Denise Riley's Selected Poems (Reality Street, 2000), third and final selection

A last set of passages from a tremendous collection...


A gush of water, welling from some cave, which slopped
Down to a stone trough squatting stout and chalky as a 
Morning sky: I plumped myself on lizard-ridden stone to stare
Into its old truth square that struck me as perhaps another lie
So serious did it look while it promised me, oh, everything.
That honest look of water nursed in stone excited me.

*

The heat of the day peeled off, the light got blurred and hummed,
Pounding dusk struck up then a strong swelling rose in my throat
Thick with significant utterance. So, shivery in my cool and newly 
Warty skin, I raised this novel voice to honk and boom.

*

Into the cooling air I gave tongue, my ears blurred with the lyre
Of my larynx, its vibrato reverberant into the struck-dumb dusk.

*

                                         Or should lyric well up less, be bonier?
So I fluted like HD's muse in spiky girlish hellenics, slimmed
My voice down to twig-size, so shooting out stiffly it quivered 
In firework bursts of sharp flowers. Or had I a responsibility to
Speak to society: though how could it hear me? It lay in its hotels.

*

I fished for my German, broke out into lieder, rhymed
Sieg with Krieg, so explaining our century; I was hooked
On my theory of militarism as stemming from lyricism. 

*

The scops owl in residence served up its decorous gulps.

*

                                    Then beauty sobbed back to me, shocking,
Its counterpoint catching my harmonies; I had heard a fresh voice.

*

No longer alone, not espousing Narcissus, I answered each peal
In a drum of delirium.

*

The voice hears itself as it sings to its fellows--must
Thrum in its own ears, like any noise thumping down
Anywhere airwaves must equably fall. I was not that 
Narcissus who stared stunned by his handsomeness;
Or I was, but not culpably, since as I sang, so I loved.

*

Could I try on that song of my sociologised self? Its
Long angry flounce, tuned to piping self-sorrows, flopped
Lax in my gullet....

from "The Castalian Spring"

(I should explain myself, I sound derivative? Because I am, I'm Echo, your reporter.

I'll pick up any sound to flick it back if it's pitched louder than the mutter of a dove.

I am mere derivation, doomed by Mrs Zeus to hang out in this Thespian backwater.)

from "Affections of the Ear"

What does the hard look do to what it sees?

Pull beauty out of it, or stare it in?

*

How long do I pretend to be all of us. 

*

the piney trees their green afire

a deep light bubbling to grey

long birds honking across

the scrub, the ruffled shore

coral beaks dab at froth

the pinched sedge shirring

from "Outside from the Start"

Is that clear as a glass stem cups its chill in its own throat.

*

And I must trust that need is held in common, as I think it my duty to.

That every down-draught's thick with stiffening feathers

with rustlings from pallor throats

as the air hangs with its free light and its dead weight equally

from "Rhetorical"

Stone looks speak freeze.

Not, call the sold earth hyacinthine 'to get the measure of the damaged world'.

The new barbarian's charmed sick

with his real sincerity, sluiced in town georgics fluency, solitude skills.

from "Problems of Horror"

                  I shine in this fresh equality, I figure us all

In our universal study, released from particular griefs

As we are to imagine an absolutely pure red

Like fine carmine suffered to dry on white porcelain.

*

But the girl at the inn will fade, however intently I stare.

And I go walking again all over the moors to sob

That she is a long way off, which is where we shall always keep her.

No having suffices the heart, which must keep integrally red. 

from "Goethe on His Holidays"

but it does hurt

top mid-left

under my shirt

with its atrocious beat.

last stanza of "It Really Is the Heart"

Purchase Selected Poems directly from the publisher for a mere £9 here.

Denise Riley's Selected Poems (Reality Street, 2000), second selection

More favourite passages from a splendid book:



One afternoon hour burns away until a rust-
coloured light sinks in towards evening

or any time at all when I fall straight through
myself to thud as onto the streaked floor of

a swimming pool drained out for winter, no
greeny depths but lined in blackened leaves. 

*

The wind sheets slap the sea to ruffled wheatfields.
Angel, fish, paradise, rain of cherries.

from "Knowing in the Real World"

It will come sobbing in my ears

calling my names to me over and over.

I'll think, and try to keep my eyes

wide open as if swimming underwater.

from "What Else"

The violet 

light of snow falling.

*

It's restless, it can't 

find whiteness.

Its grey and violet

trillion souls.

from "Poor Snow"

I haven't got a body, till it hurts--

from "Pastoral"

...it will keep your beautiful soul glazed as a 

skein of floating hill mist and as quietly as slightly

and as palely lit--

from "Well All Right"

                                --what you need you shall not get until

once you no longer need it then you will, will fall through

jampacked rivers red with thickset fish, through thrashing

muscled rivers' noisy dash pulsing from mud depths up to

air-drenched jumping surfaces in brilliant scales of scarlet

time.

*

Wait, lean from the topmost window, see over all this city

in its gravely vigorous life the moon hung orange in the 

humming sky, the deeply breathing the electric air, tall

houses dropping glow, one fox-pure shriek, dark gardens'

charcoal pools, faint droning far-off traffic, never sleep

high twists of sirens spiral down the road and palest heads

of swimming roses gape awash in their own light against

the grind of buses starting out as in this night a single

traveller flies home through everything inside one life, its

fearful hesitations, pouncing leaps of speed; at daybreak

an hour's whiteness comes to lie in folds not brushed by

any shadow screens, I act as a fan, I find soul settlement

from "A Drift"

No I don't much like this bland authoritative tone either

but it is what I took from years of reworded loss.

So if my skin slid downwards to the ground

you would see only a standing pillar of blood.

Believe that this would be true also of you.

from "Cruelty without Beauty"

...next become mildly malicious in studying the failed consolations of middle age

that at least some of the people you once mistakenly went to bed with and v.v.

now sometimes look seedier, more despairing than you, though that's only

because you get to use lipstick and hair-dye whereas they on the whole do not--

your vanities, and pleasure in theatrical self-blame, have got you where you are today

that's here: and though you've noticed now that you can breathe again, you do

*

with how to hook on to the sliding skin of the world in time

or: in time I am going to die, can you be there

*

an engine of light forgets about everything

but roaring you into it

*

Not your happy here-we-go-down-together dream of a roseate catastrophe

Not your reassuring conviction that whole governments

Will pale and stagger under the jawbones of your dismembered syntax

Vain boy! it keeps you busy, though you know

That Belgrade and Zagreb still shelter many post-surrealists, as does East Central One.

*

There was such brilliance lifting off the sea, its aquamarine strip 

*

Thickened with books again, vexed by the

grave again, falling downstairs and not looking

and going outside again there's

a world, there's one in here also

from "Seven Strangely Exciting Lies"

Purchase Selected Poems directly from the publisher for a mere £9 here.

 

Denise Riley's Selected Poems (Reality Street, 2000), first selection

Some favourite passages as I reread Riley's Selected Poems: 


An unselfconscious wife is raised high as a flag over
                 the playground and burns up

*

today it is all grandiose domestic visions truly

from Marxism for Infants

the houses are murmuring with many small pockets of emotion

from "Affections Must Not"

                                                             I'm seeing present history

glance round it for support, I'm hearing it at work to stammer its imperfect story

go on too long, be conscientious, grab at straws, then reach its edge of tears.

*

                       ...I'll leave

as I might leave a party whose guests are venomous yet inconsolable....

*

What is it that shapes us, whether 

we will or no, that through these

opened and reopened mouths that form

the hollow of a speaking wound, we

come to say, yes, now we are Illyrian.

 from "Laibach Lyrik: Slovenia, 1991"

If I seem mirthful it is tinsel & spangles on a black ground.

*

To come to the point, avoiding the temptation to impertinent

& superfluous labour. Exactness the common honesty of art.

What is prosperity without it but a violated responsibility.

*

The solemn & inexhaustible eloquence of rains and mountain.

*

We are first green and then grey and then nothing in this world.

from "Letters from Palmer"

                                                       Now

steady me against inaccuracy, a lyric urge

to showing off. 

*

                                          This

representing yourself, desperate to get it right,

as if you could, is that the aim of the writing?

'I haven't got off lightly, but I got off'--that won't

deflect your eyes that track you through the dark.

*

Will you be good towards

these animals of unease

I can just about call them home.

*

                                                I'd thought

to ask around, what's lyric poetry?

Its bee noise starts before I can:

You do that; love me; die alone.

*

Unanxious, today. 

A feeling of rain

and dark happiness.

from "A Shortened Set"

Purchase Selected Poems directly from the publisher for a mere £9 here.

Elsa Cross's Selected Poems, third selection

NB: Some of the spacing is incorrect as it could not be replicated.

Intact, we rose to love one another

while death sang at our side.

last lines of "Tenayuca" (tr. John Oliver Simon)

Now, in this time,

as unlucky days return

I break my dreams like clay jars....

from "Malinalco" (tr. John Oliver Simon)

her shackled tongue sleeps

feigns that it sleeps

stretches into its fullness

savours its own darkness

from "Cantharides" (tr. Ruth Fainlight)

With its blackened heraldry,

its relentless downpours,

the city is dying.

Around the fountain

young people shoot up,

sleep on paving slabs

with runes drawn

on their shoulders.

* * *

Close-up

only on sweaty faces,

twitching hands.

The perfect illusion shifts elsewhere,

oppressive.

A foreign dialect

with no wish to express

quite simply brings

its clean edge.

opening and closing lines of "Tattoos" (tr. Anamaria Crowe Serrano)

Night accumulated on the walls.

* * *

Oh long kisses,

hand that travels a thigh

like a beach,

the curl in the groin--

(oh summer body).

And thoughts pause

in that flowering

like insects.

from "Reflection in a Sphere" (tr. Anamaria Crowe Serrano)

The touch of day

and the cloud of dreaming

longingly

skirt each other.

And deep down

like a cloyed fish

lies consciousness.

Its intimate calm

unbuckles into arborescent light....

* * *

The heat holds up a taut arch mid-way through the day.

* * *

The heat draws its pincers closer, like a crab.

* * *

A transversal cut through meaning.

We look at the oracle, none the wiser.

Everything begins where we close our eyes.

* * *

You can hear the east wind,

the metal of cowbells,

cicadas:

the incipient polyphony of summer.

* * *

And at night, where will clarity suggest itself?

A wave in the sea

where the moon instils its desire?

* * *

Under the shade of the palm tree,

on the banks of the dry lagoon

as much sediment gets superimposed

on stones

as on the mind--

creatures of thought

or desire,

--who engenders them?

which all-fertile god germinates the tiniest impulse,

the most trivial fantasy,

as he goes by,

and turns them

into dark or radiant beings,

whose beauty overwhelms?

* * *

Desires become bright stones,

seeds devoured by birds,

or in the dark they spread their emptiness.

The moon flutters like an insect,

pulsates

in spirals over the water

and flush with visible things,

in the fissure,

it grows toward a more confined

recess of consciousness.

from "Stones" (tr. Anamaria Crowe Serrano)

Elsa Cross's Selected Poems were published by Shearsman and can be purchased delivery-free from The Book Depository.

Elsa Cross's Selected Poems, second selection

Translations by Michael Smith and Luis Ingelmo


You answer through silence.
You reduce thought
to the void,
and there where you razed all image
your name is renewed.

last stanza of "Name"

Where can I fall where you are not?

last line of "A Tightrope Act"

The ends of the earth
at the tips of your tangled hair.

last stanza of "Dancing Shiva"

My senses dissolve in this wordless sea,
words become quiet,
and one step further on the mind opens up
to the shock of its own annulment.

...

Present in everything
thus you also disappear.

...

Where are you leading me
stripped of my own body?

...

And what of Death?
Small butterflies flying among the ruins.

...

Froth leaves necklaces around the throat of rocks.
Islands of black rock.
Terns nest in the porous walls.
A necklace of froth--and I see my own wreck.
Night comes and shuts off the shine on the water.
Come, you tell me.
With closed eyes, just the tumble of the sea.
Still very close
those beaches to which I will never return.
Very far away now.

...

Black light devouring our bodies.

...

And on the water,
where rays freeze in their own light,
I see you like a seed of fire.
Every wave leaves trails of silk against the sun.

from "Malabar Canto"

Elsa Cross's Selected Poems is published by Shearsman Books and can be purchased online here at The Book Depository, which offers free worldwide delivery on all their books.

Elsa Cross's Selected Poems, first selection

Mexican poet Elsa Cross, as translated by Michael Smith and Luis Ingelmo

Bacchantes

At every entrance of that village, a church.

The seven doors protected by the archangels, so they said.

And ours got drunk in the arcades of the square,

talking of heaven and hell

as placed separated by two inches

inside the body.

last lines of II

We forgot to mind our children,

like Bacchantes,

we forgot our homes.

The rain was a fiesta on the mountain.

And who could predict his own fulmination?

from IV

...pianos stumbling in an out-of-tune waltz.

* * *

We became deer,

we crossed through the woods like arrows.

from VI

Pleasure lashed us.

Inexhaustible,

inebriated,

our bodies, the offering,

like fruits that women leave

on the beaches of the south and the sea carries away.

We were lost to the world.

We sketched boats in the air

and we went off in them.

from VII

Your eyes, emerged from what blaze,

from what sombre places,

saw without seeing the plates of food.

from VIII

Unceasing celebration,

at the cost of so much of our life,

our faces so pale.

* * *

And who could stop us?

Who could stop

those plants climbing along the wall?

from X

Elsa Cross's Selected Poems has recently been published by Shearsman and can be purchased here.