Plainwater by Anne Carson (Cape, 1995)

I didn't include any selections from the first section here as they work as brilliant versions of the original Mimnermus fragments. Perhaps I should reconsider. Anyway, here are my favourite passages elsewhere in the manuscript.


From Part II, Short Talks:

You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

the end of "Introduction"

Rembrandt wakens you just in time to see matter stumble out of its forms.

the end of "On the End"

From Part III, Canicula di Anna:

The fact that Anna is somewhere 

having coffee or a dream

is an assault on me.

I hate these moments of poverty.

*

Sound

that shines up as a laugh

and smells like blood

is another troublesome,

ancient

category.

From Part V, The Anthropology of Water:


...the only rule of travel is, Don't come back the way you went.

*

It would be an almost perfect love affair, wouldn't it? that between the pilgrim and the road. No mistake, it is a beautiful thing, the camino. It stretches away from you. It leads to real gold. Look at the way it shines. And it asks only one thing. Which happens to be the thing you long to give. You step forward. You shiver in the light. Nothing is left in you but the desire for perfect economy of action, using up the whole heart, no residue, no mistake: camino. 

*

...you drop through a freedom so clear it is simply pain.

*

Shapes of life change as we look at them, change us for looking.

*

What are we made of but hunger and rage? 

*

How surprised I am to be entangled in the knowledge of some other animal.

*

An entrance is important to a pilgrim: there can be only one.

*

No photographs--you know what fireworks are like. Tawdry, staggering, irresistible, like human love.

*

If we strain thought clear of impulse slowly, slowly the day scream subsides to ordered lust.

*

...a sun-drilled enormity of meadow....

*

I try to maintain a remote demeanour amid stunning self-accusations.

*

...little cats go clicking over the snow.




You can order Plainwater from Abe Books here.

Andrew McMillan's Physical (Cape, 2015)

Some favourite passages from this forthcoming collection:


grappling with the shifting question of each other's bodies
until the morning breaks across them and still their strength

*

taken allegorically          he is beating on himself
until the point at which the inner river of the word grace
runs past and everything lays down in calm

from "Jacob with the Angel"

they have got too close to the glass

and now they are laying

in the broken pools of their own faces

from "The Men Are Weeping in the Gym"

but the crowd goes mad and claps

of thunder thrum the valley where I sleep

and my lonelyhaircut cellist eyes the bar between us

from "If It Wasn't for the Nights"

rain      the morning's mundane idea forming

movingloopingringroad of a day

*

how much of fighting

is the need to touch another man?

from "Protest of the Physical"

you thought all men grieved like small Greek women

in black who say the bread still needs to be baked

from "How to Be a Man"

the night is not so much clouding as burying itself

last line and stanza of "Morn"

Andrew McMillan's first collection, Physical, is published by Jonathan Cape later this year.