Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: The Poetry Business
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Best known as a writer of crime fiction – notably the 12 volume Charlie Resnick series – and as the mainstay, for two decades, of Slow Dancer Press, John Harvey's own poetry has perhaps stayed too long below the radar. This, his first collection in sixteen years, brings together the best of his two earlier books, Ghosts of a Chance and Bluer Than This, along with a number of new poems which show a greater depth and maturity and variety of form, further fusing together the intimate and personal with a passionate understanding of music and painting and the ways in which they can affect and illuminate our lives.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 58
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
Out of Silence
Selected Poems
John Harvey
Published 2014 by
smith|doorstop Books
The Poetry Business
Bank Street Arts
32-40 Bank Street
Sheffield S1 2DS
www.poetrybusiness.co.uk
Copyright © John Harvey 2014
Digital Edition © 2015
ISBN 978-1-910367-25-4
John Harvey hereby asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: © Molly Boiling
smith|doorstop Books is a member of Inpress, www.inpressbooks.co.uk. Distributed by Central Books Ltd., 99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN.
The Poetry Business is an Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation
for Molly
New Poems
Saturday
Having slept through
the entire Cup Final
our daughter stumbles
blearily into the room
eyes wild and hair askew
demanding food.
A family of foxes
two adults and three stubby cubs
is living in our garden
littering it with waste and bones.
Frances died, Jim,
after thirty five years of marriage.
When we were teenagers
you used to call across
the room we shared
“Good night, John,
and God Bless.”
This evening at the Vortex,
shoulder hunched and
greying hair brushed back,
Stan Tracey, well past seventy,
fingers percussive and strong,
played Monk’s ‘Rhythm-a-Ning’
scuttling crab-like across the keys
and I thought of her and you
and all there was between
you. Interlocked.
This then is what we do,
the only thing we can,
sometimes solo,
sometimes hand in hand:
forward, sideways,
sideways, back.
The Light This Morning
for Nancy Nielsen
The light this morning is touching everything
the poet says, and I imagine you
standing tall again
no longer numbed or navvied
by pain
letting loose the dogs
then stepping with them
into the pearl of early morning
the dew on the grass
fresh around your feet
I see you
walking in this early light
bending to your garden
setting things to rights
these moments before
the day itself is up and going
a tune somewhere playing
in memory
a song someone in your family
is singing one carefree afternoon
the windows carelessly open
the melody drifting away
The light this morning touches everything
purple, gold and crimson
piercing the richness
of trees
the twist and turn of grasses
and the call of birds
whose names come to you
almost as your own
A bird starts up from the trees
and you turn towards its call;
already there are fishermen
at work in the bay,
their voices
rise and fall
A moment
then you turn
back towards the house
the cool of the kitchen
smell of coffee newly ground
the small clear crack of shell
as the eggs are loosed into the bowl
apples sliced straight into the butter
foaming ready in the pan
flour
a dusting of sugar
cinnamon:
Apple Schmarren
The taste of it,
the cabin encircled
almost, by trees
the clearing into which we walked,
and you walked out to greet us
the light around us touching everything
Your poet’s eye
your gaze
your stubborn hardiness and grace.
Apparently
for Matthew Caley
Apparently, James Butler Hickok
and William Butler Yeats
shared more than just a common middle name.
It’s a little known fact but true
that on the sole occasion
Yeats foreswore his habit of a lifetime,
borrowed from Wild Bill, and sat
with his back to the batwing doors,
an earnest young gunslinger,
out to make a name for himself,
kicked them open and beat Yeats,
hands down, to the last two lines
of ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’.
Poem
(In Imitation of Frank O’Hara)
The rain is falling,
lightly
the way it did for Frank
when he stepped out onto the sidewalk
that would take him to St. Mark’s Place;
Camels, two packs, in his pockets,
a notebook; nothing more on his mind
than a quick espresso on Bleecker or MacDougal,
meeting maybe Grace or Jane,
before riffling through the pre-loved books
– though he wouldn’t have called them that, of course –
outside the bookstores on Fourth Avenue
in search of some hidden gem.
What was it?
Whatever the poets in Ghana are up to these days.
But here, the rain falling heavier now,
verily, it pisseth down so hard
the cat will no more push her nose outside
than she would swivel round and present
her more than elegant backside to the world
and I wonder
what another espresso would do to my metabolism,
remembering that morning on my way back
from shooting the breeze with Norbert Hirschhorn,
health hero, friend, and grand poet of the Lebanon,
when, after downing two double-shot lattes
in quick succession, I left him at the bus stop
and suddenly this pain like a giant foot
stepped down on my heart and, winded,
I stopped in my tracks
sweating and fearful at the thought of it all ending
so close to where we used to catch, my daughter and I,
the C11 bus to the library,
but then, as I rested, the pain began to fade
and with it my fears and with scarcely a wave
in whatever direction Bert had taken,
I continued home to where I am now,
sitting at the window, waiting for the rain to cease
so that I can go out for my morning walk
and wondering, in the meantime,
should I listen again to the Berg Violin Concerto
that has just stopped playing or simply sit
and leaf through this beautiful little Tibor de Nagy edition
of O’Hara’s poems, the one with Larry Rivers drawings
and Grace Hartigan’s gorgeous painting of Oranges?
How my heart leapt
that morning not so long ago
when I walked into the poetry room at Foyles
and saw it there, face out, among the new acquisitions,
just begging me to buy it, take it home,
even though the poems themselves are already on my shelves
but not like this
and besides, who wouldn’t take a little more
of O’Hara’s insouciance, his seemingly careless brilliance,
to help them through the day?
See?
The rain has stopped, the cat is outside,
studiously ignoring the blackbird
digging its orange beak into the earth
at the far end of the garden,
