Poems 1960-2000
Page 26
I am sitting on the step, 45
I am the dotted lines on the map, 120
Icon, 178
I got a Gold Star for the Pilgrim Fathers, 258
I have made my pilgrimage a day early, 79
I have nothing to say about this garden, 20
I met an ancestor in the lane, 243
Immigrant, 111
I’m still too young to remember how, 177
I mustn’t mention the hamster’s nose, 269
Incident, 19
Influenza, 134
In Focus, 95
In her 1930s bob or even, perhaps, 138
In Memoriam: James K. Baxter, 68
In my love affair with the natural world, 279
Inside my closed eyelids, printed out, 95
Instead of an Interview, 115
Instructions to Vampires, 19
In the Dingle Peninsula, 108
In the dream I was kissing John Prescott, 262
In the interests of economy, 178
In the Terai, 108
In the Unicorn, Ambleside, 128
I raise the blind and sit by the window, 75
I Ride on My High Bicycle, 26
Is it the long dry grass that is so erotic, 88
It has to be learned afresh, 133
It is going to be a splendid summer, 84
It is not one thing, but more one thing than others, 100
It is not only the eye that is astonished, 119
It’s Done This, 275
It’s hard to stay angry with a buttercup, 197
It’s the old story of the personal, 175
It was going to be a novel, 130
It was the midnight train; I was tired and edgy, 42
It went like this: I married at 22, 241
It will be typed, of course, and not all in capitals, 136
It would be rude to look out of the car windows, 210
It would not be true to say she was doing nothing, 22
I want to have ice-skates and a hoop, 128
I wish to apologise for being mangled, 176
I would not have you drain, 19
I write in praise of the solitary act, 49
Jay, 277
Julia has chocolate on her chin, 269
Just because it was so long ago, 237
Just visiting: another village school, 170
Kensington Gardens, 276
Kilmacrenan, 82
Kilpeck, 71
Kissing, 182
Knife-play, 18
Lantern Slides, 140
Last I became a raft of green bubbles, 128
Last Song, 190
Late at night we wrench open a crab, 135
Leaving the Tate, 156
Less like an aircraft than a kettle, 176
Let’s be clear about this: I love toads, 196
Letter from Highgate Wood, 96
Letter to Alistair Campbell, 122
Libya, 193
Light the Tilley lamp, 259
Listen to that, 41
Literally thin-skinned, I suppose, my face, 124
Londoner, 116
Look, children, the wood is full of tigers, 31
Looked better last time, somehow, on a wet weekday, 267
Looking through the glass showcase, 76
Loving Hitler, 165
Madmen, 131
Mary Derry, 238
Mary Magdalene and the Birds, 145
May: autumn. In more or less recognisable, 208
Meeting the Comet, 222
Mid-point, 120
Milkmaids, buttercups, ox-eye dasies, 168
Miss Hamilton in London, 22
Mist like evaporating stone, 121
Moa Point, 64
Moneymore, 267
Mornings After, 50
Moses Lambert: the Facts, 240
Mr Morrison, 86
Mrs Fraser’s Frenzy, 217
Mud in their beaks, the house-martins are happy, 200
My ancestors are creeping down from the north, 254
My angel’s wearing dressing-up clothes, 274
My Father, 194
My great-grandfather Richey Brooks, 62
My name is Eliza Fraser, 217
My turn for Audrey Pomegranate, 172
Nature Table, 132
Naughty ancestors, I tell them, 252
Naxal, 78
Near Creeslough, 81
Neighbours lent her a tall feathery dog, 105
Nelia, 64
Nellie, 237
Neston, 170
Next Door, 199
Ngauranga Gorge Hill, 43
Nor for the same conversation again and again, 98
Note on Propertius, 14
Not pill-boxes, exactly: blocks, 63
November ’63: eight months in London, 111
Now that there are no sparrows, 277
Nuns, now: ladies in black hoods, 166
‘Oblivion, that’s all. I never dream,’ he said, 141
Odd how the seemingly maddest of men, 131
Offerings, 263
Off the Track, 94
On a Son Returned to New Zealand, 44
Only a slight fever, 72
On the Border, 136
On the curved staircase he embraced me, 272
On the Land, 177
On the School Bus, 169
On the wall above the bedside lamp, 204
On the Way to the Castle, 210
Our busy springtime has corrupted, 94
Our throats full of dust, teeth harsh with it, 108
Our Trip to the Federation, 85
Outside the National Gallery, 105
Outwood, 168
Over the Edge, 76
Paremata, 259
Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow, 27
Pastoral, 182
Paths, 120
Paua-Shell, 110
‘Personal Poem’, 175
Peter Pan, 276
Peter Wentworth in Heaven, 255
Piano Concerto in E Flat Major, 138
Pink Lane, Strawberry Lane, Pudding Chare, 141
Please Identify Yourself, 61
Poem Ended by a Death, 97
Poetry for the summer. It comes out blinking, 276
Poetry Placement, 276
Polypectomy, 278
Post Office, 187
Prelude, 88
Proposal for a Survey, 90
Pupation, 70
Purple Shining Lilies, 39
Queen Caroline, I think, planted these chestnuts, 276
Rats, 261
Red-tipped, explosive, self-complete, 163
Regression, 25
Revision, 133
Richey, 62
Risks, 265
River, 109
Roles, 203
Romania, 211
St Gertrude’s, Sidcup, 166
St John’s School, 69
Salfords, Surrey, 167
Samuel Joynson, 240
Sandy, 277
Saturday, 45
Scalford Again, 170
Scalford School, 166
Scarcely two hours back in the country, 116
Script, 66
Sea-Lives, 110
Send-off, 95
Settlers, 112
Shakespeare’s Hotspur, 132
She keeps the memory-game, 77
She’ll never be able to play the piano, 222
She writes to me from a stony island, 64
Showcase, 76
Shrimping-Net, 111
Slightly frightened of the bullocks, 92
Smokers for Celibacy, 215
Snow on the tops: half the day I’ve sat at the window, 123
Somehow we manage it: to like our friends, 214
Somehow you’ve driven fifty miles to stand, 247
Some of us are a little tired of hearing that cigarettes kill, 215
Someone has nailed a lucky horse-shoe, 137
Somewhere in the bush, the last moa, 205<
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Spilt petrol, 110
Standing just under the boatshed, 111
Stepping down from the blackberry bushes, 35
Stewart Island, 44
Stockings, 261
Strange room, from this angle, 101
Street Scene, London N2, 185
Street Song, 142
Sub Sepibus, 245
Suddenly it’s gone public; it rushed out, 211
Summer in Bucharest, 266
Swings and Roundabouts, 254
Syringa, 99
Tadpoles, 159
Tarmac, take-off: metallic words conduct us, 15
Tawny-white as a ripe hayfield, 129
That can’t be it, 250
That’s where they lived in the 1890s, 234
That was the year the rats got in, 261
That wet gravelly sound is rain, 70
The accidents are never happening, 177
The barber’s shop has gone anonymous, 186
The Batterer, 203
The Bedroom Window, 157
The bee in the foxglove, the mouth on the nipple, 43
The Breakfast Program, 208
The Bullaun, 60
The Chiffonier, 158
The concrete road from the palace to the cinema, 78
The Drought Breaks, 70
The events of the Aeneid were not enacted, 39
The Ex-Queen Among the Astronomers, 93
The Fairies’ Winter Palace, 276
The Famous Traitor, 65
The Farm, 212
The first spring of the new century, 238
The first transvestite I ever went to bed with, 261
The four-year-old believes he likes, 22
The French boy was sick on the floor at prayers, 166
The Genius of Surrey, 164
The Greenhouse Effect, 204
The hailstorm was in my head, 82
The High Tree, 173
The Hillside, 129
The hills, I told them; and water, and the clear air, 115
The Inner Harbour, 110
Their little black thread legs, their threads of arms, 159
The janitor came out of his eely cave, 268
The Keepsake, 162
The landscape of my middle childhood, 164
The Last Moa, 205
The little girls in the velvet collars, 169
The Man Who X-Rayed an Orange, 23
The maths master was eight feet tall, 171
The Monarch caterpillars were crawling away, 278
The Net, 77
Then in the end she didn’t marry him, 130
The ones not in the catalogue, 179
The other option’s to become a bird, 87
The Pangolin, 32
The Pilgrim Fathers, 258
The power speaks only out of sleep and blackness, 118
The Prize-winning Poem, 136
The queue’s right out through the glass doors, 187
There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public, 87
There have been all those tigers, of course, 32
There is no safety, 148
There they were around the wireless, 165
There was a tree higher than clouds or lightning, 173
There was never just one book for the desert island, 184
There were always the places I couldn’t spell, or couldn’t find on maps, 113
The Ring, 130
The room is full of clichés – ‘Throw me a crumb’, 27
The Russian War, 235
These coloured slopes ought to inspire, 121
These winds bully me, 107
The sheets have been laundered clean, 77
The Soho Hospital for Women, 101
The Spirit of the Place, 121
The strong image is always the river, 109
The surface dreams are easily remembered, 50
The syringa’s out. That’s nice for me, 99
The tadpoles won’t keep still in the aquarium, 132
The Telephone Call, 179
The Three-toed Sloth, 49
The three-toed sloth is the slowest creature we know, 49
‘The time is nearly one o’clock, 206
The trees have all gone from the grounds of my manor, 255
The underworld of children becomes the overworld, 143
The Vale of Grasmere, 121
The Video, 270
The Voices, 267
The voices change on the answering-machines, 267
The Voyage Out, 62
The Wars, 244
The Water Below, 30
The weekly dietary scale, 62
The worst thing that can happen, 193
They are throwing the ball, 34
They asked me ‘Are you sitting down, 179
They call it pica, 73
They give us moistened BOAC towels, 80
The young are walking on the riverbank, 182
The young cordwainer (yes, that’s right), 240
They set the boy to hairdressing, 242
They serve revolving saucer eyes, 93
They suggest I hold court in the Queen’s Temple, 276
They thought he looked like Gregory Peck, of course, 260
They will wash all my kisses and fingerprints off you, 97
Things, 87
Think Before You Shoot, 31
Think, now: if you have found a dead bird, 29
This darkness has a quality, 24
This house is floored with water, 30
This is a story. Dear Clive, 92
This is the front door. You can just see, 185
This is the time of year when people die, 200
This tender ‘V’ of thighs below my window, 264
This truth-telling is well enough, 100
This Ungentle Music, 129
This Winifred Nicholson card for my mother’s birthday, 278
Those thorn trees in your poems, Alistair, 122
Three Rainbows in One Morning, 119
Three times I have slept in your house, 28
Through my pillow, through mattress, carpet, floor and ceiling, 107
Ting-ting! ‘What’s in your pocket, sir?’ 213
Toads, 196
Today the Dog of Heaven swallowed the sun, 135
‘To Fleur from Pete, on loan perpetual’, 162
Tokens, 77
To Marilyn from London, 116
Tongue Sandwiches, 257
Tongue sandwiches on market-day, 257
Too jellied, viscous, floating a condition, 204
Train from the Hook of Holland, 63
Traitors, 252
Trees, 47
Tricks and tumbles are my trade; I’m, 145
Trio, 269
Tunbridge Wells, 172
Turnip-heads, 202
227 Peel Green Road, 236
Under a hedge was good enough for us, 245
Under the Lawn, 197
Under the sand at low tide, 110
Unexpected Visit, 20
Uniunea Scriitorilor, 156
Variations on a Theme of Horace, 103
Viewed from the top, he said, it was like a wheel, 23
Villa Isola Bella, 139
Visited, 100
Water, 243
We are dried and brittle this morning, 71
Weathering, 124
We awakened facing each other, 89
We bought raspberries in the market, 266
‘We did sums at school, Mummy, 166
We give ten pence to the old woman, 108
We three in our dark decent clothes, 189
‘Wet the tea, Jinny, the men are back, 66
We weave haunted circles about each other, 40
We went to Malaya for an afternoon, 85
‘What are you looking at?’ ‘Looking’, 119
What are you loving me with? I’m dead, 247
What can I have done to earn, 203
What is it, what is it? Quick: that whif
f, 206
What May Happen, 193
What shall we do with Granpa, in his silver, 234
What was the creepiest thing about him, 276
When I came in that night I found, 38
When I got up that morning I had no father, 194
When I went back the school was rather small, 69
When Laura was born, Ceri watched, 270
When the Americans were bombing Libya, 193
When they were having the Gulf War, 244
When we heard the results of our tests, 265
When you dyed your hair blue, 161
When you’re fifteen, no one understands you, 259
When you were lying on the white sand, 19
Where They Lived, 234
Which redhead did I get my temper from, 242
Wildlife, 201
‘Will I die?’ you ask. And so I enter on, 21
Willow Creek, 268
Witnesses, 189
Wren Song, 198
‘You are now walking in the road, 188
You could have called it the year of their persecution, 199
You count the fingers first: it’s traditional, 192
You did London early, at nineteen, 116
‘You’ll have to put the little girl down’, 140
‘You need a bolster,’ said the nurse, strapping a roll, 278
You recognise a body by its blemishes, 52
You’re glad I like the chiffonier. But I, 158
Your villa, Katherine, but not your room, 139
Your ‘wedge of stubborn particles’, 96
You see your nextdoor neighbour from above, 183
By the Same Author
POETRY
The Eye of the Hurricane (Reed, New Zealand, 1964)
Tigers (Oxford University Press, 1967)
High Tide in the Garden (Oxford University Press, 1971)
The Scenic Route (Oxford University Press, 1974)
The Inner Harbour (Oxford University Press, 1979)
Below Loughrigg (Bloodaxe Books, 1979)
Selected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1983)
Hotspur: a ballad for music (Bloodaxe Books, 1986)
The Incident Book (Oxford University Press, 1986)
Meeting the Comet (Bloodaxe Books, 1988)
Time-Zones (Oxford University Press, 1991)
Looking Back (Oxford University Press, 1997)
Poems 1960-2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2000)
Dragon Talk (Bloodaxe Books, 2010)
EDITOR
The Oxford Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry
(Oxford University Press, 1982)
The Faber Book of Twentieth Century Women’s Poetry