The High Window, PS Review

I'm very grateful to Joanna for her review of Pilgrim Station and to the editors of High Window for including the piece in their winter issue. It is a pretty good recommendation. 
THE HIGH WINDOW

CITN December 17

Caught in the Net, December 17, me. These are not augurs of the future, these are the good times!
Poetry Kit CITN 168: it's a comprehensive list.

Voronezh Notebooks

Mandelshtam again,
from book III, translated by Andrew Davis:

I'll sketch this out, I'll say this quietly -
Because its moment is still not evident:
The game of the unconscious sky will be
Accomplished later, with experience...

And beneath the time-soaked sky
Of Purgatory, we frequently forget
That  the blessed storehouse of the heavens
Is our home, limitless and present.

That last phrase may have heaven as "the lifelong house" of our consciousness, in David McDuff's translations. 

It is difficult to get the form from the translations, I'd gather the writing, rich in technique, is peppered with alliteration, thickened by rhymes and assonance, probably with its social reference too, even if Mandelstam never got the tone in trying to atone for his attacks on Stalin. 

All that aside, without Russian we can still enjoy the high points of  his translated verse in their un-apparelled meaning.

West Greenwich Library, New Year

Chops II

Less chops than scraps, and scraps of thought at that, the least part of reactions this last day or two to my haul of books – in any bookshop's poetry section I'll snap up Mandelstam – the series does not work. 

Notebooks keep the random lines one wouldn’t want to throw away in case they turn to something more, and if they did exceed their start then still they fail to be word exercise equivalent to the musician’s daily chops, even wishing to suggest it, suggests too much. There will be no trays of snacks in rhyme for this perpetually hungry blog.  Comments…  ach.

The plash and Walkman
                   of the perennial Redgrove
                                      groping with lingam and yonii
in ancient, undoubtedly beautiful caverns
                   wet in the ever so slow movements
                                      of his latest book was penned in
somewhere near Kingston on Thames
                   where I also lived sometimes
                                      fifteen years ago.

In English twice translated, more,
from initial thought, completed
to conversations with his wife;
the resultant verse on paper
was inevitably half opaque
but Osip shines, he shines.

The Writers' Room

The Writers Room,  with Dom, Kim and Eley recorded last Thursday. The programmes will be broadcast on Corinium Radio website for two weeks commencing 23.10.17 Mon, Wed, Fri. 2pm on the first week and 2.30pm the second week.  CORINIUM RADIO 

Two poems uploaded on Facebook page, and YouTube: "A Kiss" and "Landing" all a bit gravelly, but okay!

Chops I



Self Portrait as a Werewolf Talking to his Human Self

Struck to the core, the heart’s red core again by Liardet’s
Self Portrait as Shamdeo – misread as Shenandoah – Talking 

to his Future Self as if facing two antagonists: Ferocity and Sorrow.
I comb the jasmine, waterlily in my hair, rub bristles on my jaw. 

Removed from this apparent world, pursued by gods of earth
and air, setterragic a ssalc my demon pack of backward-hunting 

carnivores, smoky spirits of the claw, jacketed in ash,
foul-breathed in wide, extraordinary yawning, we lick our paws. 

Tormented by a yap of Alpha Dog or Sophia’s dream –
sweet reason that devolves from dust, the twisters of thrilled air 

tunnelling through Roman gardens, Parthenon, theatres empty
of the dead, long gone but in their stead a debt of anguish 

and self-loathing. How wearisome you are. Raised up on all fours
now again, back on two naked feet, you make such shaky progress 

to your clothes lines on the brink, the water's edge where hangs
a scarecrow’s skin, your battered coat removed so long ago 

you struggle to adorn yourself with human clothes again.
Contemplate your place with men. I whine and fawn, nip your heels.

You draw me back and hold me down. Struggling twin entities
squabble over worry bones, our painted knuckles on dirt floors 

scattering our grammar from the first recorded text. Let me
write it slant-wise in the mirror sweat: Red in tooth and claw, 

the neighbour at the door, the baying dog who knows you well,
can only be your own reflection.



I doubt Tim Liardet would bat an eyelid at my using a poem from his recent volume The World Before Snow as a kickoff point for a practice piece – Chops: good for a blog that needs feeding. I was struck by Liardet’s earlier collection, The Storm House: serious and disturbing. He is an examplar of the craft.  The lines above may gradually become a kind of shallow imitation - which suits the subject rather well.