Monday 11 October 2010

Richard Caddel's Magpie Words: Selected Poems 1970-2000 (West House Books, 2002), second selection

As noted before, Blogger cannot replicate the original spacing of these poems, so for such detail please see the book itself.


What of memory, a
film not
wound on properly, cold
daylight.

first stanza of "From Wreay Churchyard"

cursd critics . rubbed the stone clean .
weeds are dressing murmur .
absent in movement

from "Rigmarole: A Struck Bell"

A speech
at odds with itself, as

likely to
soak you as save you.

from "Rigmarole: Uncertain Time"

heart
in its silence.

Light gone
from the dales
and stars
lock in.

from "Sweet Cicely"

The night is
calm, still--
the song of the moon

to the feet

from "Two Movements Which Begin
at the Head and End at the Feet"

blocked morning--I bite
my day and swing out
over sound, over

the past

***

Come
buy your stars anyway

here gripping the stone of winter

***

And glibly on common way
over stubble the scarf the
waymark unstill

over sleepingsickness
over turf of the law hear
heartsong down morning

***

the blood root aloft there
in wind light--iridescent earth
warm and lime washed

***

an apple house in song
mother or summer or clear

blue edged with blood all
softened in winter wood mind
coldsilver

wandering each day of
esoteric signs--sound
gesture into the dirt lands.

***

salt caked robed in its rime
the paint the plaster the ship
the hope ever silent

***

light in showers foundered
our sound singing in
fruitless ache. Memory

***

all sound starmantles
all the half might
all that wasn't lost falling

from "Underwriter"

Young girls laugh in the lane, a word
like that giggle doesn't exist.
Out of a lexicon of reedy days
release this pavement of colour.

***

Here's a flower
we'd all forgotten, from a pot
marked nightmare. When we're

finally tired, we sleep like children. So
breathing it reaches at last
to an argued form of blessedness, a
silvered road deep to stars.

***

Then we wash down
those strange stars, and gardens
everywhere lose their quiet.

***

By starlight on a clear night
insects sing, a music apart
on margins we thrill to.

from "Writing in the Dark"



You can purchase Richard Caddel's Magpie Words directly from publisher West House Books.

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