Hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica E-Book

Matt Merritt

• Herausgeber: Nine Arches Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 48

Beschreibung

Read a sample poem for free - just click the Extracts tab above. Matt Merritt's second collection, Hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica, is alive with a rare frequency all of its own – it is a precise and rewarding music for the soul, the heart, and the head. These are poems that take a distinctive route through landscapes rich with legend and wildlife, finding elegies written in the night sky on the way home from the pub, or quiet epics raging in the pages of memories and neglected histories. Matt Merritt has an ear for the exact notes, be they in a major or a minor key, and these gently insistent poems continue to resound long after their first reading. "In Matt Merritt's finely honed new collection, lives are lived in liminal spaces, shadow selves are reconstructing history and time is no time at all. These are quick-witted poems, made of toughened glass and ground-down clocks." Helen Ivory "Matt Merritt's new book is a cracker – technically adventurous and thematically cohesive. His work is based on a close attention to the world and a scrupulous approach to getting that world into verse. His subject is landscape, the rural and urban landscapes of the Midlands, which he uses as a cipher to talk about personal and community life. We see the surfaces of the contemporary, but also the deep presence of the historical poking through – the planning of new towns and the persistence of floodplains. This is the psychogeography of modern Leicestershire. Reading these poems I felt my own consciousness calming and concentrating – which is as good a way as any of saying that they are beautiful." Tony Williams Matt Merritt's debut full collection, Troy Town, was published by Arrowhead Press in 2008, and a chapbook, Making The Most Of The Light, by HappenStance in 2005. He studied history at Newcastle University and counts Anglo-Saxon and medieval Welsh poetry among his influences, as well as the likes of R.S. Thomas, Ted Hughes and John Ash. He was born in Leicester and lives nearby, works as a wildlife journalist and is an editor of Poets On Fire.

Leseprobe

hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica

hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica

Matt Merritt

ISBN: 978-0-9565514-4-3

Copyright © Matt Merritt 2010

Cover image: Optic at Portland Bill Lighthouse

© Jane Commane 2010

Author Photograph: © Mark Cureton

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Matt Merritt has asserted his right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published November 2010 by:

Nine Arches Press

Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,

Great Central Way, Rugby.

CV21 3XH

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Printed in Britain by:

imprintdigital.net

Seychelles Farm,

Upton Pyne,

Exeter

EX5 5HY

www.imprintdigital.net

Matt Merritt’s second collection is hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica. His debut full collection, Troy Town, was published by Arrowhead Press in 2008, and a chapbook, Making The Most Of The Light, by HappenStance in 2005. He studied history at Newcastle University and counts Anglo-Saxon and medieval Welsh poetry among his influences, as well as the likes of R.S. Thomas, Ted Hughes and John Ash. He was born in Leicester and lives nearby, works as a wildlife journalist, is an editor of Poets On Fire, and blogs at http://polyolbion.blogspot.com.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due to the following publications, in which some of these poems, or versions of them, first appeared:

Anon, BBC Wildlife, Blackbox Manifold, Brittle Star, The Delinquent, Gists & Piths, Horizon Review, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Iota, London Poetry Pearl, New Walk, The New Writer, Ouroboros Review, Peony Moon, Poetry Nottingham, The Reader, The Slab, The Smoking Poet, Tears In The Fence, Umbrella, Under The Radar and Stripe (Templar Poetry Anthology 2009).

‘Unquiet’ was originally written for the book Vagabond Holes: David McComb and The Triffids (Fremantle Press, 2009).

For advice, proof-reading and encouragement, many thanks to Tom Bailey, Lizzy Dening, Matthew Stewart and James W. Wood. For constant use of the reference library that is his house, I am grateful to Kirk Parsons. And for their support, patience, editorial expertise and willingness to listen to the same poems at readings again and again, I am greatly indebted to Jane Commane and Matt Nunn.

CONTENTS

Prelude for Glass Harmonica

Uchronie

English Literature

Unquiet

The American version

With Immediate Effect

Uchronie

A Fixer-Upper

Farewell, fantastic Venus

Halcyon

Treaty House

Dio Boia

Lyonnesse

Your Search Also Found

Things Left In Hotel Rooms

Request Hour At The Numbers Station

Stanislav Petrov

Truth Or Consequences

Worst Case Scenario

January

Glass

Maps & Legends

Dreams From The Anchor Church

1984

The sea at Ashby de la Zouch

The Archaeologist

Leland’s New Year Gift To The King, 1546

Seven Whistlers

from Tesserae

St Beuno Meets The English

Capel-y-Ffin

Drinking With Godberd

Breedon-on-the-Hill

Jubilee

Pheasants

Gabble Ratchet

The Ends Of The Earth

Trees

Winterbourne

The Shortest Night

Waiting To Cross

Sketches For A New Town

West Leicester Lullaby

Warning Against Using These Poems As A Map

Fantasia for Glass Harmonica

Goose Summer

Zugunruhe

Poem

Pinkfeet

Coolidge

In St Martin’s Square

The Old Country

Wader Flock, Thornham Harbour

Troglodyte

Dotterel

Kilter

Stoat

Variations On A Theme By J.A. Baker

Yellowhammers

The Limits

The New Parks School

Searching For The North West Passage

Pluvialis

Live At The Hope & Anchor

Birdsong

Summer Breeze

Swifts

Gossamer

Happiness

Cahoots

Nocturne for Glass Harmonica

“The harmonica excessively stimulates the nerves, plunges the player into a nagging depression and hence into a dark and melancholy mood that is apt method for slow self-annihilation. If you are suffering from any nervous disorder, you should not play it; if you are not yet ill, you should not play it; if you are feeling melancholy, you should not play it.”

Friedrich Rochlitz, Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung

Prelude for Glass Harmonica

You wake late

to hear it, muffled and opaque

in a distant room,

or maybe only dream

that quicksilver music,

feel as much as hear it

playing up and down your spine,

your mind

tuned to a different pitch.

Each day becomes a search

for the frayed ends of what’s

just been lost

in that instant between sleep

and consciousness, a melody you keep

twisting, turning, trying to make

new, pristine. Still it takes yesterday’s shape.

Uchronie

“Though they [the stars] seem close to us, they are infinitely distant, and so per consequens, they are infinite inhabitable worlds: what hinders? Why should not an infinite cause (as God is) produce infinite effects?”

Robert Burton

English Literature

Pens pause one last time,

above the gaping permafrost

of the page

while outside

swifts are scribbling furiously

upon the thinning haze

and summer is swaying us

with the slow, emphatic argument

of the trees.

One chance, you get at this,

he is telling us from the front.

One chance.

Unquiet

Forget the verdict, speculation in the gutter press,

a service for family and close friends, or the tight

clusters of pilgrims round the spot where they found the car

and the condo he left unlocked and lit up like Christmas.

Sometimes, late night, the phone rang

and I answered to find unfinished business

strung silently between us in that heartbeat before the click

and purr. And twice, in later years, I saw him out there.

First, in the migraine-light of mid-morning,

blinking back an evening of cheap local wine

in a town not twenty miles beyond the border.

He was wearing his hair longer, and his face was leaner,

harder, but even as I reached to smooth away inconsistencies

he was gone into the colour and sway of the market. Then

again, in buzzard weather, way out on the flats, when our bus

slowed for some wreck, he was driving an oncoming truck.

And, of course, this time eyes met. His rewrote the story so far