At the Time of Partition by Moniza Alvi (Bloodaxe, 2013)

Some favourite passages:


Like a conquered king,
the story limps away.

Pity the ending.
No story has an ending.

Attend the burial--
there will be a resurrection.

*

One day--that sliver of time

in which anything can happen
and often doesn't,

but sometimes time take one day
by the hand, or the scruff of the neck.

That day when any story
takes a deep breath

                                and begins--

*

In an exodus, such a child
grown up and not grown up

was ripe for being lost.

*

A line so delicate a sparrow might have
picked it up in its beak.

from "The Line"

Under duress, 

it [the house] was dauntingly calm.

from "Ever After"

Where will you live?

Have you any arrangements?

An arrangement?

It lay breathing at the end of the tunnel.

Hopped towards her like a tamed bird.

Like a kite, it tangled in the trees. 

*

At this point the back

of the story

                    begins to break.

Can it walk at all?

Or hobble with a stick?

Will it close its eyes and drift into sleep?

How to serve it well?

from "So They Took the Bus"

How did she come to be here

in a place so in love with no?

from "No"

The nothingness was palpable--

you could pluck it from the air.

from "The Camp"

A nation in its instability,

one that could change lives

with the suddenness of a blow to the head.

from "And Where?"

What was there to cling to

but hope?

The fine escarpment of hope.

from "Continuing"

At the time of posting, Moniza Alvi's At the Time of Partition is available for 27% off from Foyle's. 

Heather Phillipson's Instant-flex 718 (Bloodaxe, 2013)

Some favourite passages from this delightful first collection:


I had discovered that the earth goes around the sun.
Copernicus pre-discovered it.

last stanza of 'Heliocentric Cosmology'

Enjoy your western wafts of coolth, thwacking in off the broad Pacific. It's not possible to describe the climate here. We lie low like coy carp.

end of 'Dear Johnny Bunny,'

(that title should be struck through)

                                                        Only those

who still have hope can capitalise on sobbing. 

end of 'Darling, You Missed a Revelation'

Remember when I was this tall

a flourishing know-nothing at the height

                         of her drawing pencils!

*

Is this true why did I say it?

from 'Speech to Be Delivered at the First Convenient Occasion'

Bookcases aren't reassuring, love.

Literature is too exciting, enmeshes you in its concerns

and irregular verbs, half-lost in personal sundry items.

from 'An Encounter in the New Language'

Remember the mind has uncharted districts.

Fork up events. Prime them to happen.

from 'Fingers Are Not Ignorable'

                                                                     Touching the dead

marries them to us, us too death marries.

from 'Oh. Is he dead?'

Is there no law against junk thought? Is this modernity?

from 'When the City Centre's at a Standstill, It's Really

Quite a Thrill to Lie in the Road and Read Herman Melville'

Through windows, the road is an extensive misunderstanding

confirmed by an engine. It is panoramic condensation.

opening stanza of 'How Things Haven't Changed'

At time of posting, Instant-flex 718 is 25% off at Foyle's (UK).

Roy Fisher's Standard Midland (Bloodaxe, 2010)

The afterlife back then

was fairly long:

nothing demented like for ever,

nothing military.

from "The Afterlife"

Pass by the threat and it goes back nearer Nature: the three old horses that always amble in the boggy roadside fields have criss-crossed the bluff, growing bigger all the while. They've arranged themselves on the naked steps of the summit and stand there asleep as a single conjoined thing against the sky waiting for the enormous moon to land and take them up.

*

Odours

of shellfish and salmon rising from marble

counters in the pomp of the market

defer to the palms ranged above. Masque

in the Aquarium tank breasting the view

floor up to roof where the skirts

swish through the murk and sharks

ride up and pass

'Sunday 6.30 Rev. Handel Broadbent

IF I BE LIFTED UP'

Indeed. If so he be. The phut and fall

of a late firework.

from "On the Wellingtonias at Pilleth"

[Here you will have to long for the exquisite 6-line elegy, "On Hearing I'd Outlived My Son the Linguist," or buy the book.]

My mood,

my garden: outline and ooze.

from "Shocking Pink"

Quite possibly I love the old cat

more than I love my thoughts. A private matter.

from "Of the Qualities"

It's plain. The rule

and the example.

In from the world and all its directions

the rule must fall and there lie

shining alone.

*

But there's a force that starts to curve as it gathers and says

MOVE

War and energy. Peace with revolutions

under the floorboards. Go looking.

from "Hole, Horse and Hellbox:

the Tabernacle Poems"

[More whole short poems would go here if I was going to fly in the face of copyright: "Plot," "A Damp Night," "The Skyline in the Wall Mirror"....]

It's as if some sunny splendour has not long since passed through this room and the passage beyond with the power to life the air and move, while the cartons and packing cases maintain an oppressive inertia bordering on menace.

from "Stops and Stations"

Peeling the present off the past

the better to show the wiring

*

rattling a cart of knocked-up planks

its bottom littered with research papers

on land use in the Fertile Crescent,

pamphlets, a Herodotus:

news of the stolen world.

from "Rattle a Cart"

Standard Midland is, as of this posting, available from Foyle's Books for 30% off.

Peter Reading, 1946-2011

Peter Reading's most recent book, Vendange Tardive (meaning late harvest), was all too prophetic about the nearness of his death. My review of that impressive collection appears on The Guardian website here, and his publisher Bloodaxe Books's blog entry on his death here.

British poetry has lost one of its most compelling, original writers.

Women's Poetry Anthologies

I'm off to London shortly for tonight's event at The Poetry Library, "What Every Woman Would Carry: Women's Poetry Anthologies," moderated by Dr Jane Dowson, author of A Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century British Women's Poetry; my fellow panelist is Maura Dooley, editor of Making for Planet Alice: New Women's Poetry (Bloodaxe, 1997). Thoughts?

Win four shortlisted first collections!

Cyprus Well, the Southwest literature agency, is holding a competition in conjunction with the London Festival Fringe New Poetry Award. Four poets in the Southwest are on the shortlist--myself for The Tethers (Seren), David Briggs for The Method Men (Salt), Hilary Menos for Berg (Seren), and Patrick Brandon for A Republic of Linen (Bloodaxe), and Cyprus Well has taken a short poem from each contributor and made them available on their website. CW has also obtained a copy of each book and is offering the chance for one person to win all four. Just send a postcard with your name, postal address, and email address to Poetry Competition, Cyprus Well, Exeter Central Library, Exeter EX4 3PQ by 12 August for a chance to win.