At night in the house
a river runs through her
carrying its burdens
the golden barges the dead griefs and the quick fishes
She lies alone
wet at the mouth
and between the legs
and it runs not always placid
sometimes angry
rough as old rope
dragging its way
between the receding banks
the old wharves worn smooth
by all the moorings made there
the scrolled barges
with their forgotten cargoes
of sugar tobacco raw silk
and the illicit little night boats
tied up swiftly
while the moon was behind a cloud
the twelve slithery steps
cut into the dripping wall
When the river is running hard
she speaks only its own tongue
not the dry-docked language
of other people
and in places
the trees lean in
like conspirators
and the water is smeared
with whispers
and in places
the bank
melts into the water
roots and all
roots and all
even an unlucky heifer
risking the edge for a drink
In the night house
she is nothing but riverbanks
all she can feel is river
drawn through her
like a green rope
scouring the banks
with restlessness
hauled
towards open sea
taking its freight
of corpses
and drowned silverware.
Copyright Jean Sprackland - 'At Night in the House',
from Sleeping Keys
Jonathan Cape
With Permission
Sleeping Keys is a very accomplished collection from a poet who won the Costa Award for poetry a few years ago with her first collection 'Tilt’. Jean Sprackland is also one of the few poets in the UK to be published by a major international publisher. Jean is not yet a household name, though she should be. Her poetry is not only accessible but rich in imagery and resonance, revealing deeper layers at second and third readings. Jean is currently Reader in Poetry at Manchester University and a trustee of the National Poetry Archive. Her books have been shortlisted for all the major poetry awards including the TS Eliot Prize. Her meditation on walking the shoreline, 'Strands', won the Portico Prize for non-fiction.
‘Sleeping Keys’ is on the surface about houses, lived in, abandoned, dreamt of, but also about our ideas of home and belonging. It’s about locking and unlocking - private and public space.
Doorways are liminal, transitional spaces and have been done to death in poetic metaphor. But they only hover in the subconscious here. It's the keys that are central - lost, found, collected, at the centre of family dramas -
‘First week in the new house and a muddle over keys.
She’s back from somewhere with her daughter in her arms,
three months old, electric with hunger.
It’s dark and she can’t raise her neighbour.’
The title poem brings back all sorts of memories. I still have a tin box in the house, full of keys that might just possibly fit some forgotten lock or other and which I (quite inexplicably) can’t bring myself to throw away.
‘Painted with old roses or tartan and thistle
there’s a biscuit tin like this in every house.’
It's full of keys 'decommissioned and sleeping'. But there are clues in the poem that more has gone into the past than obsolete keys in unusual locks.
‘Not one will ever spring a lock again
to let him into your space, or yours to him.’
And there is one key that offers admission to
‘A house you will never enter
nor haunt after your death
rooms full only of themselves’
Empty rooms fading ‘to a tinnitus of dust and dead wasps’.
One of my favourite poems is ‘Moving the Piano’ - I’ve had to scrap two old pianos in my life, each with its ‘grubby mouthful of elephant’ and I can still remember the effort, the noise, the smell . . .
‘The frame looked quaint as a spinning jenny.
It stank of old felt and lamentations.’
‘At Night in the House’ grabbed my attention because my home in England is on the banks of a big, wild river and the sound of it permeates my days and particularly the nights. And the sound of it is something like a thread of memory bringing ‘the golden barges the dead griefs and the quick fishes’. In the poem this river is a metaphor for something else - solitariness, reflection, the freight of a life lived, ‘the old wharves won smooth/ by all the moorings made there’, those barges, ‘with their forgotten cargoes’.
The river is a life-force, sometimes angry, sometimes placid, both erotic and disturbing, but always powerful, a source of creativity and passion. I know very well the ‘twelve slithery steps/cut into the dripping wall’ and the trees that ‘lean in/like conspirators’. And I have lain in bed, awake, in the darkness of 3am and felt this . . .
‘In the night house
she is nothing but riverbanks
all she can feel is river
drawn through her
like a green rope.
Copyright Kathleen Jones and Jean Sprackland
Please take a look at the sidebar and check out what the Tuesday Poets are posting on their own blogs - a feast of poetry every Tuesday from all over the world!
a river runs through her
carrying its burdens
the golden barges the dead griefs and the quick fishes
She lies alone
wet at the mouth
and between the legs
and it runs not always placid
sometimes angry
rough as old rope
dragging its way
between the receding banks
the old wharves worn smooth
by all the moorings made there
the scrolled barges
with their forgotten cargoes
of sugar tobacco raw silk
and the illicit little night boats
tied up swiftly
while the moon was behind a cloud
the twelve slithery steps
cut into the dripping wall
When the river is running hard
she speaks only its own tongue
not the dry-docked language
of other people
and in places
the trees lean in
like conspirators
and the water is smeared
with whispers
and in places
the bank
melts into the water
roots and all
roots and all
even an unlucky heifer
risking the edge for a drink
In the night house
she is nothing but riverbanks
all she can feel is river
drawn through her
like a green rope
scouring the banks
with restlessness
hauled
towards open sea
taking its freight
of corpses
and drowned silverware.
Copyright Jean Sprackland - 'At Night in the House',
from Sleeping Keys
Jonathan Cape
With Permission
‘Sleeping Keys’ is on the surface about houses, lived in, abandoned, dreamt of, but also about our ideas of home and belonging. It’s about locking and unlocking - private and public space.
Doorways are liminal, transitional spaces and have been done to death in poetic metaphor. But they only hover in the subconscious here. It's the keys that are central - lost, found, collected, at the centre of family dramas -
‘First week in the new house and a muddle over keys.
She’s back from somewhere with her daughter in her arms,
three months old, electric with hunger.
It’s dark and she can’t raise her neighbour.’
The title poem brings back all sorts of memories. I still have a tin box in the house, full of keys that might just possibly fit some forgotten lock or other and which I (quite inexplicably) can’t bring myself to throw away.
‘Painted with old roses or tartan and thistle
there’s a biscuit tin like this in every house.’
It's full of keys 'decommissioned and sleeping'. But there are clues in the poem that more has gone into the past than obsolete keys in unusual locks.
‘Not one will ever spring a lock again
to let him into your space, or yours to him.’
And there is one key that offers admission to
‘A house you will never enter
nor haunt after your death
rooms full only of themselves’
Empty rooms fading ‘to a tinnitus of dust and dead wasps’.
One of my favourite poems is ‘Moving the Piano’ - I’ve had to scrap two old pianos in my life, each with its ‘grubby mouthful of elephant’ and I can still remember the effort, the noise, the smell . . .
‘The frame looked quaint as a spinning jenny.
It stank of old felt and lamentations.’
‘At Night in the House’ grabbed my attention because my home in England is on the banks of a big, wild river and the sound of it permeates my days and particularly the nights. And the sound of it is something like a thread of memory bringing ‘the golden barges the dead griefs and the quick fishes’. In the poem this river is a metaphor for something else - solitariness, reflection, the freight of a life lived, ‘the old wharves won smooth/ by all the moorings made there’, those barges, ‘with their forgotten cargoes’.
The river is a life-force, sometimes angry, sometimes placid, both erotic and disturbing, but always powerful, a source of creativity and passion. I know very well the ‘twelve slithery steps/cut into the dripping wall’ and the trees that ‘lean in/like conspirators’. And I have lain in bed, awake, in the darkness of 3am and felt this . . .
‘In the night house
she is nothing but riverbanks
all she can feel is river
drawn through her
like a green rope.
Copyright Kathleen Jones and Jean Sprackland
Kathleen Jones is an English poet, biographer and novelist living in Italy. Her first full collection 'Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21' was published by Templar in 2011. She blogs at 'A Writer's Life' and has a website at www.kathleenjones.co.uk
5 comments:
What an extraordinary poem and what sounds like an extraordinary collection! I have been so busy of late with other people's poems as a publisher that I forget to write myself. Some poems shove you right back to that particular riverbank... thank you Kathleen, and thank you for what you say here, too, oh woman of the river. Simply wonderful.
Wonderful!
This is great! Thanks for introducing me to this poet.
The fantastic thing is that her collection is available on Kindle or I-pad for a very reasonable price - you don't have to wait for post and pay the extra postage!
Brilliant! Thanks Kathy and Jean.
Post a Comment