24 november 2008

The Bride who Carried a Dolls’ House

Marriage is a precision instrument

That must always be checked for accuracy.

Therefore a doll’s house should be carried

Rather than a bouquet

In the afternoons, between work

And her husband’s arrival,

The newly-wed may wish to study her dolls

In their small, domestic theatre

Before, like a creaking windmill

Her husband walks through the door

She must practice balancing millstones

Transforming bread to flour.

Van Gogh’s Sunflowers

We are Van Gogh’s sunflowers

Reporting from the other side of the glass

It’s always on the tip of their tongue

Freudian slips the psychiatrist coaxes from them

Red herrings lie in the air

Between patient and doctor

‘Take your time’ he says

Furiously clicking the nib of his ball point pen

The patient stares at our yellow, squirming petals

Breathing in-out, in-out

We, too, know what it is

To be watched.

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THE POETS

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Iain Britton’s first collection of poems was published by Cinnamon Press in February 2008 and was a 2008  Forward Poetry Prize nomination. Interactive Press (Australia) is publishing his second collection in 2009.

Iain is a teacher at a

large independent

school for boys in

Auckland, New Zealand.

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Jeffrey Paparoa Holman grew up on naval bases and then later in mining towns in New Zealand.   He has

worked as a sheep-shearer, postman, psychiatric social worker and bookseller and is currently a PhD candidate at Canterbury University. Holman’s poetry collections include Two Poets (1974) with David Walker, Flood Damage (1998), and As big as a Father (2002), the title poem of which won the 1997 Whitireia Prize and is included in Essential New Zealand Poems (2001). His poems and short stories have also appeared in the NZ Listener and Landfall.

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Robert Vas Dias, an Anglo-American living in London, has published eight collections, the most recent of which was Leaping Down to Earth, 2008, with images by Stephen Chambers and Tom Hammick.  His work has appeared in magazines in the USA, including  Choice, The Nation, The New Yorker, Partisan Review, and Poetry (Chicago) and in such British magazines as Ambit, Encounter, Leviathan Quarterly, Moving Worlds, Ninth Decade, Oasis, Poetry Review, Shearsman, and Stand.  He is a tutor with The Poetry School and writes on book art and artists’ books, particularly those which incorporate poetry and text.

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Sheena Blackhall is a prize-winning writer, illustrator, traditional ballad singer and storyteller in North East Scotland. From 1998-2003 she was Creative Writing Fellow in Scots at Aberdeen University's Elphinstone Institute.  She has published four Scots novellas, ten short story collections, sixty poetry collections and two of her plays have been televised.

A Winter’s Incursion

I do as I want.

          I watch the sky lean down

and dig in its light.

Apples cling hard and green.

Blackberries

claw at paths.

A woman on the veranda

            hears spring cracking

through tunnels of foliage.

She hears the fingernails

of blossoms

scratching.

A kotare scoops tracts of estuary

            for fish. The sea

                          plays on my sunglasses

and like a shadow

          the woman crosses dark maps

of countryside

unspoilt by languages

           She has become a landmark

I can’t quite touch.

She comes inside

begins to pick up, put down –

rocks, shells, the skeletons of plants.

She is deferential, detached

related to the sea

                 which possesses rhythms

which has reasons

for us being here.

She’s a stranger wanting contact

sustenance, a taonga

wanting to be seen

recently beached

after a long sea haul.

She pauses for me

as we step out onto the grass

to the flattened bodies of storms

           a winter’s incursion.

                       I do as I want.

I choose

to give her reassurance. So many homes

like broken gifts seem to want us.

_____________________________________

To Shoot Flying Pigeons

Gold anatomies

lean like broken temples on the path.

Old men. A few with deformed Midas claws

know the gates, the lock combinations

know how and when

to walk through sacred gardens.

Like body snatchers

they grab at the sea coming in.

They paddle the foam, stare at the city

snatch at hills

uplifting the horizon. What they touch

turns briefly to gold.

My face is a scoured cliff

of morning abuses. Uncle Sam’s Bar

has long since gone – rubbed out, burnt down

guns handed to little boys

to shoot flying pigeons. The old men

crush their silences between tight lips, their code of unity unshakeable.

A woman

her nose in a plastic bag

greets me with her eyebrows, sniffs in her bag

sniffs at the ogres in the street.

She scuffs her sandals through shadows

defies a ghost to challenge her, sniffs once more

and totters blindly

into a large shop window

her body melting in a sequence of reflections.

The old men

communicate their lust by looks, they study her

as if she were dropped foliage skidding between buildings

and then forget her.

They sweep up the day’s gold dust. It glitters

on the footpath, on concrete steps. It shines in their sweat.

Listening to music in a technicolour shirt . . .
 
plugged-in to a storm’s performance,
rain on the roof, fingers
rhythmically tapping.
 
The music is repetitive, reverberating.
Lights in apartments flash on, buildings
become floodlit, The Square is crowded.
 
Night birds
vacate this parkland of concrete
and silhouetted humanity.  I’m in the company
 
of a self portrait
leaning into the wind. I cross a bridge
to the accompaniment of ducks
 
blackened by a pond. Stars float.
A woman is singing
of soldiers and battles.
 
She bangs a tambourine,
smiles at me, a religious hooker
coveting her side of the road.
 
Listening to Queen

I fix my attention on the pile-up of a city

on sounds
 
pushing against windows.
I can’t break the intrusive cycle

of music.

Like something chemical
it works on softening my features.
It comes at me like twigs

tugging at my clothes.
The heart of this place pulses

as laser lights reopen old celestial wounds.

_____________________________________

Someone else’s dumping ground

Through the eye of an owl

you move swiftly

bumping off shrubs and fences.

Stick insects hang like brooches

from your clothes.

Another man

hits his head on the roof of the sky

in a fireworks display.

Flashes of him

explode for others to pick up.

Your lawn’s a dumping ground

for blood and bone,

for long lost owls

shrieking the gaps between houses.

Someone’s tribal lingo

covers the walls of a synagogue,

a public toilet, the windows of a politician.

You charge across craters,

across the loveless fields

of warring encounters. You paint

the earth’s furniture

a dirty grey and slash it

deep red. You wire yourself up

to prove the effectiveness

of careful planning,

you let rip

and all the stars flicker

as if choking for light. You listen

to the good news told by an idiot

of summer reassembling,

that forests will one day grow

from your mouth, that love

springs reinvented

from the exhalations of orchids

ceremoniously picked

from the white ash of your flesh.

Your body language rubs the night

in all the right places. The darkest

of streets walk in your sleep.

Iain Britton

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

From a collection to be called The Fly Boy, a series:

The Dumpy Book of Aircraft and the Air

The Cover

Devouring you in bed till late with my dull little

night light keeping back the dark under a bomber’s

moon I knew so well from the pages of those Pan

Piper World War Two paperbacks: one white Vulcan

swooping  low over Vulcan two on a ripped British

Racing Green cover with the red and the yellow

waiting words: The Dumpy Book of Aircraft & The Air.

There was everything, everything  that flew

in there - so I  kicked  the chocks and clambered in.

The Squadrons

At last a bible of my own: Fitzy sold it to

me for half a crown and racing home I fell into

the ditch. They had all the squadron histories and

all the crests: Number One was a 1 with wings, there

were daggers, keys and spears, a camel and rooster

row on row on the inside cover and a title page

where I printed in pencil as straight as I could

my name  and address on the grail before me.

Page 8

It looked like a woodcut: no line wasted on

”The Battle of Britain 1940”. That was where

my war began: Spitfires pouncing onto Heinkels

out of the sun with Brownings blazing, black iron

crosses, smoke and murder. Every pass I made was

fatal, every burst a burning engine, every kill a cross

to paint on that long line below my cockpit: England

I will die to save you!  A victory roll, the Merlin screaming!

A Messerschmitt from nowhere rakes me.

30 dec 2008

Sheena Blackhall

Robert Vas Dias

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

Iain Britton

Sheena Blackhall

Michael Davenport

Picture credit

Portrait of

Sheena Blackhall -

from an oil painting

by Mike Knowles

The 240th

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

Catalan Christ (pretending to be dead),

Sacha and Gabriel, regretting they were wed,

Some wall, some fly,

The late R.B. Kitaj.

You’ll see them everywhere,

Jump, Intro, Yours, Grip, London Derrière

Stiletto heels and whips and moans, they say

Thanks to Allen Jones, R.A.

Emin, Tracy

Somewhat racy

Legs akimbo,

Hairy bimbo!

A pal of Emin made a movie,

A naked woman hula hoopin’,

A little sexy, little groovy,

But doesn’t set your heart on fire.

A band of blood around waist?

Then you see the hoop’s barbed wire.

Hair of the first girl I ever slept with,

So let’s be fair,

A pile of pubic hair,

There’s art in there.

Bellany and his peasant burying the dead,

Blackadder and her pheasant hanging by a thread,

Frau mit gitarre und yellow socks,

(Could rash round eyes be chicken pox?)

Humphrey Ocean, Lucien Freud,

Zaha Hadid and Norman Ackroyd.

Freund (Remix)?

By Georg Baselitz,

Barry Flanagan’s dancing hare,

Ken’s Rain Effect, Trafalgar Square,

Jeff Koon’s egg (blue) cracked in half,

Ice cream on tits by Johnny Trayte;

Reynolds and Kaufmann would simply laugh,

A hundred and forty years too late.

Michael Davenport

Virgin, Virgin

(with apologies to Wm. Blake, Esq.)

Bloody, bloody Northern Rock

You have put us all in hock,

Our erstwhile saintly Mervyn King

Has lent you all our nat’nal saving.

In what silly subprime deals,

Mortgages to bankrupt heels,

How d’you think you’ld ever win

With banking conduits moving in.

Where’s the virgin? Where His cash?

Can He spare us the property crash?

Can He rush to Darling’s aid,

For in this deal he will be weighed?

When Gordon Brown came into power

He scarce foresaw the fearsome shower

Of Rocks and discs and army chiefs

And capital gains and funding beefs.

And now his Chancellor’s on the line.

With Virgin he will have to shine.

Will he smile his work to see?

Will Brown who made the mess go free?

ALSO SEE:

LONDON GRIP POETRY edited by

FRED D’AGUIAR

LONDON GRIP POETRY edited by

ROBERT VAS DIAS