Infragreen - Softcover

Bingham, Kate

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1781722439 ISBN 13: 9781781722435

Verlag: Poetry Wales Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Perceptive, persuasive and intricately made, the poems of Kate Bingham’s third collection, Infragreen, take the reader on a startling and unfamiliar journey through everyday experiences and phenomena. Her keen eye, reflectiveness and quiet wit endow her subjects with a shimmering freshness. Set within the four walls of home, on the streets of north London and in the Yorkshire countryside, the poems build out from mundane activities such as taking the pill, traveling a daily bus route and scything thistles. In Bingham’s hands, the familiar sights and hypnotic routines that normally lull the brain into unthinking acquiescence are the starting points for finding new richness in the world around us and our participation in it.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kate Bingham is a poet, novelist, and filmmaker who lives in London. Her previous collections are Cohabitation and Quicksand Beach, which was nominated for the Forward Prize Best Collection in 2006. ‘On Highgate Hill’ was nominated for the Forward Prize Best Single Poem in 2010.

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Infragreen

By Kate Bingham

Poetry Wales Press Ltd.

Copyright © 2015 Kate Bingham
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78172-243-5

Contents

I, 
Ultragreen, 
Infragreen, 
Spring, 
look at the rain ..., 
On Highgate Hill, 
Silt, 
The World at One, 
Heels, 
Tulips, 
Arrangements, 
Rosa Wedding Day, 
At Night, 
Questions, 
Midnight, 
two of us awake ..., 
II, 
Open, 
The Children's Room, 
String, 
Strip, 
Ten O'Clock, 
To, 
Cows, 
Thistles, 
August, 
Tapetum Lucidum, 
Cull, 
The Wood, 
Blackberries, 
Down, 
III, 
By the River Lau, 
My Hand, 
no handkerchief ..., 
Between Our Feet, 
Look, 
One, 
My Heart, 
Between, 
Two, 
Next Door, 
Cento, 
call it what you ..., 
Acknowledgements and Notes, 

CHAPTER 1

    Ultragreen

    A water drop
    turns in its skin at the end of the garden
    and opens one eye to the sun.

    Unsteadily, at the speed of light, its plain
    no-coloured heart breaks into such a green I can hear it
    loud and bright and green to distraction.

    It turns its eye in my brain, looks out
    and sees what I have seen.
    Something like photosynthesis begins.


    Infragreen

    Something the sun and I see eye to eye in
    winks in the crux of a leaf.

    For every turn of the turning earth
    it makes a tiny correction

    half letting go of itself
    half hanging on.


    Spring

    You know what the sun is like
    it has a way of looking at us from side to side

    of rising above its various nationalities
    and making things grow

    as if that's what a life-form has to do
    to get more attention.

    Up come snow drops
    pushing and shoving and putting on weight

    daffodil nubs break out all at once
    where the grass is thin

    and even the weak municipal crocuses
    divide and multiply, insisting they matter.

    An empty plastic milk container
    left on the kitchen table

    takes a breath, increasing in volume
    filling with light.

    look at the rain it always seems to know what to do
    coming down clear and direct silver and fearless
    many too many to count in one quick freshwater shoal
    no thought no thought at all for what happens next

    shaped by the air it runs through going its absolute fastest
    round at one end sharp at the other in and out of control
    it manages somehow to look its best its every last drop
    clean and true and hurrying to put its foot in its footstep

    falling over itself into earth's cracked bowl
    it disappears as it collects vanishing from the pavement up
    grounding the sky and lifting filthy waters
    falling into itself in the street as if only falling matters


    On Highgate Hill

      How it rained;
    we caught the bus up Highgate Hill
    past Whittington's cat and the hospital.
    The driver insisted he was full –
    twenty wet children, pleading, shrill,
      how it rained.

      How it snowed;
    the bus got stuck on Highgate Hill
    and we stood on the pavement in pumps and heels,
    children pelted the windows and wheels,
    their walk to school a wild white thrill,
      how it snowed.

      How it shone;
    we held our breath down Highgate Hill
    through stinking heat. A teenage girl
    chucked study guides across the aisle,
    a boy spat on Swiss Army steel
      and it shone,

      how it shone;
    the children kicked their seats until
    the driver came roaring up out of his stall.
    He bent in the middle. We saw it all.
    The engine turned over. Traffic stood still.
      How it shone.


    Silt

    Between the school and Whitehill Food Market
    two small motor repair shops operate
    from opposite sides of the street, one on the corner,
    one with Hand Car Wash And Valet Services
    sharing its neat white stucco art deco yard,
    where less than once a year I take the car
    to have its moss scraped off and some of the silt
    sucked out of the velvet-effect upholstery,
    sugar and salt and worms of rubbed white tissue,
    anonymous embedded grime, filaments
    and particles of inner-city filth
    accumulated through the ins and outs
    of all those journeys, prints of my footprints pressed
    on the brake like a prehistoric assemblage,
    the padded bodywork a safe, repulsive
    five-seater cave I have to return to,
    part of the landscape, its familiar volume
    somewhere to look from as a dirty sun
    slides behind chimneys and rooftops, or the moon
    comes out from a billboard, centring the sky
    between Whitehill Food Market and the school,
    where a glade of plane trees reaches over the fence
    of the padlocked playground and a broken drain
    wells at the side of the street in long black water,
    sluicing the pavement, falling back on itself
    and sluicing again as cars slow through ahead
    of the traffic island, washing a black sand beach
    inland over glittery concrete flood plains
    to the walls of houses...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Poetry Wales Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1781722439
• ISBN 13: 9781781722435
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 64
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar