Includes most poems from HOUSES DIM and 2000 TALES OF LOVE, REWINDING,
and about 30 new poems, from which this selection is taken.
CUMBRIAN JUNCTIONS
Spring 2001 A car which threw the group who drove against the swell of trippers, south, recorded, in a glaze, the land of bright and focused genocide. The grazing, almost-shone and short in April, fresh as ash, vacated like a drift, flopped off the cusp of furnaces by hillside homes. All vehicles vented up the reek of holocaust, de-sensitised on oil-painted, fuming scarp on spring-crime, where the water washed. Like surgeons’ gloves, escaping clean all drove to shield their globular and seed-fed lives, domains, calf-razed and foot-in-mouth, but soon retrieved. AUGHTON PARK Not Adlestrop the shame of every afternoon. That view which trees reduced to, unassumingly, autumn to June. The rails groaned. Kids called or jeered. Or left for a home that paid up steps, in uniforms. All they knew was Aughton, grander than a park - and broad-leaved, broadening, grassy and overshown, with stock-paved drives - no steel-grey or blowing hard of gritty spirals in the sky. And for their childhoods a blackbird sang close by. Down the line, resounded further and darker, jackdaw calls from Merseyside and Lancashire. Such tourists, clustered west as these have tottered out to see lots left - a little rack, courageous land, point out their final fantasies: and so it grows. Like being young, the islands in the background, grainy, shade a day ambitiously, become the missing talismans – like unrecorded songs, whose words could curl a twingeing sense of loss, or poems, neither primed nor yet without the final will to give; like bursts of gravel prose, unsaved before the power shuts, or prints, which now projected face the rock, the blurring sea. And no one gapes inland, or stops to long for where they live, or mull moreover, after, how they could dread home, one afternoon.Yes. Some remembered Aughton Park –
GOODBYE, ISLANDS
Pointe du Raz
