The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

  Aren’t you chilled by it?

  The way the late afternoon

  is reduced to detail –

  the sky that odd shape of apron –

  opaque, scumbled –

  the lazulis of the horizon becoming

  optical greys

  before your eyes

  before your eyes

  in my ankle-length

  summer skirt

  crossing between

  the garden and the house,

  under the whitebeam trees,

  keeping an eye on

  the length of the grass,

  the height of the hedge,

  the distance of the children

  I am Chardin’s woman

  edged in reflected light,

  hardened by

  the need to be ordinary.

  1988CHARLES CAUSLEY Eden Rock

  They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:

  My father, twenty-five, in the same suit

  Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack

  Still two years old and trembling at his feet.

  My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress

  Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,

  Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.

  Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.

  She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight

  From an old H.P. sauce bottle, a screw

  Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out

  The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.

  The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.

  My mother shades her eyes and looks my way

  Over the drifted stream. My father spins

  A stone along the water. Leisurely,

  They beckon to me from the other bank.

  I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is!

  Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’

  I had not thought that it would be like this.

  EDWIN MORGAN The Dowser

  With my forked branch of Lebanese cedar

  I quarter the dunes like downs and guide

  an invisible plough far over the sand.

  But how to quarter such shifting acres

  when the wind melts their shapes, and shadows

  mass where all was bright before,

  and landmarks walk like wraiths at noon?

  All I know is that underneath,

  how many miles no one can say,

  an unbroken water-table waits

  like a lake; it has seen no bird or sail

  in its long darkness, and no man;

  not even pharaohs dug so far

  for all their thirst, or thirst of glory,

  or thrust-power of ten thousand slaves.

  I tell you I can smell it though,

  that water. I am old and black

  and I know the manners of the sun

  which makes me bend, not break. I lose

  my ghostly footprints without complaint.

  I put every mirage in its place.

  I watch the lizard make its lace.

  Like one not quite blind I go

  feeling for the sunken face.

  So hot the days, the nights so cold,

  I gather my white rags and sigh

  but sighing step so steadily

  that any vibrance in so deep

  a lake would never fail to rise

  towards the snowy cedar’s bait.

  Great desert, let your sweetness wake.

  NORMAN MACCAIG Chauvinist

  In all the space of space

  I have a little plot of ground

  with part of an ocean in it

  and many mountains

  It’s there I meet my friends

  and multitudes of strangers.

  Even my forebears dreamily visit me

  and dreamily speak to me.

  Of the rest of space

  I can say nothing

  nor of the rest of time, the future

  that dies the moment it happens.

  The little plot – do I belong to it

  or it to me? No matter.

  We share each other as I walk

  amongst its flags and tombstones.

  1989TED HUGHES Telegraph Wires

  Take telegraph wires, a lonely moor,

  And fit them together. The thing comes alive in your ear.

  Towns whisper to towns over the heather.

  But the wires cannot hide from the weather.

  So oddly, so daintily made

  It is picked up and played.

  Such unearthly airs

  The ear hears, and withers!

  In the revolving ballroom of space,

  Bowed over the moor, a bright face

  Draws out of telegraph wires the tones

  That empty human bones.

  KEN SMITH Writing in Prison 1990

  Years ago I was a gardener.

  I grew the flowers of my childhood,

  lavender and wayside lilies

  and my first love the cornflower.

  The wind on the summer wheat.

  The blue glaze in the vanished woods.

  In the space of my yard I glimpsed again

  all the lost places of my life.

  I was remaking them. Here in a space

  smaller still I make them again.

  CIARAN CARSON Belfast Confetti

  Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks,

  Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broken type. And the explosion

  Itself – an asterisk on the map. This hyphenated line, a burst of rapid fire…

  I was trying to complete a sentence in my head, but it kept stuttering,

  All the alleyways and side-streets blocked with stops and colons.

  I know this labyrinth so well – Balaclava, Raglan, Inkerman, Odessa Street –

  Why can’t I escape? Every move is punctuated. Crimea Street. Dead end again.

  A Saracen, Kremlin-2 mesh. Makrolon face-shields. Walkie-talkies. What is

  My name? Where am I coming from? Where am I going? A fusillade of question-marks.

  NUALA NÍ DHOMHNAILL (trans. PAUL MULDOON) The Language Issue

  I place my hope on the water

  in this little boat

  of the language, the way a body might put

  an infant

  in a basket of intertwined

  iris leaves,

  its underside proofed

  with bitumen and pitch,

  then set the whole thing down amidst

  the sedge

  and bulrushes by the edge

  of a river

  only to have it borne hither and thither,

  not knowing where it might end up;

  in the lap, perhaps,

  of some Pharaoh’s daughter.

  EAVAN BOLAND The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me

  It was the first gift he ever gave her,

  buying it for five francs in the Galeries

  in pre-war Paris. It was stifling.

  A starless drought made the nights stormy.

  They stayed in the city for the summer.

  They met in cafés. She was always early.

  He was late. That evening he was later.

  They wrapped the fan. He looked at his watch.

  She looked down the Boulevard des Capucines.

  She ordered more coffee. She stood up.

  The streets were emptying. The heat was killing.

  She thought the distance smelled of rain and lightning.

  These are wild roses, appliqued on silk by hand,

  darkly picked, stitched boldly, quickly.

  The rest is tortoiseshell and has the reticent,

  clear patience of its element. It is

  a worn-out, underwater bullion and it keeps,

  even now, an inference of its violation.

  The lace is overcast as if the weather

&n
bsp; it opened for and offset had entered it.

  The past is an empty café terrace.

  An airless dusk before thunder. A man running.

  And no way now to know what happened then –

  none at all – unless, of course, you improvise:

  The blackbird on this first sultry morning,

  in summer, finding buds, worms, fruit,

  feels the heat. Suddenly she puts out her wing –

  the whole, full, flirtatious span of it.

  SEAMUS HEANEY from Lightenings 1991

  VIII

  The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise

  Were all at prayers inside the oratory

  A ship appeared above them in the air.

  The anchor dragged along behind so deep

  It hooked itself into the altar rails

  And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

  A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope

  And struggled to release it. But in vain.

  ‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’

  The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So

  They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back

  Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

  MICHAEL LONGLEY The Butchers

  When he had made sure there were no survivors in his house

  And that all the suitors were dead, heaped in blood and dust

  Like fish that fishermen with fine-meshed nets have hauled

  Up gasping for salt water, evaporating in the sunshine,

  Odysseus, spattered with muck and like a lion dripping blood

  From his chest and cheeks after devouring a farmer’s bullock,

  Ordered the disloyal housemaids to sponge down the armchairs

  And tables, while Telemachos, the oxherd and the swineherd

  Scraped the floor with shovels, and then between the portico

  And the roundhouse stretched a hawser and hanged the women

  So none touched the ground with her toes, like long-winged thrushes

  Or doves trapped in a mist-net across the thicket where they roost,

  Their heads bobbing in a row, their feet twitching but not for long,

  And when they had dragged Melanthios’s corpse into the haggard

  And cut off his nose and ears and cock and balls, a dog’s dinner,

  Odysseus, seeing the need for whitewash and disinfectant,

  Fumigated the house and the outhouses, so that Hermes

  Like a clergyman might wave the supernatural baton

  With which he resurrects or hypnotises those he chooses,

  And waken and round up the suitors’ souls, and the housemaids’,

  Like bats gibbering in the nooks of their mysterious cave

  When out of the clusters that dangle from the rocky ceiling

  One of them drops and squeaks, so their souls were bat-squeaks

  As they flittered after Hermes, their deliverer, who led them

  Along the clammy sheughs, then past the oceanic streams

  And the white rock, the sun’s gatepost in that dreamy region,

  Until they came to a bog-meadow full of bog-asphodels

  Where the residents are ghosts or images of the dead.

  1992DENISE RILEY A Misremembered Lyric

  A misremembered lyric: a soft catch of its song

  whirrs in my throat. ‘Something’s gotta hold of my heart

  tearing my’ soul and my conscience apart, long after

  presence is clean gone and leaves unfurnished no

  shadow. Rain lyrics. Yes, then the rain lyrics fall.

  I don’t want absence to be this beautiful.

  It shouldn’t be; in fact I know it wasn’t, while

  ‘everything that consoles is false’ is off the point –

  you get no consolation anyway until your memory’s

  dead: or something never had gotten hold of

  your heart in the first place, and that’s the fear thought.

  Do shrimps make good mothers? Yes they do.

  There is no beauty out of loss; can’t do it –

  and once the falling rain starts on the upturned

  leaves, and I listen to the rhythm of unhappy pleasure

  what I hear is bossy death telling me which way to

  go, what I see is a pool with an eye in it. Still let

  me know. Looking for a brand-new start. Oh and never

  notice yourself ever. As in life you don’t.

  THOM GUNN The Hug

  It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined

  Half of the night with our old friend

  Who’d showed us in the end

  To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.

  Already I lay snug,

  And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

  I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,

  Suddenly, from behind,

  In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:

  Your instep to my heel,

  My shoulder-blades against your chest.

  It was not sex, but I could feel

  The whole strength of your body set,

  Or braced, to mine,

  And locking me to you

  As if we were still twenty-two

  When our grand passion had not yet

  Become familial.

  My quick sleep had deleted all

  Of intervening time and place.

  I only knew

  The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

  THOM GUNN The Reassurance

  About ten days or so

  After we saw you dead

  You came back in a dream.

  I’m all right now you said.

  And it was you, although

  You were fleshed out again:

  You hugged us all round then,

  And gave your welcoming beam.

  How like you to be kind,

  Seeking to reassure.

  And, yes, how like my mind

  To make itself secure.

  1994 HUGO WILLIAMS Prayer

  God give me strength to lead a double life.

  Cut me in half.

  Make each half happy in its own way