pictured landscape
rain fall falls river
birds move empty air
deluged in willows
(in) hidden (cigarette-smoke) mist
Jinling landscape
rain shadows rain falls falls lateral stalks
quantitative as-if dream: larks sang (air)
suspended fair field within
riuer narrows walls of a city borrowed light
quite a way after Yu Hsüan-chi (AD 844–869)
poem responding
the crowds the people the noise the glare
quietly sitting set apart
not looking for company nor even an elegant phrase
finding a mot juste in a moated village
for your simple flowers I’m grateful
rusticated, learning my -ologies
so full of affection that I need no-one
one living in mountains … pines
poem responding (remix)
flung amid an accident of noise
silence banishes mandolins
work a jewel bound on my finger
distilling the propounded word
clematis – denotes – result
held – aloof – to learn
symptoms of affection perception
pine heedless fellow of mountains
quite a way after Ch’ien Ch’i (AD 722–780)
abandoned person
two yellow birds through woods
overcast (at dawn) overcast
flower bells exhausted
rain among water-willows
warm sun specific
cherished (with both hands)
poems still not wanted
hair white, face & future blank
gift accepted
bright birds blur woodland
shady city outskirts
flower-clocks sounding patterns
willows parting long water
electric roadways divide
elder blossom held in mind
poems met with offers
such readiness / magnificent
quite a way after Li Po (AD 701–762)
wasted visit
dog sound water bark
rain heavy blossoms
trees deep with deer
beck hears no bell
bamboo split mist
water hangs from peaks
where is ‘here’ no-one knows
pine on pine on
no way
((water)) (dog) within (bark) ((sound))
peach blossoms distil the dew
deer // deep woods // appear
above the stream [ ] unheard
((blue)) (bamboo) divides (bamboo) ((mist))
springs wing from green cliffs
not-to-have / not-to-know / just to go
still weary pines twice, thrice
quite a way after Li Shang-yin (AD 813–858), again
no title
exquisite zither’s fifteen strings
fretfully bridge time lost & spent
(butterfly dreams shivering scales,
cuckold-cuckoo sings in spring;
these pearls that were moons tears
from a long way off, smoky-grey)
how hold lost time immaterial
gone in a flash amidst bewilderment
That harp…
That harp – sounds – feathering the air
fretting / trembling / the flowery mountain
racket for the contemporary moment
springs amorous (‘… pretty … … warbles…’) blurred
travelling blues going in your direction
step into not knowing “the summits again”
with a feeling cadences ring through memory
merely spatio-temporal, perplexed and lost
an epithalamy, or ballad
love is put to the test – Wittgenstein
calm the day, and bright;
constructed space and time
altering surroundings;
below skies
water-encircled
in the lee of the land,
larks sang matutinal
in sunlit air, that mote
your mind delight …
– ordered nature
transfigures itself
to ordered world –
a place and a purpose
intangible but simple,
long-looked-for joy …
now is it time
commitment calling
through scatterd light,
love manifest
ut tenax hedera
arborem implicat
now is time unfolding,
minute accumulations
in the texture of air:
– such knowledge fragmentary
until unconcealment,
minutes accumulating …
a purpose and a place
for solace and happiness: truth
is there too, in calm and quiet
paired magpies fly;
light through cloud, then
wind through reeds –
all things established
in graceful dance
where rest and peace are found,
glad affection
deliberate and resolved
through sweet consent:
may suns strengthen
and winds caress:
we’re wishing good luck in all things.
Bass adds Bass
for Dom Lash and his bass
Bass adds
bass, wrap-
-ping round
a line,
taking
it for
a walk:
stand-
-up
up-
right
holding im-
-mediacy,
no abstract
nothing
a dis-
-ruption
into
form,
force
expend-
-ed to
an end
strong, ac-
-tive and
voracious
charac-
-terised by
abun-
dance and
excess,
dance of
power
and weight,
a firm
& fast
footing
and harm-
-onious
devel-
-opment
hand o-
-ver hand
so add a
little bass,
a low wave
become audible
under
the song,
deter-
-minedly
indeter-
-minate
:
mechanisms
of affinity
closely
modelled
… brushed, dragged
and smeared, simul-
-taneously tangled;
scraped, wiped
and scratched …
bringing objects
before the mind
in de-
-finite thought:
change the
phrase, change
the phase
the process ac-
-centuated;
– whence
the bass, nearly
black, dark & impure –
brim-full of content,
translated to
immediacy
(a soft boom,
a hoarse roar)
suspended
in difference,
indifference
suspended:
setting the
rhythm,
minute,
particular
pure apper-
-ception
looking out
for the beat
the straight
line and
&
nbsp; the curve
knotted and
projecting
capacity
& power,
practical
builder of
elegant
convergences:
the sound
brightens
time and
possibility,
abstract,
unfettered:
in the beginning
what was there?
in the first place,
start from being
the end not
identical with
the object
thus, after
the beat,
thrum and pulse:
it’s a ba-
ba-
ba-
ba-
ba-
bass –
Georg Trakl fails to write a Christmas poem
white sky. black jackdaws. grey forest.
white treetops. black sky. grey jackdaws.
white forest. black treetops. grey sky.
white jackdaws. black forest. grey treetops.
•
red branches.
red snowfall.
red nights.
red darkness.
•
purple snow, purple wine.
purple midnight. purple wine.
blue snow, blue wine.
blue midnight. blue wine.
silver snow, silver wine.
silver midnight. silver wine.
David Davis’s bone density
beyond the startling
calyx of teeth
[…] asylum (Trevor Joyce)
wanting to see
genuine children
brought in
carried along
on a tide
of emotion
a well-grown 2-year-old
may be mistaken
for older
formerly judgemental
of physical appearance
and demeanour
people need to have
confidence in moving
to dental checks
milking it
temporary replaced
by permanent
teeth at the
corners of this 4-
year-old mouth
influenced by
nutrition and
the environment
past their peak
when 9 to 10
years of age
we need to be quite
hard-nosed here
people are desperate
there is a
terrible intelligence
working inside
the mouth
opened by
powerful hands
eyes expressionless
with tears in
mesh-link fencing
callous
written
on the heart
the scream continues
builds
abruptly stops
a spokesman said
we can’t satisfy
what you want
knowledge
and informed
consent
is it safe
is it safe
is it safe
inappropriate and
unethical when
of no benefits
The Matter of Ireland
for Billy Mills
Turquoise
Hornblende
Epidote
Pitchstone
Rhodonite
Obsidian
Pyroxene
Erinite
Rutile
Topaz
Iron
Epistilbite
Sapphire
Olivine
Felspar
Selenite
Tin
Onyx
Nickel
Emerald
Revisions (after Roy Fisher)
ut varias usus meditando extunderet artia (Georgics I. 133)
Virgil
taking hours over it losing them
into a poised gleam
a single light
•
Coping Batter
for Tom Raworth
chip and block
cleavage footing
bed chain
wedge runner
head joint
face jumper
crown grit
tie spar
flag course
stoop through
rag pinnings
buck and doe
a breath of air
branches like trees,
lighting
small increments of change;
heard sound
climbs
as song ramifies,
and, speaking, sees:
part
and apart,
as music strives,
doing, saying
finely
by hand, for us –
ranging, now, high to low,
patterns dying
that don’t give satisfaction.
they were so clear,
those first strophes,
stating
how heart, ears, interchange,
move round:
time’s
sequence codifies
all theories,
art
and non-art;
jouissance contrived
for those hearing
truly –
accretive, plus
evolving, fast or slow –
moments passing,
distilled out of abstraction.
to be prepared
and know the keys,
finding
broken airs (tunes) exchanged;
such ground
rhymes
feedback [specialised]
and syntheses
(thought
and un-thought);
hands re-derive
right-brain thinking
clearly –
monoceros
(no rustic chalumeau)
embodying
motor-movements’ exaction.
the song can dare
these clarities,
shaping
as modulations range:
compound
chimes
materialise
lancets, in threes,
arch
on curved arch;
high-pitched, roof dives
(red-tiled ceiling):
roundly-
drawn lines move, thus,
describe a circle, so:
curves, relieving –
part of delight’s attraction.
unfolding spare
polyphonies
shifting
overtones re-arrange,
expound:
mind
that’s active denies
minds from bodies
part
– they can’t part,
not while alive! –
such conjoining
wholly
analogous,
moving gemutató
(demonstrating)
de motu, ‘about motion’.
from otherwhere
rare densities
making
the familiar strange,
new-found:
lines
cross, don’t cross, surprise
by strategies;
heart
sings by heart
how joy shapes lives –
music, feeling
singly
brilliant corners –
no frowns as flurries flow,
snake, deciding
it’s ‘instant composition’.
accord connives
(remir) seeing:
plainly
it’s marvellous,
hurtling prestissimo –
endings’re endings –
&n
bsp; scarce time for introspection.
Acknowledgements & Annotations
‘And the light falls, remir’ – Ezra Pound
Ever since Pound put the word remir (Provençal, ‘I gaze’) into his Canto xx, trusting the reader to unpack the reference (a highly-charged moment in a poem by Arnaut Daniel), it has been a risky, but licit, gambit in poetry to condense allusion as well as diction. (Basil Bunting told Pound he’d once encountered a German-Italian Dictionary that embedded the concept in a definition: ‘Dichten: condensare’.) There is, below, some information relevant to such unpacking of my poems herein. I’ve tried to leave it at that; as Charles Olson reminded Jonathan Williams, ‘a poem is a process, not a memoir’. The intent, then, is not to ‘explain’: as Bunting said, the reader is as clever as the poet, and, indeed, is also the co-maker of any reading. The poems are themselves, and would be so without any annotations. But why not be easy and democratic about such things?
The poems appear in approximately chronological order, with some minor adjustments that made for a better grouping or pace. I have excluded from this book those of my translations where a conventional model of fidelity is intended (as, e.g., For British Workers: Versions of Vladimir Mayakovsky and others (London: Barque Press, 2017). An asterisk at the head of an entry below indicates that the poem is previously unpublished.
* * *
Catullus played Bach first appeared in Oasis magazine (1990) and in Richard Caddel’s ‘26 New British Poets’ supplement to New American Writing magazine (1991). The opening reverses a phrase in Louis Zukofsky’s long, Bach-obsessed poem “A”: ‘Bach read Catullus’. An aria from Bach’s Matthew Passion, ‘Erbarme dich…’, contains the phrase schaue hier, ‘look thou hither’; it has a famous obbligato violin part. There are some snippets from Leopold Mozart’s still-used treatise on violin-playing, found on my father’s bookshelves; arco is the musical Italian term for ‘[played with the] bow’. Prati ultimi flos is from Catullus, poem XI: ‘at the meadow’s edge a flower’.
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