Small World E-Book

Richard Price

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 57

Beschreibung

The 'Patient' suffers a brain haemorrhage. Small World grows out of the days before and after. It has the authority of lived experience, beginning with what Price dubs 'existential family poems': honed, lyrical, they explore the dynamics of modern life. Price's poems observe and reflect, revisiting and deepening the themes of his earlier books. These poems prepare us for the moment when the poet's lover, the 'Patient', is afflicted. At times angry and despairing, the poems evoke hospital conditions and social attitudes to the ill, but the main focus is on the intricate reality of living day to day, trying to bring memory to bear on the future: Price's produces a multi-layered collection that builds a rich portrait of love under almost intolerable pressure.

Leseprobe

RICHARD PRICE

Small World

for the patient, and for the Patient

My name is Double Double This This,

Double Double That That,

Double This, Double That,

Double Double This That

England, Ireland,

Scotland, Wales –

Inside, Outside,

donkeys’ tails!

stand on the elastic

I have a best friend:

she’s a chocolate biscuit.

Acknowledgements

The epigraph contains fragments from playground songs first published in Painted, spoken and transcribed from performances by Ellen Price and Maisie Price. ‘Faster!’, arranged by the author, is taken from a song sung by Ellen Price in the same survey. ‘An old drawer up beyond the children’ first appeared in Julie Johnstone’s one poem project, less.

Other poems collected here were originally published in Alba Londres, Cahiers intempestifs, cul de qui, The Lyre, Magma, Manhattan Review, Poetry Review and The Red Wheelbarrow.

‘Jazz syllabus’ appeared in An Unofficial Roy Fisher (Shearsman) and ‘I am greatly changed’ within A Mutual Friend: Poems for Charles Dickens (Two Rivers), both edited by Peter Robinson.

An alternative version of ‘House martins’ was first published in Birdbook 1 (Sidekick), edited by Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving; ‘Delicate greenery’ and ‘Pinnacle wordfinder’ were first published by likestarlings.

Both ‘Blue black permanent’ poems appeared in the letterpress collection Frosted, melted (diehard), and ‘Left neglect’ in Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins), edited by Tom Chivers.

Versions of many of the poems collected here were recorded in a single session for the online Archive of the Now, curated by Dr Andrea Brady, Queen Mary, University of London.

My thanks to all involved, and to Judith W., Peter McC., Sandy H., and David K.

“In memory” is dedicated to the late Fiona Farquhar.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Acknowledgements

SMALL WORLD

An old drawer up beyond the children

The Mutual Satellite Assurance Company Limited

Cocktail hour

Book makers

Fold-up

A rising field

Little toes

Compartment

At the Modern

Mermaid in a wheelchair

Fifty per cent is by continuous assessment

Ninety per cent is by continuous assessment

Missing person

Namesake

Namesake

Faster!

Jazz syllabus

High red gates → prawns, pork

The paper doors

Initials

Manmade buoyancy

If you fall, or touch a line, your turn ends

Compartment

House martins

SMALL WORLD

Delicate greenery

Blue black permanent

Blue black permanent

Nimble, oblique

Initials

Pinnacle wordfinder

Prayer

IN MEMORY

Breaking point

Aphasia in last days

SMALL WORLD

Relatives Room

Under

The whole ocean

Cards

Valentine: Would love to meet

All the best

Corinne

Lift

As if the equal

Frank O’Hara was a curator

From Crete

Dominion claim

‘A second’s scalding’

‘In the corner there’

Stella

cell

Storming

Talks about talks

If you fall, or touch a line, your turn ends

That passing place

Glasgow Coma Scale

She wakes in war poetry

Rose

Drugs or

Tilt table

Clip

Jewellery

Phantom limb

Left neglect

It’s work to sit still

São Paulo is no city for walkers

Dust in the tread

Introductions

Locked

Two Ians and a witch

An award-winning documentary

The Everfield

The Elderfield

Gallery

I am greatly changed

Release & the goodwill aquifers

AFTERWORD

Fliers

Copyright

SMALL WORLD

An old drawer up beyond the children

Little torn-offs, kept, gummed, and a bill window; large small change in matt grey and bronze. ‘Are these your medals, Dad?’

A list of do-it-ourselves in feet and inches. Half-hollow plastic letters, red red, blue blue. They won’t, can’t, endure an open word. Grr – consonant consensus.

A single staple, not yet folded, in self-assembly dust.

Up beyond the children this old drawer, laden (can stick). Easy with it, extract and show.

The Mutual Satellite Assurance Company Limited

A double-planet system –

the Earth and the Moon.

Stability,

maybe stability.

And maybe the moon – you know –

an equal – once.

Sisters – (a little big-sister,

a big little-sister) –

rough couplets,

two haloes of pressure,

mutual, unequal –

the solidarity of interference.

(Their desire to hold.

Their desire to hold back.)

Cocktail hour

Measure out, administer.

Katie’s half dribbling, half tiny-bubbling.

She’s laughing (gentle). She’s not swallowing this, tells it

in a viscous mumble, bright red –

to Miss Piggy on her night-top.

A lip froth of light pink. Epilim

is the trademark; the mixer saliva.

Cheers.

Cheers.

<

Measure out, administer.

A balancing spoonful – red’s liquid thisness accepted

but a no-swallow repeat. The jaws grip.

A slow worrying; the spoon’s dog-stickish.

I’m pulling carefully this side, carefully that.

Katie is teeth. (By the way,

either animals are not animals or we are all animals.)

Her head moves with me:

she seems to know and she seems to No. Eye contact, smiling. Finally

we are free. The spoon looks wiped clean (tight lipped Katie). No,

no swallow. She’s

snorting an avoidance –

turning, turning with a backward shove. The drug-thick syrup still not down.

Now she’s… this way, facing close with a face-full. Her cheeks are puffed up,

pursing, pursing, (drama of the mime), twice tight-lipped. She pouts, full of it.  

She twitch-teases. She

blurts.

<

We have both dyed. That’s sis-gusting! ( – big little-sister Ellen, suddenly at my side).

We’re all a crimson speckling (our faces, my peevish glasses).

We are red-spectrum endpapers, delicate, an art house horror clip.

We are blood relations.

Measure out.

Administer.

Book makers

Tuning out and seeking scrap,

any marker to don’t-know down a page.

Tuning out.

We’ll not be bullied by gangsters in Ellen’s gel pen.

We’ll not be bullied by gangsters on a white sheet

of printer fodder – surrender all news

to glitter strawberry

and the scent of glitter strawberry scent.

A6ing the A4.

I’m just full of the Cuban infant mortality rate.

How come you don’t like your own kids in America?

Casting the first statistic,

                                                    a little folded

<

/and over the fold

seeking cutting adage

no, simpler, an artist’s book itinerary

slow up

(a keyboard waits six years

for EDCD EEE- DDD- EEE-

EDCD EEE- DDED C—-)

wherever she would go

wherever she would go

<

The house asleep I’m a Special Effect, a digital ghost,

not quite random with the poked remote:

boxed-in music and the truth channelled uncanny by current affairs.

‘Rhythm is a dancer’ – Katie was a drummer.

The djembe’s decoration now

and she’s all eyes for the boy bands.

There’s Newsnight unanimity, Late Night Revue

(poet-pundits, poet bio-pics, but no poetry),

all a turnoff.

For Ellen this evening there was ocarina emulation,

harps and jazz guitar on the halfpint Yamaha.

Mild interest.

Some space here.

<

/over the fold

(accident on the A6)

it’s all manuscripts and mass printlessness,

text art objects, electric sacred-pretend

no, cut that back, make the book

over the fold

for glass boxes, light welling out

kids’ glitter all over the audit trail

<

/

look me squarely in the eye

tell me you’re not

tell me you’re not

tell me you’re not

a constructivist

<

/