maggles

Clanchy has published three poetry collections. This poem, my favorite of hers, is from "Slattern" (Chatto & Windus, 1995; Picador, 2001).


Kate Clanchy
Poem for a Man with No Sense of Smell

This is simply to inform you:

that the thickest line in the kink of my hand
smells like the feel of an old school desk,
the deep carved names worn sleek with sweat;

that beneath the spray of my expensive scent
my armpits sound a bass note strong
as the boom of a palm on a kettle drum;

that the wet flush of my fear is sharp
as the taste of an iron pipe, midwinter,
on a child's hot tongue; and that sometimes,

in a breeze, the delicate hairs on the nape
of my neck, just where you might bend
your head, might hesitate and brush your lips,

hold a scent frail and precise as a fleet
of tiny origami ships, just setting out to sea.

'My party piece' and 'The Patent' are probably my favourite Armitage poems. (From "Book of Matches" (Faber, 1993) and "The Dead Sea Poems" (Faber, 1995), respectively. But if you read only one book of his, I'd recommend the "Selected Poems" published by Faber, 2001.)


Simon Armitage
'My party piece'

My party piece:
I strike, then from the moment when the matchstick
conjures up its light, to when the brightness moves
beyond its means, and dies, I say the story
of my life -

dates and places, torches I carried,
a cast of names and faces, those
who showed me love, or came close,
the changes I made, the lessons I learnt -

then somehow still find time to stall and blush
before I'm bitten by the flame, and burnt.

A warning, though, to anyone nursing
an ounce of sadness, anyone alone:
don't try this on your own; it's dangerous,
madness.

I've yet to read her latest book, "Changeling", but here's my fave from her previous three collections. Published in her debut, "The Heavy-Petting Zoo" (Bloodaxe, 1998).


Clare Pollard
Angel song

This fir-tree point could impale.
I balance on it, praying for still skies.
Fingertip bulbs in cracked coloured cases
Fuse, and threaten to burn my skirts.

Shiny red apples decompose on nooses.
Pine cones are sprayed with crunched-mirror glitter.
Sometimes it is thrilling,
This sparkle, this lack of roots.

Only the others hate me. Cry out
That I am no better than them,
It's just my wings are sprayed with old gold
And a halo on a pin skewered through my scalp.

But I earned that jet of golden paint!
I suffered as the pin pierced my soft plastic head,
And unlike them, I cannot make mistakes.
An imperfection and I will be torn from this tree.

I cannot be bitter like a gift of myrrh,
Or they'll say: "Who does she think she is?
Tied to a spike as if it's a crucifixion."
I am a seasonal decoration,

Pretty - but I will not bring salvation.
Tinsel is not real silver, you know,
Just foil that moults off in strips;
And nobody can join me up here.

What am I but a detail in this small beige room?
An afterthought in an outfit made of
Someone's old wedding dress. These needles
Bring not sleep, just little hurts.

O, to have a Bethlehem to go to.
To be deep filled, like a mince pie.
Father Christmas, give me wings that work.
I am so tired of trying to rival snowflakes.

After reading Hill's thirteen poetry collections, here are my two picks -- from "Violet" (Bloodaxe, 1997). (Also liked "The Flowers" from "Saying Hello at the Station" (Chatto & Windus, 1984), "Hairbrush" from "Bunny" (Bloodaxe, 2001) and "Charlie's Girlfriend" [unavailable online] from "Fruitcake" (Bloodaxe, 2009), as well as all of her Bloodaxe covers!)


Selima Hill
Please Can I Have a Man

Please can I have a man who wears corduroy.
Please can I have a man
who knows the names of 100 different roses;
who doesn't mind my absent-minded rabbits
wandering in and out
as if they own the place,
who makes me creamy curries from fresh lemon-grass,
who walks like Belmondo in A Bout de Souffle;
who sticks all my carefully-selected postcards -
sent from exotic cities
he doesn't expect to come with me to,
but would if I asked, which I will do -
with nobody else's, up on his bedroom wall,
starting with Ivy, the Famous Diving Pig,
whose picture, in action, I bought ten copies of;
who talks like Belmondo too, with lips as smooth
and tightly-packed as chocolate-coated
(melting chocolate) peony buds;
who knows that piling himself stubbornly on top of me
like a duvet stuffed with library books and shopping-bags
is all too easy: please can I have a man
who is not prepared to do that.
Who is not prepared to say I'm 'pretty' either.
Who, when I come trotting in from the bathroom
like a squealing freshly-scrubbed piglet
that likes nothing better than a binge
of being affectionate and undisciplined and uncomplicated,
opens his arms like a trough for me to dive into.


Selima Hill
The World's Entire Wasp Population

This feeling I can't get rid of,
this feeling that someone's been reading
my secret diary
that I kept in our bedroom
because I thought nobody else but us
would want to go in there,
except it's not my diary,
it's my husband,
I'd like you to smear this feeling
all over and into her naked body like jam
and invite the world's entire wasp population,
the sick, the halt, the fuzzy,
to enjoy her.

Read most of Harrison's poetry books in the past week, and --surprise! -- chose the poems I liked the best. The one I'm posting is my all-time favourite poem of his, but I also like "Timer" and "Book Ends". All three are published both in "Permanently Bard: Selected Poetry" (Bloodaxe, 1995) and "Selected Poems" (Penguin, 1987).


Tony Harrison
Long Distance II

Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn't just drop in. You had to phone.
He'd put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.

He couldn't risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon he'd hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
He knew she'd just popped out to get the tea.

I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven't both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there's your name
and the disconnected number I still call.

Currently reading everything Hoagland's ever written, and here's a poem from "What Narcissism Means to Me" (Graywolf Press, 2003). The book includes "Social Life" and "On the CD I Buy for My Brother", which I also liked.


Tony Hoagland
Phone Call

Maybe I overdid it
when I called my father an enemy of humanity.
That might have been a little strongly put,
a slight overexaggeration,

an immoderate description of the person
who at that moment, two thousand miles away,
holding the telephone receiver six inches from his ear,
must have regretted paying for my therapy.

What I meant was that my father
was an enemy of my humanity
and what I meant behind that
was that my father was split
into two people, one of them

living deep inside of me
like a bad king or an incurable disease --
blighting my crops,
striking down my herds,
poisoning my wells -- the other
standing in another time zone,
in a kitchen in Wyoming,
with bad knees and white hair sprouting from his ears.

I don't want to scream forever,
I don't want to live without proportion
like some kind of infection from the past,

so I have to remember the second father,
the one whose TV dinner is getting cold
while he holds the phone in his left hand
and stares blankly out the window

where just now the sun is going down
and the last fingertips of sunlight
are withdrawing from the hills
they once touched like a child.

Read all of Bhatt's books recently, and here's an excerpt that's pretty representative of her work. From "Brunizem" (Carcanet, 1988).


Sujata Bhatt
from Search For My Tongue

You ask me what I mean
by saying I have lost my tongue.
I ask you, what would you do
if you had two tongues in your mouth,
and lost the first one, the mother tongue,
and could not really know the other,
the foreign tongue.
You could not use them both together
even if you thought that way.
And if you lived in a place you had to
speak a foreign tongue,
your mother tongue would rot,
rot and die in your mouth
until you had to spit it out.
I thought I spit it out
but overnight while I dream,

it grows back, a stump of a shoot
grows longer, grows moist, grows strong veins,
it ties the other tongue in knots,
the bud opens, the bud opens in my mouth,
it pushes the other tongue aside.
Everytime I think I've forgotten,
I think I've lost the mother tongue,
it blossoms out of my mouth.

The poem that made me borrow all three of her collections from the library -- and the one I still like the best (from "Take Me With You"; Bloodaxe, 2005.)


Polly Clark
Hedgehog

Its leg was not broken. It was not homeless.
It clenched in my hands. A living flinch.
You cannot love so much and live,
it whispered, its spines clicking like teeth.
I hid it from itself in a cardboard box.

Overnight it nibbled a hole and slipped away.
I cried so much my mother thought I'd never stop.
She said, You cannot love so -- and yet
I grew to average size and amused a lot of people
with my prickliness and brilliant escapes.