The Europeans E-Book

David Clarke

• Herausgeber: Nine Arches Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 48

Beschreibung

David Clarke, winner of the Michael Marks Poetry Award 2013, returns with his second collection, The Europeans. Simultaneously close to home and looking outward beyond these shores, these wry and perceptive poems revel with form and encompass journeys, ideas of nationhood and national identity, and the optimism of a time when Europe and the UK enjoyed a quite different entente cordiale. They are a warning against nostalgia, a lucid and prescient exploration of how we see ourselves and how we are seen. "A document for our times. A protest against bigotry and smuggery. A thesis for open borders and equality. In its cumulative effect, The Europeans is a comparative cultural analysis, a social satire and political commentary, a portrait of us and them, here and there, home and away." Paul Stephenson "Clarke's authoritative new collection offers profound pleasures, and deepening regrets, in a poetic continent where every reader must confront 'your own untruth'. The Europeans is certainly a book for the present. It is also a book for our uncertain future." - Alison Brackenbury "It includes the best gathering of found Brexit similes I expect to see in my lifetime, and a poem on stately homes that needs to be broadcast before every re-run of Downton Abbey. With targeted humour, an eye for the mobile and the sedentary, repurposing the mundane, David Clarke takes us to estates of all kinds, to both Leeds Central and Milano Centrale."– Alistair Noon

Leseprobe

The Europeans

The Europeans

David Clarke

ISBN: 9781911027690

eISBN: 9781911027782

Copyright © David Clarke, 2019.

Cover artwork © Jonathan Wateridge, ‘Boy on Wall’, 2012 (Oil on Linen 282cm x 400cm) www.jonathanwateridge.net

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.

David Clarke 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 March 2019 by:

Nine Arches Press

Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,

Great Central Way, Rugby.

CV21 3XH

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Printed in the United Kingdom by:

Imprint Digital

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding

by Arts Council England.

la naïveté est une condition de la fuite.

Édouard Louis

Contents

Invitation

Letter in March

An Exchange

The Europeans

To a Black and White Portable Television

The Tarot Reader Shows Me the Hierophant

Museum of Lies

To a Public House

In the Snug

Let Me Be Very Clear

The Defence of Bureaucracy

The Towns

When my mother worked in the asylum

To a Mellotron

The Villages

To a Stately Home

The Wreckers’ Prayer

The Chicken Catchers

To a Telephone Box

The Girl with the Golden Voice

England, I loved you

Night Porter

Hotel Stationery

To a Petrol Station

For the Traveller

Auden at Kirchstetten

Laudatio

To a Small Audience

Linguaphone

To a Photo Booth

Lingua franca

The Clock

The Amber Room

Sugar Town

To an Airmail Letter

The Numbers Stations

The Natives

On Choosing a Piano

Letter to George Gordon Byron

Station to Station

Apparition

Land of Rain

The Vision of Albion

Notes and Acknowledgements

About the author and this book

Invitation

Meet me in the lobby of the Hotel Europa,

the high lobby shadowed by palms,

where men in uniform stride with stiff

purpose and the pianist gifts us bland jazz.

We’ll never spend as many nights

in the Hotel Europa as we would need

to wake just once in all its pristine rooms,

to step lightly onto every balcony.

Let’s kiss in the garden of the Hotel Europa,

let’s scandalise the dowagers, their hangers-on.

We’ll be a mystery to those who meet us,

briefly, at the backgammon table

or in the cocktail hour, when the Hotel Europa

is pearlescent with afternoon light

and the time until dinner is too short for anything

but dozing and minor intrigue.

As soon as we arrive in the Hotel Europa

we long to leave, to find that little place

you once stumbled on – its courtyard walls

rippling with fig trees, its address a fiction.

And yet we cannot fault the service

in the Hotel Europa. Even though it’s just after

or just before a war and long-retired

waiters have been pressed back into the ranks

of the white-gloved. Half bent with age,

they’re a credit to the Hotel Europa,

younger by decades than most of the guests,

who don’t remember their room numbers,

the names of their children,

or even the location of the Hotel Europa

in a land so silent you can hear the blades

of grass turned by the breeze, steam

escaping from the crazed pipework

in the basement of the Hotel Europa,

where the boiler groans from years of obsolescence

and the maître d’ is stealing the better wine.

And if we’ve ever cause to quit the Hotel Europa,

let us not be consumed by recrimination

and regret. Call it a dream,

a happy accident. If you must, a lie.

Letter in March

Old friend, I hope this reaches you. The land’s

still yet and sullen as it turns towards

the spring. Dove-grey clouds. Ice expands

in ponds and pipes, while cyan sky rewards

a flash of sun. I hold my breath. These are

the days the people rise. I hear their far-

resounding curse and sigh, as rattled from

electric sleep they wonder what they’ve won –

a world perhaps, but still it slips away

from them. I walk to town through traffic, sleek

and closed. Wide TVs in shops replay

whatever news we’re meant to fear this week.

I watch the outsized heads of talkers talk.

We have to think they’re honest now we’ve bought

their line, but all neat arguments dissolve

to rhetoric. The foolish show resolve,

the barbarous their grit, and every shit

defends the culture he does not understand.

Along the morning high street, shops are lit

to show us what we think we want. I stand

before the glass. Crystalled pavement skins

this hunk of ice, the earth, as doubt begins

like hunger, in the guts. Then shoppers come –

I wonder what it is they’ve really done.

An Exchange

About midday we alighted that muggy coach,

wafted with us packed-lunch air of sweaty hams

and crusty rolls to settle on some verge

beside a modern monument in Essen,

Lichtenstein, or (was it?) Strasbourg-Ouest.

The sky the murk of mushroom soup, the air

a bouillon piqued with too much salt – rich fare

for kids whose land was known for boiling all

it ate. This was the 80s, since you ask,

when chaps in clogs and leather jackets

drilled us through the many conjugations

of to be, stroked their strangely sculpted

facial hair, their foreign wives hirsute in places

we didn’t dare to guess. Biology

or Culture? We could still write that fruitless essay –

just give us rain, an endless afternoon,

the props of that misunderstanding known

once as exchange – a plate of soft bread

smearedin offal paste, deep carafes

of winewith plastic caps, cheap cigarettes.

The method we preferred back then was five nights