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- Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Late Gifts is a joyful and anxious book. The eponymous late gift, this book's occasion, is a son, born to a middle-aged father. How does this change his sense of present and future, of time itself? The poet focuses on this demanding and joyful relationship in terms that are funny and re-energising, his world renewed. The child's future makes more urgent the environmental and political themes which have long been a concern for the poet. Here Price has developed new forms for his subject matter, including striking longer pieces which survey contemporary worlds with arresting imagery and a hypnotic energy, the twin gatherings of prose poems 'Shore Gifts' and 'Shore Thefts', and quieter, meditative poems of elegy and awe-struck praise. As Maureen N. McLane has written, 'He is one of our most attentive, delicate, ferocious transmitters, singers, makers.'
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Late Gifts
Richard Price
CARCANET POETRY
Contents
Some of these poems have been published in And Other Poems, Bad Lilies, Nancy Campbell’s A Book of Banished Words, The Caught Habits of Language: an Entertainment for W.S. Graham (edited by Rachael Boast, Andy Ching and Nathan Hamilton), The Dark Horse, Finished Creatures, Magma, Mayday, PN Review, Poetry Review, The Rialto, Spark: Poetry and Art Inspired by the Novels of Muriel Spark (edited by Rob A. Mackenzie and Louise Peterkin), The Times Literary Supplement, and Verseville. My thanks to the editors and other publishing workers involved and to dear, patient, friends who have read and commented upon versions of this book.
My particular thanks to the Society of Authors for an Authors’ Foundation Award which helped pay towards childcare at a critical time.
In loving memory of Tim Price, 1961–2021
For Rory
We are the artists of the dream.
We are the Baddies.
We twist ears into eyebrows.
Rory Price-Lowe
Late Gifts
Nobody’s child
her child
who is my child
as holy
as loved
as inner thought
my child
who is her child
no-one’s child
hush thought is
waking
our child no-one’s child
who has been dreaming
(now woken) forgetting
a future world remembering
a new world nobody’s child
SOMEBODY’S CHILD
Children are wild
Children are wild and make dens with coats and a folding table
in one-room bed-and-breakfasts.
There are kids’ homes in the condemned woods.
Black polythene flaps like a wood-gatherer in a glimpse of distance.
One lean-to has the wet weight of silver birches for structural timber.
There’s stolen ply, too, orange as ‘just a little milk in tea, thanks’, and neat handwriting.
An ex-soldier has settled in the shelter of a tree-house with its car-door shut. All autumn
he lays high but now everything’s gone bar the cut leaf of a SIM, two turquoise sandals, and an empty
holdall.
Somebody’s child
The automatic doors are half opening, half closing.
Just outside on the cheer-us-up paving there’s a, a
middle-aged man sitting air-drumming, a quick light
percussion, onset of Parkinson’s perhaps.
He’s folded back the four black/blue petals
of an empty Happy Meal box to…
make a begging cup – kicked now, crushed
by the white puffy trainers
of a man shouting You
shall not enter! You
shall not enter
the Kingdom
of God!
Die!
Die!
and God
tells Sportsman
to Set the fake
on fire, so he clicks,
clicks his purple lighter,
clicks, clicks close, but no flame, God
is testing the man, Urinate
on the fake, God says quite politely
so Sportsman is flipping his penis out.
Now a woman from above Explore Learning
shouts down Put it away! You cunt! I’m calling the,
you fucking low life, get away from him, I’m dialling –
she holds up the pink phone. He flees like he’s being hunted.
Somebody’s child
Thrown
wide out –
in the bins
a Pole working
at Costa daytime
spends nights cooking up, then,
neat alarm clock set, beds down
between Landfill and Recycling.
Six months in he’s gaunt but smiles Welcome.
Above him low-seat drivers ramp fast up
to easyGym for 24hr protein
shakes, spinning classes, lycra retro dance, dumbells
v donuts. (In the flats five floors high the air is fuel –
children inhale snags of petrol, diesel, plane fumes, flicked dust.)
City allotment
Hasan sub-leases a second plot
and to hell with the red tape.
Phil swears in Italian.
He shares seedling and fruit.
Dennis grows irises
and some men call him Flower Boy.
Elaine is as neat as a diagram.
She colours-in borders with lavender.
Joy and Honor
keep themselves to themselves.
Hasan was Hussein, but Iraq.
Covid took him.
It’s Spring and his widow says
one plot is enough.
Left-hand drive
Stolen left-hand drive, bench front-seat.
Europe or America? Kraftwerk? Harmonica? Contrast / compete.
Choose the ready-made real
as you wake up at the wheel, a child in Cuban heels, The Fall on repeat.
It’s wayback when or maybe the day after next week.
Rituals and coins, jump-cuts and joins, now you hear her speak.
But you miss the big reveal
when you wake up at the wheel: half robot, half antique.
The fires have cleared and you’re miles from lake and peak.
Moonscape, ocean floor? Airstrip? Charcoal moor? You’re way too weak
to know if you can heal
but you wake up at the wheel, wrong kind of unique.
Your dreams are at the tip of your tongue.
You know there’s oil – in the aqualung.
You spy the mime but what gets sung?
