N is for North

Seamus Heaney has a great poet name. My friend who sometimes says she doesn’t like poetry has really good taste in poetry. Currently she’s carrying around Heaney’s collection North, and I wish I could repeat for you, word for word, what she said about choosing this particular book from the poetry stacks at the Coolidge Corner Library, because it was an awesome description of the weird and glorious (mostly glorious) variety of ways we all choose what to read. My friend’s been reading the poems aloud to herself in a strange accent and I totally failed to get her to read them to me (she tells me I didn’t try and she would have done it. Damn it) but I did read a couple out loud myself, and they’re gorgeous. So’s Seamus Heaney:

Older Seamus

Young Seamus

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also gorgeous — these poems:

 

North

I returned to a long strand,

the hammered curve of a bay,

and found only the secular

powers of the Atlantic thundering.

I faced the unmagical

invitations of Iceland,

the pathetic colonies

of Greenland, and suddenly

those fabulous raiders,

those lying in Orkney and Dublin

measured against

their long swords rusting,

those in the solid

belly of stone ships,

those hacked and glinting

in the gravel of thawed streams

were ocean-deafened voices

warning me, lifted again

in violence and epiphany.

The longship’s swimming tongue

was buoyant with hindsight—

it said Thor’s hammer swung

to geography and trade,

thick-witted couplings and revenges,

the hatreds and behind-backs

of the althing, lies and women,

exhaustions nominated peace,

memory incubating the spilled blood.

It said, ‘Lie down

in the word-hoard, burrow

the coil and gleam

of your furrowed brain.

Compose in darkness.

Expect aurora borealis

in the long foray

but no cascade of light.

Keep your eye clear

as the bleb of the icicle,

trust the feel of what nubbed treasure

your hands have known.’

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Bone Dreams

I

White bone found
on the grazing:
the rough, porous
language of touch

and its yellowing, ribbed
impression in the grass—
a small ship-burial.
As dead as stone,

flint-find, nugget
of chalk,
I touch it again,
I wind it in

the sling of mind
to pitch it at England
and follow its drop
to strange fields.

II

Bone-house:
a skeleton
in the tongue’s
old dungeons.

I push back
through dictions,
Elizabethan canopies.
Norman devices,

the erotic mayflowers
of Provence
and the ivied latins
of churchmen

to the scop’s
twang, the iron
flash of consonants
cleaving the line.

III

In the coffered
riches of grammer
and declensions
I found ban-hus,

its fire, benches,
wattle and rafters,
where the soul
fluttered a while

in the roofspace.
There was a small crock
for the brain,
and a cauldron

of generation
swung at the centre:
love-den, blood-holt,
dream-bower.

IV

Come back past
philology and kennings,
re-enter memory
where the bone’s lair

is a love-nest
in the grass.
I hold my lady’s head
like a crystal

and ossify myself
by gazing: I am screes
on her escarpments,
a chalk giant

carved upon her downs.
Soon my hands, on the sunken
fosse of her spine
move towards the passes.

V

And we end up
cradling each other
between the lips
of an earthwork.

As I estimate
for pleasure
her knuckles’ paving,
the turning stiles

of the elbows,
the vallum of her brow
and the long wicket
of collar-bone,

I have begun to pace
the Hadrian’s Wall
of her shoulder, dreaming
of Maiden Castle.

VI

One morning in Devon
I found a dead mole
with the dew still beading it.
I had thought the mole

a big-boned coulter
but there it was
small and cold
as the thick of a chisel.

I was told ‘Blow,
blow back the fur on his head.
Those little points
were the eyes.

And feel the shoulders.’
I touched small distant Pennines,
a pelt of grass and grain
running south.

—Seamus Heaney

M is for the M in Ammons. Either of them.

I’ve been carrying around A.R. Ammons’ A Coast of Trees for upwards of two weeks now. It’s one of those well-timed books that found me right when I needed it. I’ve been spending a lot of time with this poem, “Swells.”

Swells

The very longest swell in the ocean, I suspect,

carries the deepest memory, the information of actions

summarized (surface peaks and dibbles and local sharp

slopes of windstorms) with a summary of the summaries

and under other summaries a deeper summary: well, maybe

deeper, longer for length here is the same as deep

time: so that the longest swell swells least; that

is, its effects in immediate events are least perceptible,

a pitch to white water rising say a millimeter more

because of an old invisible presence: and on the ocean

floor an average so vast occurs it moves in a noticeability

of a thousand years, every blip, though, of surface and

intermediacy moderated into account: I like to go

to old places where the effect dwells, summits or seas

so hard to summon into mind, even with the natural

ones hard to climb or weigh: I go there in my mind

(which is, after all, where these things negotiably are)

and tune in to the wave nearly beyond rise or fall in its

staying and hum the constant, universal assimilation: the

information, so packed, nearly silenced with majesty

and communicating hardly any action: go there and

rest from the ragged and rapid pulse, the immediate threat

shot up in a disintegrating spray, the many thoughts and

sights unmanageable, the deaths of so many, hungry or mad.

~ A.R. Ammons

L is for The Lie

The Lie

As was my custom, I’d risen a full hour
before the house had woken to make sure
that everything was in order with The Lie,
his drip changed and his shackles all secure.

I was by then so practised in this chore
I’d counted maybe thirteen years or more
since last I’d felt the urge to meet his eye.
Such, I liked to think, was our rapport.

I was at full stretch to test some ligature
when I must have caught a ragged threat, and tore
his gag away; though as he made no cry,
I kept on with my checking as before.

Why do you call me The Lie? he said. I swore:
it was a child’s voice. I looked up from the floor.
The dark had turned his eyes to milk and sky
and his arms and legs were all one scarlet sore.

He was a boy of maybe three or four.
His straps and chains were all the things he wore.
Knowing I could make him no reply
I took the gag before he could say more

and put it back as tight as it would tie
and locked the door and locked the door locked the door

~ Don Paterson

K is for Kay, Sarah (sera)

Late last year I discovered spoken word poet Sarah Kay. We carry the print edition of her poem, “B,” in our store, but the best way to meet Sarah Kay is by hearing her read:

Check out Sarah performing other poems on her website, www.kaysarahsera.com.

J is for Jabberwocky

Illustrated by John Tenniel, borrowed from Wikipedia.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves    Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves,    And the mome raths outgrabe. "Beware the Jabberwock, my son    The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun    The frumious Bandersnatch!" He took his vorpal sword in hand;    Long time the manxome foe he sought— So rested he by the Tumtum tree,    And stood awhile in thought. And, as in uffish thought he stood,    The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,    And burbled as it came! One, two! One, two! And through and through    The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head    He went galumphing back. "And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?    Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"    He chortled in his joy. 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves    Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves,    And the mome raths outgrabe. ~ Lewis Carroll