Saturday, Ocean Creek by Fred D’Aguiar

Sometimes the morning shakes itself from its moorings

To this world and lifts skywards with a fighter jet's roar,

Everyone lucky enough to be up and about looks to the east

But the sound follows idly a much faster comet too quick

For lazy eyes, so we ink in a sleek cross with exhausts

And settle for sound in place of sight for peace of mind.

A morning without wings, or adrift on one wing-beat,

Skimming waves for their fumes and saltlick,

That's gulls, waves, and wind, sharpening pines.

That's me happy to see that I am nowhere to be found,

Thrilled to be lost at last in things outside of myself

Until I belong to a world that ignores my footprint:

That pine umbrella, a flock, a handclap away from liftoff;

The pike of a heron, on one pirate-foot, stalking its reflection.

This poem appears by kind permission of the author

Editor: Belinda Hollyer

'I should never ask / directions to my childhood,' writes Fred D’Aguiar, 'there is no way back home; home is always elsewhere.' This sense of dislocation is at the heart of his writing, in particular the complex legacy of slavery and colonialism. 

His latest collection of poetry, The Rose of Toulouse, from which this week’s poem is taken, traces the places he has lived, together with their histories and his own. His transformations and shifts – between Britain, Guyana and the USA – are his identity: 'Each year I travel, my passport photo / looks less like me.'

'My first scrape with the arts happened in Secondary School, in London around age 13,' Fred remembers. 'An English teacher read a few poems to us and asked us to write imitations. I forget the poems now but I remember the feeling of liberation when I started to copy the poem in terms of my experience or to put it another way, translate my experiences as a teenager in terms of the given forms of the poems. 

'A few years later another English teacher, Geoff Hardy, revisited the same poets and this time his readings made me pay attention to the poets themselves, to the intensity of feeling in their utterance. From that moment I knew I wanted to write but had no idea what I would write. ... This is wisdom miles after the event and partial wisdom at that, fashioned by my desire to turn a chaotic past of accidents and incidents into seamless narrative, or at least a story with as many of the crinkles in it ironed out by a highly selective process of recollection.'

Fred D'Aguiar was born in London in 1960 to Guyanese parents and grew up in Guyana, returning to England when he was a teenager. He trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury. His previous collections of poetry include Airy Hall (1989; winner of the Guyana Poetry Prize), and Bill of Rights (1998; shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize). 

He is also the author of four novels, the first of which, The Longest Memory (Pantheon, 1994), won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. His plays include High Life (1987) and A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death (1991), which was performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London.

Fred D'Aguiar is currently Professor of English and Gloria D. Smith Professor of Africana Studies at Virginia Tech State University.

You can hear Fred read part of one of his poems on the Poetry Archive, here. And If you want to order The Rose of Toulouse at the special price of UK£8, with free UK delivery (the RRP is UK£9.95) go to www.carcanet.co.uk and use the code TRACE (it's case-sensitive) at the checkout - valid until 30th June.

When you've listened to Fred - do check out the sidebar for poems posted there by our Tuesday Poets. 

This week's Tuesday Poem editor is Belinda Hollyer, a New Zealand writer and anthologist living in London. She doesn't write poetry - she thinks it's far too difficult - but other people's poems inform and sustain her life. The details of her other publications can be found on her website, and also on her blog, where her Tuesday Poems reside.  

Five Quartets by John Tranter

1
All might have been speculation.

What might have been opened?

I do not inhabit the garden.

There they were dignified, invisible,

over the dead bird, in response to

the flowers that are our guests,

in the drained pool.

Dry water, bird children,

garlic and mud in the blood

dance along the sodden floor.

Below, the practical "Erhebung" without

elimination, its partial ecstasy,

its horror. Yet the body cannot

allow a little dim light: neither

rotation nor strained fancies

with no men. Bits of wind in unwholesome

eructation, the torpid gloomy hills of Putney,

twittering into inoperancy and the other.

Abstention from its metalled bell

carries the cling wing.

2


Words move the Chinese violin, while

the words between the foliage

waste a factory, or a by-pass.

There is a time for the wind to break

and to shake the field-mouse with a silent motto.

You lean against a van

and the deep village, the sultry dahlias,

wait for the early pipe. 


3


And the little man and woman

round and round the fire

leaping through the laughter

lifting the milking and the coupling

of man and woman of dung and wrinkles.

I am here in heat, and writhing high

into grey roses filled with thunder.

The rolling cars weep and hunt the ice.

That was not very worn-out.

Poetical fashion, wrestle with poetry.

Calm and wisdom deceived us, the dead secrets

into which they turned their every moment

and shocking monsters, fancy old men,

can hope to acquire houses under the Stock Exchange. 


4


The Directory of cold lost the funeral.

I said to the dark, the lights are hollow,

with a bold rolled train in the tube

and the conversation fades into the mental ether,

the mind is in the garden, pointing and repeating

‘there is no ecstasy!’ The wounded steel,

the fever chart, is the disease,

the dying nurse our hospital.

The millionaire ascends from feet to mental wires.

I must quake in our only drink, blood.

Trying to use a failure, because one has

shabby equipment in the mess of emotion,

and to conquer men, is no competition.

Home is older, stranger, intense.

But the old lamplight is nearly here,

with the explorers. 


5


I think that the patient is forgotten.

Men choose the machine, but the nursery bedroom

in the winter gaslight is within us,

also, the algae and the dead men.

The sea has the water,

the groaner and the women.

Where is there an end of it?

Where is the end of the wastage?

We have to think of them,

while the money is ineffable:

we appreciate the agony of others,

covered by dead negroes.

Editor: Belinda Hollyer

John Tranter says, “This poem is T.S. Eliot's Five Quartets with most of the words removed,” so you can tell he has a good sense of humour as well as of poetry. I love this poem's wit, intelligence and structure, and the way it forms a dance with Eliot's poem: that reminds me of Leonard Cohen's line about 'our steps will always rhyme'.

John Tranter is an Australian poet who has published more than twenty collections of verse. His collection Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected won a number of major prizes. His latest book is Starlight: 150 Poems published by the University of Queensland Press in 2010, from which this poem is taken. Recently he also edited The Best Australian Poems 2011, published by Black Inc. He is the founding editor of the free Internet magazine Jacket, and has a homepage at http://johntranter.net

Do check out the other Tuesday Poems in the sidebar.

This week’s Tuesday Poem editor is Belinda Hollyer, a New Zealand writer and anthologist living in London. She doesn’t write poetry – she thinks it’s far too difficult – but details of her other publications can be found on her website, and also on her blog (where her Tuesday Poems reside.)

Rembrandt's Late Self-Portraits by Elizabeth Jennings

You are confronted with yourself. Each year


The pouches fill, the skin is uglier.


You give it all unflinchingly. You stare


Into yourself, beyond. Your brush’s care


Runs with self-knowledge. Here

Is a humility at one with craft.


There is no arrogance. Pride is apart


From this self-scrutiny. You make light drift


The way you want. Your face is bruised and hurt


But there is still love left.

Love of the art and others. To the last


Experiment went on. You stared beyond


Your age, the times. You also plucked the past


And tempered it. Self-portraits understand,


And old age can divest,

With truthful changes, us of fear of death.


Look, a new anguish. There, the bloated nose,


The sadness and the joy. To paint’s to breathe,


And all the darknesses are dared. You chose


What each must reckon with.

From ‘Collected Poems’ Carcanet, 1987, © Elizabeth Jennings 1987, and used by kind permission of David Higham Associates.

TP Editor: Belinda Hollyer

Elizabeth Jennings (1926 – 2001) was a poet of great emotional intensity and acuity. Sometimes the effects of these qualities are almost unbearably honest – the Rembrandt poem, above, comes close to that for me – and are always supported by a faultless technique, as well as by what seems a wonderful inevitability of logic and imagery.

Her obituary in The Guardian quotes something she said about clarity: “Only one thing must be cast out, and that is the vague. Only true clarity reaches to the heights and the depths of human, and more than human, understanding.” Her own poetic achievements both echo and celebrate that.

Jennings was – and still is – a much-anthologised poet, and works such as ‘Delay’ and ‘One Flesh’ are the ones most people will know. I chose the Rembrandt poem because it seems to me to go straight to the heart of our fear of the real, dark, hugeness of death and decay, as well as of the challenges of art.

I can't find a really good picture of Elizabeth Jennings. There's one I've heard of (but not seen: it may be apocryphal) taken when she had just received her CBE in 1992, in which she stands glowing with pleasure and wearing a low-slung beret, short tweed skirt and striped socks above tennis shoes. I love the idea of that photo: utterly at ease with herself, and utterly happy.

Belinda Hollyer is this week's Tuesday Poem editor. She is a New Zealand writer living in London - a children’s author and anthologist - and she blogs at www.belindahollyer.com/blog.

Two Photographs by Geoffrey Lehmann

TWO PHOTOGRAPHS (1970s)

by Geoffrey Lehmann

My sister took two photographs I love,

Both indoor colour shots with yellow filter,
Of father tinkering with a radio
Glittering with tiny lights upon a table.
Wrapped in a hairy old brown dressing-gown
In heavy yellow light he sits and listens
To ancient earphones plugged into the set,
And in the next he has the earphones off,
And sits, a puzzled frown upon his forehead,
A man of seventy with kindly lines
Upon his weathered face, a youngster trying
To probe the age-old whistling of the ether,
The moans and crackles of the distant stars.
How young your face, old man, how young the hand
Of love that made the camera shutter click.

I came across this poem in the 1970s when I was teaching at Melbourne State College (it’s in the old Penguin ‘Australian Voices’ anthology, which is full of treasures). I’ve frequently returned to the poem over the years, always delighting in the way it captures and develops its imagery with such emotional precision and immediacy. And this year I contacted Geoffrey Lehmann to ask for permission to use it on the Tuesday Poem blog. He wrote back saying this:-

“I'm glad you like ‘Two Photographs’. You mention coming across it in the 1970s, which means you came across the correct version. When I prepared a "Collected Poems" (1997) I rewrote a lot of poems, usually improving them considerably, so much so that my editor whom I had asked to compare the old and new versions gave up comparing them. But I wrecked ‘Two Photographs’ by leaving out the last two lines. Sometimes one can get too precious and afraid of frank emotion and this was such an occasion.”

And a day later, when I was still thinking about what he’d said, and rather shocked at the idea of publishing the poem without its utterly necessary last two lines, Geoffrey Lehmann wrote to me again.

“I’ve just taken another look at the revised 1997 version and the opening is better than the 1970’s version which overdoes the use of the word “love” which should have been saved up to the end. I've now combined both versions, the opening of the 1997 version and the end of the 1970s version to get what I think is the right balance. If it is of any interest please feel free to use both of these emails. The photographs were slides as the later version states. My sister died 4 years ago and I have a collection of her slides of family members which were quite remarkable in their naturalness.  

The version with this email is therefore the definitive version and not likely to change.”

So here is the final, revised, definitive and author-approved version of the poem. He’s right, of course: I was unwilling at first to give up allegiance to the 1970 version, but this one does work better.

TWO PHOTOGRAPHS (2010)

by Geoffrey Lehmann

My sister took two slides with yellow filter,
Of father tinkering with a radio
Glittering with tiny lights upon a table.
Wrapped in a hairy old brown dressing-gown
In heavy yellow light he sits and listens
To ancient earphones plugged into the set,
And in the next he has the earphones off,
And sits, a puzzled frown upon his forehead,
A man of seventy with kindly lines
Upon his weathered face, a youngster trying
To probe the age-old whistling of the ether,
The moans and crackles of the distant stars.
How young your face, old man, how young the hand
Of love that made the camera shutter click.

Geoffrey Lehman is currently completing a 1,100 page anthology for the University of New South Wales Press (‘Australian Poetry since 1788’) but when he’s finished that he’s going to look for the slides that inspired the poem. And if he finds them, he’s promised to send me digitised versions of them. I’ll let you know ...

This week’s Tuesday Poem editor is Belinda Hollyer, a New Zealand writer and anthologist living in London. She doesn’t write poetry – she thinks it’s far too difficult – but details of her other publications can be found on her website and blog (where her Tuesday Poems reside.)

For more Tuesday Poems from the rest of the Tuesday Poem community browse our live blog roll in the sidebar – if the header says ‘Tuesday poem’ you know there’s a poem in there somewhere!