Lesley Wheeler's Heterotopia (Barrow Street, 2010)

Some favourite passages:


This blitzed, hungry, smoke-thin world
invented me, and its ardent lies

are my birthright.

from "Forged"

                                                               ...dryad men, full

of mutton and commerce, stomp through in gray overcoats.

from "Heterotopia"

The new designer had never seen an eagle and did not know

          it carried prey in its talons, or he wasn't as deft as the

          old artist, or he was bored and manufacturing trouble.

Ergo, the duck with something nasty in its bill.

*

...the irritable phoenix plotting immolation in its ball of myrrh....

from "Concerning the Liver Bird"

There he goes, peeping at my bosom

and away again quick, stumbling

and clutching his guilty heart.

It's snowing flakes of coal today.

from "Mr. Hawthorne Peeks at Me Shelf Kit, c. 1854"

Even my great-grandmother's suffering

was never told, save for the last birth, seventeen

years after the rest. Go to the pictures,

Father said, and the elder children grabbed

the coins and ran. They didn't know and he

was ashamed. The newborn small and powerful,

distilled from the ether, dreams, old rain.

*

                         All beginnings hurt

someone: the animal, the ground. So much

to witness and all of it slipping away.

from "Twilight Sleep"

A day becomes a story becomes a bird,

a lost seagull who shrinks each time

I describe him.

from "Inland Song"

I'd belong 

to it whether it wanted me or not.

end of "Vronhill Street in Liverpool 8"

It's an incoherent sound,

the shout of the unshaven man in the dirty cap,

but he has what you need and he sells it cheap.

from "The Calderstones"

If a magpie lights on the garden wall, she might

look up, and the wind might pluck a fragrance

from a blossoming bough.

from "The Forgetting Curve"

You can purchase Heterotopia directly from the publisher here.