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    The Last Tape
    The Last Tape
    The Last Tape
    Ebook94 pages48 minutes

    The Last Tape

    By Alex Niven

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    About this ebook

    In this haunting debut collection, Alex Niven explores a poetic hinterland that is also a psychological and cultural wilderness. Adopting a style grounded in the radical minimalism of northern English modernism and romanticism, Niven writes poems constructed out of traditional forms cut up and reassembled to produce an abrupt lyric realism ideally suited to the political subject matter of his verse. These are poems of anger, mourning, and finally, extraordinary optimism, announcing the arrival of a historically lucid new bearing in twenty-first-century British poetry.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn Hunt Publishing
    Release dateOct 31, 2014
    ISBN9781782795445
    The Last Tape
    Author

    Alex Niven

    Alex Niven is a writer from the north-east of England. He writes regularly for the Guardian, Tribune and New Statesman, and has also contributed to publications including the New York Times, the Independent, Pitchfork, The Face and VICE. As well as Folk Opposition (Zero, 2011), he is the author of an instalment in Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series (on Definitely Maybe by Oasis, 2014) and New Model Island (Repeater, 2019), a critically acclaimed memoir of Englishness and regional identity. Currently Lecturer in English Literature at Newcastle University, he helped to start the radical publisher Repeater Books in 2014.

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      Book preview

      The Last Tape - Alex Niven

      WINNING

      A gang of us at first, breaking

      into the mildewed football ground

      hours before dawn, scouring

      the lime white terraces for an apt

      space to launch from, the concrete

      like the surface of the moon.

      In the powerful light of this

      in between place you see faces as if

      for the first time – stars, glances –

      the chinks in the cantilever stand

      allow some small rays to filter through.

      We don’t know what we’re doing.

      There are risings in the east we think

      must come stammering into life;

      we will die for kinship or fail

      forever in our sniggering selves.

      Here lies the largest congregation

      in the western world. Miles above

      the paving stones, scintillating

      the leaves, our flares reignite the sky.

      1989

      They came swooshing like water

      out of Leppings Lane, leaping

      into the matchday sun. Soon

      bodies ghosted the gym.

      All I dreamt of back then were

      vague summaries of light, now

      nightmares of black hammers

      pummelling the helpless.

      THE DOMINICAN FRIARS COME TO ENGLAND

      We set the country alight.

      Miracles in the marketplace

      and tales of the pure earth.

      Girl gaggles followed us.

      They were a susceptible people

      and we were young, skint.

      Peacock parading

      was our schoolboy itch.

      Anyway, we meant it

      at that juncture.

      We were trying to scatter

      rainbows,

      poetry, anything.

      You can’t imagine

      the blue-veined love

      I had for the world, back then.

      Dreams stacked up.

      Dogs gambolled with us.

      We felt that our convoy would

      lead to Lyonesse.

      By Michaelmas we

      were fat as bullocks,

      and the pennants of the new

      true life glazed the hills.

      Just out of sight

      the Mother Church

      was clucking her teeth.

      She must have known all along.

      HIDDEN TRACK

      I couldn’t work out whether

      you were part of the future

      or a beautiful aftershock.

      Blind spots where the sun snuck.

      Your skin was syncopated, weightless.

      We crossed every finish line,

      woke immaculately new.

      REMEMBRANCE DAYS

      We seem unable to move on.

                                      Beached fish

      say forever is a butterfly life.

      A studio reel-to-reel oiled smooth, safe.

      (Photos clacker past, watermarks vanish.)

      Dawn autumns the dust choked village hall.

                                                           Curled

      beneath the hymnbooks and the nursery chairs

      a spider spins the first new form in years.

      We surge, we gather, in another world.

      PANTISOCRACY

      We were barracked in a lonely ranch.

      Food sacks for the winter.

      Salt.

      Inured to the pulse of things.

      Leaving the coastal towns was hard.

      We left trinkets.

      Warriors were expunged

      from the phonebook.

      But then, the ranch-lands glittered.

      Banquets scarfed by the hearth.

      Green wet grass everywhere

      goading us.

      My sweetheart fished for salmon.

      I sang.

      Friends delivered the basic mete

      and railroads arrived latterly.

      Only, something had broken.

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