

  Their footsteps borrow silence from the snow.

  DOUGLAS DUNN A Removal from Terry Street

  On a squeaking cart, they push the usual stuff,

  A mattress, bed ends, cups, carpets, chairs,

  Four paperback westerns. Two whistling youths

  In surplus US Army battle-jackets

  Remove their sister’s goods. Her husband

  Follows, carrying on his shoulders the son

  Whose mischief we are glad to see removed,

  And pushing, of all things, a lawnmower.

  There is no grass in Terry Street. The worms

  Come up cracks in concrete yards in moonlight.

  That man, I wish him well. I wish him grass.

  DOUGLAS DUNN On Roofs of Terry Street

  Television aerials, Chinese characters

  In the lower sky, wave gently in the smoke.

  Nest-building sparrows peck at moss,

  Urban flora and fauna, soft, unscrupulous.

  Rain drying on the slates shines sometimes.

  A builder is repairing someone’s leaking roof.

  He kneels upright to rest his back.

  His trowel catches the light and becomes precious.

  NORMAN MACCAIG Wild Oats

  Every day I see from my window

  pigeons, up on a roof ledge – the males

  are wobbling gyroscopes of lust.

  Last week a stranger joined them, a snowwhite

  pouting fantail,

  Mae West in the Women’s Guild.

  What becks, what croo-croos, what

  demented pirouetting, what a lack

  of moustaches to stroke.

  The females – no need to be one of them

  to know

  exactly what they were thinking – pretended

  she wasn’t there

  and went dowdily on with whatever

  pigeons do when they’re knitting.

  IAIN CRICHTON SMITH Shall Gaelic Die?

  Translated by the author

  1

  A picture has no grammar. It has neither evil nor good. It has only colour, say orange or mauve.

  Can Picasso change a minister? Did he make a sermon to a bull?

  Did heaven rise from his brush? Who saw a church that is orange?

  In a world like a picture, a world without language, would your mind go astray, lost among objects?

  2

  Advertisements in neon, lighting and going out, ‘Shall it… shall it… Shall Gaelic… shall it… shall Gaelic… die?’

  3

  Words rise out of the country. They are around us. In every month in the year we are surrounded by words.

  Spring has its own dictionary, its leaves are turning in the sharp wind of March, which opens the shops.

  Autumn has its own dictionary, the brown words lying on the bottom of the loch, asleep for a season.

  Winter has its own dictionary, the words are a blizzard building a to
wer of Babel. Its grammar is like snow.

  Between the words the wild-cat looks sharply across a No-Man’s-Land, artillery of the Imagination.

  4

  They built a house with stones. They put windows in the house, and doors. They filled the room with furniture and the beards of thistles.

  They looked out of the house on a Highland world, the flowers, the glens, distant Glasgow on fire.

  They built a barometer of history.

  Inch after inch, they suffered the stings of suffering.

  Strangers entered the house, and they left.

  But now, who is looking out with an altered gaze?

  What does he see?

  What has he got in his hands? A string of words.

  5

  He who loses his language loses his world. The Highlander who loses his language loses his world.

  The space ship that goes astray among planets loses the world.

  In an orange world how would you know orange? In a world without evil how would you know good?

  Wittgenstein is in the middle of his world. He is like a spider.

  The flies come to him. ‘Cuan’ and ‘coill’ rising.

  When Wittgenstein dies, his world dies.

  The thistle bends to the earth. The earth is tired of it.

  6

  I came with a ‘sobhrach’ in my mouth. He came with a ‘primrose’.

  A ‘primrose by the river’s brim’. Between the two languages, the word ‘sobhrach’ turned to ‘primrose’.

  Behind the two words, a Roman said ‘prima rosa’.

  The ‘sobhrach’ or the ‘primrose’ was in our hands. Its reasons belonged to us.

  W. S. GRAHAM Malcolm Mooney’s Land 1970

  I

  Today, Tuesday, I decided to move on

  Although the wind was veering. Better to move

  Than have them at my heels, poor friends

  I buried earlier under the printed snow.

  From wherever it is I urge these words

  To find their subtle vents, the northern dazzle

  Of silence cranes to watch. Footprint on foot

  Print, word on word and each on a fool’s errand.

  Malcolm Mooney’s Land. Elizabeth

  Was in my thoughts all morning and the boy.

  Wherever I speak from or in what particular

  Voice, this is always a record of me in you.

  I can record at least out there to the west

  The grinding bergs and, listen, further off

  Where we are going, the glacier calves

  Making its sudden momentary thunder.

  This is as good a night, a place as any.

  2

  From the rimed bag of sleep, Wednesday,

  My words crackle in the early air.

  Thistles of ice about my chin,

  My dreams, my breath a ruff of crystals.

  The new ice falls from canvas walls.

  O benign creature with the small ear-hole,

  Submerger under silence, lead

  Me where the unblubbered monster goes

  Listening and makes his play.

  Make my impediment mean no ill

  And be itself a way.

  A fox was here last night (Maybe Nansen’s,

  Reading my instruments.) the prints

  All round the tent and not a sound.

  Not that I’d have him call my name.

  Anyhow how should he know? Enough

  Voices are with me here and more

  The further I go. Yesterday

  I heard the telephone ringing deep

  Down in a blue crevasse.

  I did not answer it and could

  Hardly bear to pass.

  Landlice, always my good bedfellows,

  Ride with me in my sweaty seams.

  Come bonny friendly beasts, brother

  To the grammarsow and the word-louse,

  Bite me your presence, keep me awake

  In the cold with work to do, to remember

  To put down something to take back.

  I have reached the edge of earshot here

  And by the laws of distance

  My words go through the smoking air

  Changing their tune on silence.

  3

  My friend who loves owls

  Has been with me all day

  Walking at my ear

  And speaking of old summers

  When to speak was easy.

  His eyes are almost gone

  Which made him hear well.

  Under our feet the great

  Glacier drove its keel.

  What is to read there

  Scored out in the dark?

  Later the north-west distance

  Thickened towards us.

  The blizzard grew and proved

  Too filled with other voices

  High and desperate

  For me to hear him more.

  I turned to see him go

  Becoming shapeless into

  The shrill swerving snow.

  4

  Today, Friday, holds the white

  Paper up too close to see

  Me here in a white-out in this tent of a place

  And why is it there has to be

  Some place to find, however momentarily

  To speak from, some distance to listen to?

  Out at the far-off edge I hear

  Colliding voices, drifted, yes

  To find me through the slowly opening leads.

  Tomorrow I’ll try the rafted ice.

  Have I not been trying to use the obstacle

  Of language well? It freezes round us all.

  5

  Why did you choose this place

  For us to meet? Sit

  With me between this word

  And this, my furry queen.

  Yet not mistake this

  For the real thing. Here

  In Malcolm Mooney’s Land

  I have heard many

  Approachers in the distance

  Shouting. Early hunters