Lee Harwood's The Orchid Boat (Enitharmon, 2014)

Some favourite passages from Lee's last book:

Without thinking
I step aboard the orchid boat,
the feel of silk
carrying me beyond all mirrors.

last stanza of "Departures"

A wall of dense fog ahead

--blocked, all knowledge denied.

'The flying bird brings the message.'

What message from out there?

('Chirpy chirpy cheep cheep' doesn't help much.)

opening stanza of "Ornithology"

She climbed down from the tree a queen.

As we all do, and then set out

across golden stubble to the river.

from "The Books"

But the night not that frightening,

the landscape well known despite the strangeness.

Been-here-before one way or another.

To push on past weariness, but with so much baggage. 

from "Paleontology"

Through the mirror that other world,

almost like this? The colours maybe softer?

the world there harsher? The strangeness,

both sides, of a face, a scene.

What's there before and beyond the glass,

but somehow outside. Beyond the fear.

from "Ben's Photo"

Centuries ago the sages plod up the ivory mountain,

up rock-cut steps, past battered pines,

to the summit shrine to pay their respects, 

mist in the valley below, a soft breeze. 

*

What's to be seen in the old woman's curio cabinet?

Ivory carvings, plates, cups, and a blue glass sugar-shaker. 

We just don't know the full story.

from "Sailing Westwards"

Purchase The Orchid Boat directly from the publisher.

Rhian Gallagher's Shift (Enitharmon, 2012)

I read with Rhian Gallagher on the King's Lynn Poetry Festival in September and this weekend finally found the time to read her second collection, Shift. Here are my favourite passages:


Not moving an inch,
myself to myself become a mystery.

last lines of "Under the Pines"

                                     Yet rain falling over the city

is like a hammer, a thousand pianos at the adagio.

*

I am equal to the wound of any blade.

from "The Gospel According to Longing"

...till the architecture seemed made of lights alone.

from "Becoming"

The mountains do not rescue us, or the light

or the tender microclimate of the bay below.

We have it all and are lost.

from "Crossroad"

The season bends.

from "Prospect Park"

A white wing blurs over lagoon and paddock,

flick of a magician's cloth.

from "The Big Dark"

Some days, blind to stone and wing,

more or less moving,

when I am picked up

by the scent again

and am shaken

margin of every elsewhere here.

*

The southerly boots in, flanked by coal-dark cloud

polar-particled, mean as.

from "Shore"

The sun

roaring in my head.

last words of "Sea Change"

The wind stirring above the range

and angel, a parachute with no body.

from "The High Country"

You can purchase Shift for directly from its publisher, Enitharmon Press, by going here.

"Ogres" from Andrew Bailey's first collection, Zeal (Enitharmon, 2012)

Here's a delightful villanelle from Andrew Bailey's first collection, Zeal. Tomorrow night he'll be reading at Topping's here in Bath, and I hope he'll include this. There is some identation in the lines I have been unable to replicate here, by the way.

OGRES

And there there is a lemon that contains

an island where they laugh so loud it hurts –

the souls of all the ogres in Ceylon

have been secreted far enough from harm

that they assume their soulless frames immortal.

But there there is a lemon that contains

the path to the secret citrus grove, wherein

assurances were made that seemed to state

the souls of all the ogres in Ceylon

would be protected. And there, too, to be found

is a blunted knife, an x-marked chart,

and there there is a lemon that contains

a lemon-scented sharpening stone

that hones the sour knife till it could halt

the souls of all the ogres in Ceylon.

And there’s that grove, that path, that laugh again.

You grip the knife, your other hand out flat,

and there there is a lemon that contains

the souls of all the ogres in Ceylon.

Andrew Bailey

In the UK, you can purchase Zeal from the publisher here.