http://www.nybooks.com/books/authors/tove-jansson/
New York Review of Books
translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal
New York Review of Books
translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
Monday, June 29, 2015
R.S. THOMAS ~
R S Thomas and Mildred Eldridge at Tallarn Vicarage 1940
That Day
Stopped the car, asked a man the way
To some place; he rested on it
Smiling, an impression of charm
As of ripe fields; talking to us
He held a reflection of the sky
In his brushed eyes. We lost interest
In the way, seeing him old
And content, feeling the sun's warmth
In his voice, watching the swallows
Above him — thirty years back
To this summer. Knowing him gone,
We wander the same flower-bordered road,
Seeing the harvest ripped from the land,
Deafened by the planes' orchestra;
Unable to direct the lost travellers
Or convince them this is a good place to be.
___________________
R.S. Thomas
H'm
Macmillan London, 1972
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/r-s-thomas
Sunday, June 28, 2015
Saturday, June 27, 2015
Friday, June 26, 2015
Thursday, June 25, 2015
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
Monday, June 22, 2015
SINEAD MORRISSEY ~
Of which the first is love. The sad, unrepeatable fact
that the loves we shouldn't foster burrow faster and linger longer
than sanctioned kinds can. Loves that thrive on absence, on lack
of return, or worse, on harm, are unkillable, Father.
They do not die in us. And you know how we've tried.
Loves nursed, inexplicably, on thoughts of sex,
a return to touched places, a backwards glance, a sigh —
they come back like the tide. They are with us at the terminus
when cancer catches us. They have never been away.
Forgive us the people we love — their dragnet influence.
Those disallowed to us, those who frighten us, those who stay
on uninvited in our lives and every night revisit us.
Accept from us the inappropriate
by which our dreams and daily scenes stay separate.
This Century, The Next, The Last
My husband requests a sky burial
he wishes to be
as carrion sequestered by leopards
strung up in a desert tree
Back to the familiar corridor he
may choose any opening
but all the rooms contain me
dressed for a wedding
Genetics
My father's in my fingers, but my mother's in my palms.
I lift them up and look at them with pleasure —
I know my parents made me by my hands.
They may have been repelled to separate lands,
to separate hemispheres, may sleep with other lovers,
but in me they touch where fingers link to palms.
With nothing left of their togetherness but friends
who quarry for their image by a river,
at least I know their marriage by my hands.
I shape a chapel where the steeple stands.
And when I turn it over,
my father's by my fingers, my mother's by my palms
demure before a priest reciting psalms.
My body is their marriage register.
I re-enact their wedding with my hands.
So take me with you, take up the skin's demands
for mirroring in bodies of the future.
I'll bequeath my fingers, if you bequeath your palms.
We know our parents make us by our hands.
Migraine
And it's happening yet again:
vandals set loose in the tapestry room
with pin-sharp knives. Such lovely scenes
as this day's scrubbed-white clouds
and shock of scarlet blooms
across the wasteground
looking abruptly damaged —
stabbed-through from the back
so that a dozen shining pin-sized
holes appear at random. Then widen.
Soon even the grass has been unpicked,
the gorse hacked open.
I can no longer see your face.
Posed in unravelling sleeves
and disappearing lace,
I have given up all hope for what was whole —
the monkey under the orange tree,
the tatterdemalion nightingale.
Blog
I don't have girlfriends but I do have sex
with a different woman about three times a month.
Sometimes more. Sometimes less. I rarely ask.
They'll stop to talk to me in the supermarket
or on the bus. Off-handedly at first.
They're not made-up or drunk. We don't flirt
or analyse it. There's this tiny electrical thrill
gets passed like an egg-yolk slipping
between the cups of its own split shell.
They take me home. It happens. I leave. Simple.
They don't invite me to dinner or text.
It's easy and clean and consensual.
Then it happens again. Loneliness's overblown —
unless I'm just one of the unnaturally blessed.
My good friend Jack told me to write this down.
______________________
SINEAD MORRISSEY
Parallax
and Selected Poems
Farrar 2015
Born in 1972 in Belfast Northern Ireland, Sinead Morrissey is the
author of five poetry collections. She teaches creative writing at the
Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen's University, Belfast.
Sunday, June 21, 2015
Saturday, June 20, 2015
Friday, June 19, 2015
HERMIT'S GUIDE TO HOME ECONOMICS (ROBERT LAX) ~
Robert Lax
Hermit's Guide to Home Economics
New Directions poetry pamphlet #17
edited by Paul Spaeth
New Directions 2015
Thursday, June 18, 2015
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
LONG AGO ~
Long Ago
That tiny toy instrument
Shaped like a French horn
Displayed with a dozen others
We both gave it a squeeze —
But for some reason this
One sounded the best
With its familiar sound
More than a horn
And it took your breath away
And close to tears
At how its cry
Was like our geese
On a little farm
From long ago
________________________
© Bob Arnold
from DUO
Longhouse 2015
Longhouse 2015
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
GEORG TRAKL ~
GEORG TRAKL
(1887–1914)
Helian
In the lonely hours of the ghost
There is beauty walking in the sun
Along the yellow walls of the summer.
The footsteps fall quietly in the grass; yet ever sleeps
The son of Pan in the grey marble.
Evenings on the terrace we drank ourselves drunk on brown wine.
The red glow of the peach amid the leaves;
A soft sonata, mirthful laughter.
Beautiful is the stillness of night.
On the dark plain
We meet together with the herdsmen and white stars.
When it becomes autumn
A stark clarity reveals itself in the grove.
We wander calmly along red walls
And our wide eyes follow the flight of birds.
With evening the white water dwindles in the grave urns.
The sky freezes in bare branches.
The peasant brings bread and wine in immaculate hands
And the fruit ripens tranquilly in a sunny room.
O how solemn are the faces of those precious dead.
But it does the soul good by how it does them justice.
________________
GEORG TRAKL
Poems
translated by James Reidel
Seagull Books, 2015
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/georg-trakl
Monday, June 15, 2015
ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK ~
Alejandra Pizarnik
(1936-1972)
Possible Unions
IN A COPY OF LES CHANTS DE MALDOROR
A field of flowers stung beneath my dress, giddy as children at
midnight.
A gust of light in my bones when I write the word earth. A word or
presence, followed by perfumed animals — as sad as itself, as beautiful
as suicide — and it soars over me like a dynasty of suns.
SIGNS
Everything is making love to the silence.
They had promised me a silence like fire — a house of silence.
Suddenly, the temple is a circus and the light is a drum.
FUGUE IN LILAC
You had to write without a for what, without a for whom.
The body remembers love like the lighting of a lamp.
If silence is temptation and promise.
FROM THE OTHER SIDE
Like sand sifting through an hourglass, so music falls into music.
I am sad on this night made of wolf fangs.
Music falls into music the way my voice falls into my voices.
MORTAL TIES
A single thought cast out words like lifelines at sea. Making love
inside our embrace implied a black light: a darkness that started
gleaming. A rediscovered light, twice extingusihed already, yet more
vibrant than a thousand suns. The color of a mausoleum for infants,
the deadened hues of repressed desire, opened up in the savage
room. The rhythm of our bodies disguised the flight of the ravens.
The rhythm of our bodies carved out a space of light inside that light.
from The Shapes of Absence
THE WORD THAT HEALS
While waiting for a world to be unearthed by language, someone
is singing about the place where silence is formed. Later it'll be
shown that just because it displays its fury doesn't mean the sea — or
the world — exists. In the same way, each word says what it says —
and beyond that, something more and something else.
OF THINGS UNSEEN
Before words can run out, something in the heart must die.
The light of language covers me like music, like a picture ripped
to shreds by the dogs of grief. And winter reaches for me like a woman
who has fallen in love with a wall.
Just when I'd hoped to give up hoping, your fall takes place within
me. Now I am only but this within.
'OBSCURITE DES EAUX
Listening to the sounds of falling water in my dream. The words
fall like the water — I fall. Drawing the shape of my eyes in my eyes;
swimming in my waters and telling myself of my silences. All night
long, waiting for language to configure me, I am thinking of the
wind that whirls toward me and stays in me. All night long, I have
been walking in an anonymous rain. I was given a silence filled with
shapes and apparitions (you say). And you keep running, an unconsoled
as a bird alone in the wind.
GESTURE FOR AN OBJECT
Numb time, time like a glove upon a drum.
The three who compete in me remain on a shifting point and we
neither are nor is.
My eyes used to find rest in humiliated, forsaken things. Nowadays
I see with them; I've seen and approved of nothing.
THE MASK AND THE POEM
The splendid paper palace of the wanderings of childhood.
When the sun sets, they will lock up the tightrope-walker in a cage
and take her to the temple ruins and leave her there.
FOR JANIS JOPLIN
(fragment)
to sing sweet and die soon.
no:
to bark.
like Rousseau's sleeping gypsy:
this is how you sing, plus the lessons in terror.
you have to cry until you break
in order to make or utter a small song,
to scream so much to fill the holes of absence
that's what you did, what I did.
I wonder if that didn't make the error worse.
you did well to die.
that's why I speak to you,
why I confide in a girl monster.
___________________
Alejandra Pizarnik
Extracting the Stones of Madness:
Poems 1962-1972
translated by Yvette Siegert
New Directions, 2015
(September)
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