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Poetry from Lancashire and Cumbria
Deborah Swift
Martyn Halsall
Mark Carson
Maya Chowdhry
Emma McGordon
005 Click here to open the book
Contents
Foreword 3
Deborah Swift
Boots on the Moon 5
The Stone Rubbing 6
Cairn 7
Self-portrait with Binoculars 8
Obituary 9
Martyn Halsall
Scalpay 11
Legend 12
Blackthorn 13
Rembrandt’s Sandwich 14
Mark Carson
Cat’arsis 16
Per Ardua ad Nauseam 17
Offshore System Designer makes Dodgy Decision 19
Maya Chowdhry
Barter 21
Kali Mirchi 22
been sprouts 23
Genderality 24
Emma McGordon
Death at 22 from a Curable Disease 28
Gutter-Witch 30
Go Forward Blue Black Zac 32
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This edition published in Great Britain by Flaxbooks,
26 Sun Street, Lancaster, LA1 1EW. Tel 01524 62166.
www.litfest.org
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2
Foreword
I knew Flax books would have no shortage of poets for its second digital anthology, but
not how astonishingly various their writing would be.
Although the five poets whose work is sampled here could hardly write more differently
from each other, they do have something in common. All engage with surprising and
often challenging subject matter – and invent ways of writing to handle it. Coulombs
and van de Graff not the stuff of poems? They are with Mark Carson’s light touch.
So are towfishes and urethane in tougher poems about the relentlessness of working
at sea. His lights and darks are elegantly fused in ‘Offshore System Designer makes
Dodgy Decision’.
Maya Chowdhry loves words too, her title ‘Genderality’ telling you she’s making a risky
poem about gender identity. Skilfully, she allows language to drive the poem: ‘we’re
crossing over, under / cover’. Oh yes, she does write one poem about a more ‘usual’
subject matter, the end of a relationship – but you’ll never have come across anything
quite so inventive as her ‘been-sprouts’.
There’s a change of pace with Martyn Halsall’s writing: he draws you into a growing
stillness and silence until you can hear music ‘keyed to the breeze’. A poem in which he
recalls being told about making a blackthorn staff builds and intensifies, then quietly
unravels in its final couplet.
Emma McGordon uses rhythm and repetition as an engine for fast-moving poems that
confront urban life and alienation. Her shifts of perspective cleverly keep you inside the
poem, and may leave you, like her, ‘Drawn / To the man who street cleans / Last night’s
screams’.
Contents
The moon, the future, the past – these are some of the places Deborah Swift takes us, not
Go Forward as abstract ideas, but with vivid and shapely writing to make them tangible, her ‘fingers
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3
absorbed in the marks’. There’s a particularly fine ending to her ‘Boots on the Moon’.
And that’s another thing these five poets have in common – an ability to deliver last lines
that leave you savouring the poem. And wanting more.
Jane Routh
Deborah Swift
Boots on the Moon 5
The Stone Rubbing 6
Cairn 7
Self-portrait with Binoculars 8
Obituary 9
4
Boots on the Moon
They’re still up there, size nine-and-a-half,
medium – where micro-meteoroids
swirl like milk in a washbowl of ink.
The boots stand nights colder than the black
silk skin in an Eskimo’s borehole.
Silicon is unstable in the gases exhalation,
so the soles crumble in their own footprints.
Their buckles have fallen away, and glint,
float silvery against the pock-marked crust.
Grey sandstorms wear the man-made fibres thin;
hS
glow softly as they sashay into space.
De
designed to protect and cushion the foot,
encapsulate the 1960’s breath.
The rock samples are calibrated, boots
left where they stand, their precise weight
in rocks, carried home barefoot.
The air bends, quivers in the boom
of the shuttle’s returning velocity;
the men begin to plummet, stretching
toes through zero gravity to terra firma.
A shoemaker in Delaware inhales, sees
Contents the shuttle break the waves, looks up at night
Go Forward to where his outbreath hangs, left behind
in the yellow stomachs of their footfalls.
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5
The Stone Rubbing
I hold the film of paper over the stone
as she rubs in the paste of pearly graphite.
A shoal of fish bloom from the white space, then dart away
under silvery dust. The paper pecks in the wind; from above
the marbling of shadows, a flock of birds
calling.
hS
how Winifred Nicholson teased out the mysterious braille,
De
drifting.
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Cairn
From the top, the town is a crust of grey
almost pocketed by the valley.
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7
Self-portrait with Binoculars
My neck kowtows from side to side, lidless eyes
slew upwards into empty air: twin black holes stretched
over glassy depths, cupping miniature drifts of cloud.
o r a hS A kite can see a rabbit break for home from half a mile,
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Obituary
Fire is gone from the city, the notion of keeping a flame.
Combustion is hidden in chambers where fission and the leap
of spark are groomed by computers while we sleep. Pyrotechnics,
once a universal skill, are controlled by lever, pump and switch.
Wood and soft combustibles industrialized, to fossil fuel.
w i f t feed it, coax it, watch the kindling spit, see pictures coat its yellow tongue.
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Martyn Halsall
Scalpay 11
Legend 12
Blackthorn 13
Rembrandt’s Sandwich 14
10
Scalpay
You could sit out here all day; nothing would happen.
A tide might stain the slipway in the lochan,
gulls would glide over, trailing cries and shadows,
hard plait of gneiss and turf folds darken, lighten,
small waters smooth, then pattern to a salmon skin.
Ha
of lichen along brown runnels of a worn tin roof.
a r tyn You could look at the rock and count four billion years,
M read of a range of mountains higher than
Andes or Himalaya, see these hills
worn low by this same rain, sense how it was
changed gradually each day; how it goes on.
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Legend
The rest had gone back up the track to the rented farm.
She stayed with her two daughters by the shore,
facing the island wide as a mother’s welcome.
Light gentled, oil lamp turned down in slow motion.
lsall
Daughters drew stillness round them like their blankets,
tyn
last burn of sunlight coppering sharpened crags.
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12
The children waited, quiet for once and listening
to the man who could summon nightfall out of music.
In a moment their mother would say: we’ll have to go now.
But not yet. Not till the world that he played was finished.
Blackthorn
Deep roots must come out whole to form the crown,
as he explained it. Wrenching the blackthorn free
meant digging round and deep, forming a pool
the sky reflected in as bog-flood filled it.
lsall
Using one could transform him: prophet, saint,
tyn
to share their meaning, leaving on the bounce of peat
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Rembrandt’s Sandwich
An artist sits in a café, watching a man.
Her eyes are drawn to the warming red of his coat,
the grateful way he cups his steaming drink,
worries at a sandwich; rabbi, chewing prayer.
lsall
The artist begins to catch him in her pocket book;
tyn
halter of his shoulders, phrasing of bearded jaw
Mar
as if rehearsing a speech he’d half forgotten,
small hopes in half-closed eyes, small hopes returning.
The artist jots notes: scarlets, pleats on rags.
14
Mark Carson
Cat’arsis 16
Per Ardua ad Nauseam 17
Offshore System Designer makes Dodgy Decision 20
15
Cat’arsis
Cat fur was used for early electrostatics experiments,
before the Wimshurst Machine and the van de Graaff Generator.
k C a on dielectric paws
Mar
she fairly
crackles with coulombs.
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Per Ardua ad Nauseam
The oceanographer’s motto: through difficulty until seasick
Car
Dulled, behind my eyes the dazzle pulse
17
speed up, slow down,
high gain, low gain,
no gain.
We are kidding ourselves
that we can go on, go to bed,
get up like humans in daylight.
Car
As the winch grinds in,
18
Offshore System Designer
makes Dodgy Decision
This engineer can’t get design approval.
He’s got to square the circle: compromise is oval –
he’ll smooth the seastate, shave the ship excursions,
massage the data to suppress the motions.
n
Bends the criteria, and overrules
s o
Car
the codes of practice, guidance notes for fools.
a r k
M Canute could tell these self-deluding clowns
a thing or two about the tides, their ups and downs,
and winds, and waves, and where the surges reach
and when to move your sofa up the beach.
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Maya Chowdhry
Barter 22
Kali Mirchi 23
been sprouts 24
Genderality 25
20
Barter
i swapped a purple sports bra for my first dress ready-made
didn’t recognise myself as the skirt skirted its mosaic mirrors
suburban Noida ringing in the mid-distance
i imagine her in the sports bra its lycra pinning her breasts
to her rib cage she told me she’d worn it in Defence Colony Bazaar
ry
acquiring haberdashery in small newspaper packets tied with string
d h
ow
a Ch
later i found a pink ribbon in an inside seam
May
an embroidered motif that grazed my navel
and wondered what it spelled
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Kali Mirchi
kali mirchi predicts the fall of nations
pursuing a palatable future
in the Malabar mangroves
h r y
wd
kali mirchi (Punjabi for black pepper)
C h o
Ma ya
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been-sprouts
break-up from your girlfriend, discard longing into compost
you need to have prepared yourself the day before
pick over and remove any broken feelings:
fear, anger, hatred.
rinse in several changes of lukewarm water to remove
dust and anything left from the milling process
cover all with warm water and soak for twelve hours
put in a plastic bag that has been punched all over with holes
(you can do this with a fork).
place the bag in a sieve leaving the mouth of the bag open
wd
balance over a large bowl in a dark, draught-free place,
23
at this point do not cover up,
place in the fridge
and all will stay healthy for three days.
Genderality
1978 aged thirteen / i wear a denim waistcoat /
khaki small-collared shirt
knotted with a black silk tie /
my mum refuses to leave the house / with me until i take the tie off /
i stuff it in my pocket and wear / an imaginary knot; centre-stage
scene one:
throw me a life
buoy sailor, we living
in sink or swim times;
wd
getting thrown out the ladies
Ma ya she’s a girl!
she’s a boi with a toy
denied admission to vanilla
she’s a girl
looking straight / through me
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measurements for inside leg
how to grow the hair / elsewhere
he’s a faery boi / should be a girl,
grew his hair and tucked his cock down
her inside leg
what a drag, not popular like the queens / not cultured
like the queers, something in-between the word-play
translator or impersonator
transgressor or impresser
test the line
scene two:
skirts don’t suit me, something about the cut,
the print, the way it hangs like abandoned washing
wd
an embarrassment / like the time I walked down
scene three:
Contents on the street I wear one of my off-stage identities
Go Forward and an old lady says: ‘can you help me cross the road young man’
i readjust my sock / take my hands outta my pockets,
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grasp her arm, dodge the 6pm traffic
scene four:
i can rip-saw / use a lathe, make mortise, tenon and dovetail joints
‘tie your hair back’ the journey-man says / health and safety
i plane oak, wafer-thin curls peeling back to smooth contours, trace the years with
my index finger /
28 and still no sign of an identity: carpenter, film-maker, web-designer
activist, mentor, chairperson
gendered jobs / apply within
scene five:
wd
silver wisdom in her hair
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Emma McGordon
Death at 22 from a Curable Disease 29
Gutter-Witch 31
Blue Black Zac 33
27
Death at 22 from a Curable Disease
Outside they will be getting married,
buying houses
deciding on tea-dipping biscuits.
Outside they will hold each other
until they squeeze the very life
from that which they cherish.
Outside all of this will be repeated in
18 or 15 or 20 years time.
Go
and I will hear about this
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Inside there will be no knowledge
of the latest eviction
or the care for the status of celebrity.
Inside four plates will be washed,
one to be used again tomorrow.
Inside there may be the anger of a young man,
although outside they will not feel
his wrath or dependability or envy
in the slightest.
Go
go blind in one eye
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29
Gutter-Witch
From up here,
where the steam
of the street heat
rises,
I hear the savage cackle
of some gutter-witch,
who argues the price
of a pizza slice
or a look misguided
in her direction.
r d o n
Go
And she who has dressed
30
still she clung to the argument’s hiss
as her strapless body mingled with his.
The street steam cools
and falls,
fools find themselves
in some other’s home
where beds will be slept in
at right angles to sense,
and the idea of sedition is given no chance.
Sunday mornings mix
in their cocktail smell
of duvets used and cigarettes spent.
r d o n
Go
Now in the not quite still
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Blue Black Zac
Blue Black Zac
on his knees
eyes to heaven.
In the May sunshine
you can see the souls
of his shoes as he rests on his heels.
Em banana slide,
a park bench
and railings.
32
brown, white horses behind him.
This is the May Day bank holiday of two friends,
Ikea excited, driven car park crazy by two more friends
and two more friends, all with the idea of a space-saving-shelf
that they have the perfect photograph of themselves and a loved one
in a fake leopard-skin-style frame that will look just wonderful
in a kitsch kind of way.
Go
half tripping on tape measures
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This is the May Day bank holiday
twelve months since we
shared a pub, a pool table, a jukebox.
Your broad chest, you talked
of your little prince and princess
in a land far far away with a woman you wanted to call wife.
Go
so far you said it was almost the future.
34
Zac, I was the child on the swing.
Zac, I was the Ikea excited.
Zac, I was even the blood hungry hack
who got the line, the fact that you
were found dead on your knees and looking to heaven for answers.
Blue lights flashing on your face and arms blackened by your own blood
and didn’t that grim discovery as we called it sell a few more copies
of the evening edition that would otherwise have been packed out
with May Day frivolities and it gave us something to talk about over a pint –
what a cracking story.
r d o n
Go
Zac, I am more of a hypocrite than those hacks, for in life
Em m Still sons die for the recognition that they did live.
And now, Zac, though you can no longer hear me,
I will speak of you
to those who would otherwise
never have known your name.
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