Infinite Difference, sampler no. 9: Elisabeth Bletsoe's "Birds from the Sherborne Missal"

Bletsoe's poetics statement is helpful here: "A missal contains the text and often the music to conduct the Christian Mass throughout the year and the one at Sherborne was created c. 1400 for the monks of the Benedictine abbey there. It is unique for its remarkable marginal series of naturalistic birds, most of which are native to the area and given their dialect names. Studying and writing about the birds allowed me to explore my favourite themes. I observed each bird in its real habitat around Sherborne or its outlying villages and then linked it back to the missal by means of religious iconography, imagery relating to books, pigments or methods of illumination and bird mythology, the latter often subverting the original Christian intention. I employed my version of the Japanese haibun as the roughly similar-sized blocks of text looked pleasing to me on the page and the haiku allowed for a brief word-sketch of the bird itself to literally 'illuminate' the whole."

II.

Roddok, Robin (Erithacus rubecula)

Becoming secretive & depressed in the later months, before the vigorous reassertion of autumn territory. Stakes & ties. Paths of observance newly laid through contusions of aster, sedum & verbena bonariensis, helmeted with bees; offertories yielding a roman tessera, three pebbles from Chesil Bank & a tennis ball. A smell of burning moxa. Sulphur being ground with mercury to form vermilion; glazed with madder, sealed. Red as a releaser (your fat cherry lips), the impossible fury of it all. Oscillograph of the throat, that bob bob bobbing thing. Boundaries constructed from scribbles of sound. Marginals encompass the crossing at North Road, where fifteen burials "very shallow & without coffins" marked the putative site of Swithun's chapel. Haunter of low places & diggings, befitting associations with early resurrection cults. A bird so hallowed such that, harming it, the offending hand would forever uncontrollably tremble. Bringer of fire from the chthonian levels, that our lives might blaze inches from shadow; burnt feathers colour of bright fame. Covering the bodies of the dead with leaves.

tweezing gray hairs

in the bathroom; outside a robin's

winter song

Elisabeth Bletsoe

The anthology is out now and can be ordered from the publisher, Shearsman Books, and The Book Depository in the UK and from The Book Depository or Small Press Distribution in the US.

Divining

Good news! Richard Owens of Damn the Caesars and Punch Press has asked to bring out a small letterpress chapbook/pamphlet of poems from the "Divining for Starters" series. I'll provide more details when I have them; I gather it will appear later this year. To read about the series, see my earlier post, or to read a selection, see Shearsman 60.

Infinite Difference, sampler no. 8: Sascha Akhtar's "The Sufi"

The Sufi

Surrender I, speak

a word for you

a pot on flame melts
before we eat glistening
like cherrywinter, like bootblack
I polish indefinitely

reach my dizzy head
in all its circumference, touch
choose a card
save sure till you mean it
I'll clock your time in true beads
tonight I see a crash
next morning wizard hollers

a crest-fallen face, a dust-rudder

who was there on this winters morn
I saw snow-devils whirling
& lost myself.

wine pour backwards.

hold.


Sascha Akhtar

The anthology is out now and can be ordered from the publisher, Shearsman Books, and The Book Depository in the UK and from The Book Depository or Small Press Distribution in the US.

Infinite Difference, sampler no. 7: Andrea Brady's "Still Hanging on Clinton's Second Visit"

Still Hanging on Clinton's Second Visit

Hope for running out on the flats, under

the overpass that chutes this abstract

into bread home delivery, buckled up

from your front porch to my front seat.

The hyphenated bridge lane where motor

boards a dream of expansive happiness,

dinosaurs trapped in oil pits, a future

to run into red and green eyes

and out till no man's land. Past the refinery

into outlaw verde, unowned hydrotropic

life unclinched by regularity, ownership,

by a loss that has never happened: one of the

kinds of possible losses. You sang this

national anthem, your life parenthesized

by flight into cinema and depiction:

the sun sets orangely, tempers cool

the boss goes nowhere and the land,

lived from, bossily patriotic. Your name

retrieved from the web, the collocation

with the smash given to know

the unknown, blood furls gradually

from the heads and is never less

parenthetical. Texts still bundled

in your pocket switch to discreet mode, rings

engage the natural world in decoration.

Above the concrete marshes, the stars

can't make their empty lines believable.

Stars to shadow by, chase out of manhattan

where that marsh is brown and the old worlds

creep around on stilts with eeling baskets.

Banality will never be obsolete, like the internal

combustion engine: even the tracks

of unbroken yellow too fleet for

the escape artist, a mimic pile-up loops

in place of persons, in a question of sovereignty.

No place unmandated, no stretch without

the service stations marked in bold on the route planner.

These four lanes a horn of plenty blow out at night

the endless hunting lament, a fictional

surplus for continents learning to recognise their bounds.

In the outlaw west the wedding party tips

their guns into starlight glasses, fill space

with pellets to celebrate the belly's axle; fire

falling down burns a noose free, ash and sand

to put fires out and secure a slipless exit. Was this

really what you wanted, to splurge on a rider

the whole real an advert break? Do go on so,

then breath undeterred in the breakbeat meter,

singing for freedom to misuse national space:

the free ride which is no freedom

when at the edge of disaster

you find yourself in the back seat of the patrol car,

the reel catapults into pitch black, and over all of us

who still live the stars

crash down from their heroic outlines

into vacancy

Andrea Brady

The anthology is out now and can be ordered from the publisher, Shearsman Books, and The Book Depository in the UK and from The Book Depository or Small Press Distribution in the US.

Peony Moon

Thanks to Michelle McGrane and her Peony Moon for its support of Infinite Difference. Order a free-delivery-worldwide copy at The Book Depository here.

Infinite Difference, sampler no. 6: Claire Crowther's "Young Woman with Scythe"

Young Woman with Scythe

As if soil was noise, the legal notice

shivered on the barrow. Louise tore off

her scything gloves. High on a pine, wild

parakeets, harbingers of change

in our climate, stared from their margin, chattered

about apocalypse. Carefully, eking

out a holiday, I watered plants.

That's my dialect of territory

against the elocution of possession.

I looked for so long at Louise's face,

that, in the bedroom mirror, it smoothed mine.

Claire Crowther

The anthology can be pre-ordered from the publisher, Shearsman Books, and The Book Depository in the UK and from The Book Depository or Small Press Distribution in the US.

Infinite Difference, sampler no. 5: Frances Presley, from "Alphabet for Alina"

from "Alphabet for Alina"

a

apple a pull a tree a lina
leans her aap pull an apple an
ape sun ap rise across a cross be
tween cox and box her sunset keep
her kept such red to last such red to read

a tart start heart wood this year
the sun gone set or unripe apples
for supermarkets not my favourite
checks to come and live in caravans
pays less than factory work leaf eaters

whose apples who eats this
apple do not snow white do not
white out my reading burst let her
breathe let her choose between apple
and mirror of the apple her s/own character

Frances Presley

The anthology can be pre-ordered from the publisher, Shearsman Books, and The Book Depository in the UK and from The Book Depository or Small Press Distribution in the US.

Infinite Difference, sampler no. 4: Sophie Robinson's "Glisten, Glisten, glisten, glisten"

"Glisten, Glisten, glisten, glisten"

after John Keats & Adrienne Rich

Thump me restlessly against the darkling

Drum of your disquiet, pulse-rattle and

Wheeze a werewolf-hungry eye a

Stormy pounding chromosomal ache a

Scratch of needy charm neglected, named &

Filed away waiting, charring itself to ruin

To spoil in the zombie-fleckered dankness,

Wanting, chagrin grimace betraying urge,

Loosened hips to buck & smoothen,

Iron-down frottage, eiderdown merging,

Feathered to resurgent skin-scansion--

Read and comb the yearning emergency

To crest & crash, to splurge trembling the whole

World across the pane, to glitter patent &

Pattern itself as strings from gurning lips

To spell its listless etude toward the sky.

Sophie Robinson

The anthology can be pre-ordered from the publisher, Shearsman Books, and The Book Depository in the UK and from The Book Depository or Small Press Distribution in the US.

Infinite Difference, sampler no. 3: Lucy Sheerman's "Mine"

Mine

The heart honeycombed; its collected spread

of prospects accrued in court precincts. Late

afternoon. Windows blazing. Walls gilded.

Sudden Suburban stillness. Sunbury.

Gold seams thread the fabric of the in thing

necklace boxed unthreading thirty years from

hand to throat spun into strands. Locketed.

The ache worn threadbare. Later years alter.

Settling. Sedimentary. Paint coats

over paint work. The lustre lost. Wake a

while. Blanket folds under fingers unfurled.

Feathers, leaves, stones, square the edges. Weighted

Down. Memories sink sleep deeper unmazed.

A king's picture--as I had dreamt of him--

chest covered in blood; heart on the outside.

Don't worry. Sound carries meaning intact.

Lucy Sheerman

The anthology can be pre-ordered from the publisher, Shearsman Books, or The Book Depository in the UK and from The Book Depository or Small Press Distribution in the US.

Infinite Difference, sampler no. 2: Harriet Tarlo's "A Spoon for Stein"

A Spoon for Stein

a curve is a centre if you turn it a round over which

you don't let in substance or do using it using

it in a baby mess throw a curve out of which came

came substance steal a spoon steel it feeling

filling the curve is an ending end the handle and

mush the baby out of a stainless mess a stain

is not an object out of a spoon it curves round

around its filling is a centre throw it a spoon

is a missile hit and miss a spoon a mush onto and

of banana rice pear chicken potato apple

again spoon spoony tune let it go throw

Harriet Tarlo

The anthology can be pre-ordered from The Book Depository in the UK and from The Book Depository or Small Press Distribution in the US. And The Book Depository's offering a pre-order special of 25% off!