The Merchant of Feathers E-Book

Tanya Shirley

• Herausgeber: Peepal Tree Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 51

Beschreibung

This second collection of poems confirms why Tanya Shirley is so much in demand for readings. The stories she tells have their finger on the pulse of contemporary Jamaica in all its exuberance and brokenness. She tells these stories with a winning mixture of acute observation, outrage, outrageousness, tenderness and understanding. They present a poetic persona of a woman who is "sometimes dangling from high wires/ but always out in the open". So that whilst there is no one who so wittily skewers the misogynistic, she is also honest about the complicity of women in their own acts of submission, of how "I danced flat-footed in your dense air". There is joy in the energy and delights of the body but also a keen awareness of ageing and the body's derelictions. If there is one overarching vision it is that love is "larger than the space we live in", a love represented by the "merchant of feathers - now a woman/ selling softness in these hard times", or the mother who tends the battered face of her son, the victim of a homophobic beating. There is scarcely a line without some memorable phrase - the madman who chants his "lullaby of badwords", the father who "became the water within him" - but these are much more than an assembly of sharp images; closer reading shows just how shapely and elegant these poems are.

Leseprobe

THE MERCHANT OF FEATHERS

TANYA SHIRLEY

First published in Great Britain in 2014

This ebook edition published in 2021

Peepal Tree Press Ltd17 King’s AvenueLeeds LS6 1QSEngland

© 2021 Tanya Shirley

ISBN 9781845232337 (Print)

ISBN 9781845235451 (Epub)

ISBN 9781845235460 (Mobi)

All rights reservedNo part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission

CONTENTS

I: The Alphabet of Shame

The Alphabet of Shame

How Dreams Grow Fat and Die

Summer Days

Recompense

Flower Girl

Sweet Sweet Jamaica

The People are Deading

The Day I Felt Like Migrating

The Sea

Waiting for Rain (Again)

Spell #1

En Route to Negril

Matie Shall Not Conquer

What Words Can Do

Making Family

II: Standing Outside the Circle

Montego Bay

Poetry at an Overseas Prison

Away from Home

Standing Outside the Circle

Message in a Dream

What We Do Not See

Again

When the World is Sleeping

Said by a DJ at an Uptown Dance

The Merchant of Feathers II

Beyond the AIDS Hospice

On a New Kingston Corner

Every Hoe Have Him Stick a Bush

In Times of Trouble

Teaching Jane Eyre

III: Let This Be Your Praise

The Merchant of Feathers I

On the Other Side of Madness

Dining at Customs

At the Nursing Home

To the Man who Tends My Grandmother’s Grave

Melba Speaks (Again)

To the Man who Still Tends My Grandmother’s Grave

Let This Be Your Praise

Sunday Drive Out

Grace

Just Kissing

Love Done Did It

Night Nurse

Said by a DJ at a Downtown Dance

Kill Him Wid It, Eh Eh

The Merchant of Feathers III

Edward Baugh, When I Die

Notes

Where I come from,

old women bind living words

across their flat chests,

inscribe them on their foreheads,

and in the palms of their hands.

If you don’t have the eye

to you they just look like

third world women with nothing much.

Lorna Goodison, Goldengrove: New and Selected Poems

This time there was no beak,

no little bloody head, no bony

claw, no loose wing – only a small

pile of feathers without substance or center.

Gerald Stern, This Time: New and Selected Poems

In Memory of Luna May Dorothy Beckfordand Carlton Washington Beckford

THE ALPHABET OF SHAME

THE ALPHABET OF SHAME

You must have been proud:

first on the street to acquire a satellite dish.

How far you had come from country boy

working at the post office to save

for a red bicycle you pushed up hill, afraid

riding would break it.

Now laughing in a circle of new friends,

gin and tonic in hand, king of your landscaped yard,

you say, “I love looking in the Arbit,

seeing all the channels to choose from.”

She says, “It’s Orbit not Arbit.”

She is ten and cheeky, always first in class,

well, except that one time she came second;

you crushed her report card into a brittle bomb,

threw it out the third-storey window, startling the dogs.

Your friends laugh and you laugh louder.

Ten minutes later she is skipping in the corridor

between the den and kitchen. You catch her.

“Never, ever embarrass me!” you say,

fingers like forceps squeezing her chubby cheek.

Years of ballet and still she is storing fat.

“Now go to your room and stay there!”

She watches the party from a small window,

face sandwiched between burglar bars,

forlorn but not foreseeing

that this is the beginning

of a life sentence.

HOW DREAMS GROW FAT AND DIE

All summer I practised walking

in wooden-tip ballet shoes,

pretended God was pulling me up,

ten-year-old marionette,

steps stuttering from room to room.

Flat-footed I traced grout lines

in our kitchen with encyclopedias

on my head, balancing dreams of

twirling off stage into the sails

of standing ovations.

In September, you told my mother I

was too fat to be a ballerina.

You, of faux British accent and hollowed

collar bones I imagined were tea cups.

You, who wanted a kukumkum orchestra,

a herd of bones gliding under

the baton of your arms.

You, who illustrated to my mother

my incompetence by drawing a circle

in the air. I was the round nightmare

landing heavy in the melody of grand jetés.

You could keep me back with the younger

girls, maybe in a year or two I would shed

the fat, reverse blossom into fragrant bud,

or I could donate my tutu now

to the kingdom of dust cloths, hang my ballet

shoes by their wooden-tip necks.

In dreams I am a feather, buoyed and buoyant

and you are the barbed wire that kills me.

SUMMER DAYS

Our house sat on a hill,

three-storey remnant of whites

who made money here

but fled to Florida

in the ’70s when independence

was fresh in our mouths

and riots still smelled

like burning cane.

As a girl in her prime,

I would stand on the upper balcony,

watch the neighbourhood boys play ball,

while wearing a brown towel on my head;

clasped in the back,

the cascading cotton –

my very own ponytail.

I would paint my lips

hibiscus pink, pull a maxi skirt up

into a sleeveless dress,

twirl and preen and pose

on my balcony,

as years before me

some white girl did.

RECOMPENSE