Australian poet Sarah Holland-Batt will be on tour from 12 Oct to launch her UK retrospective The Jaguar, with readings in Berwick, Ilkley, Bath, Leeds, Edinburgh,...
Launch reading by Nia Broomhall, Niall Campbell, Sarah Holland-Batt and Laura Wittner, with translator Juana Adcock
Nia Broomhall, Niall Campbell, Sarah Holland-Batt and Laura Wittner, plus translator Juana Adcock, launched their new books online. Recording available on our YouTube...
In this small grey circle I am
cropped, a moony snippet, an eye
the size of a world,
a doubled pupil. Shelled in
like a snail, I seal all space:
my sight is minuscule. Here
is the hinge, the gap
between what there is
and what I see – and the glass
is cool and deep
as a well. Within, words bend
and flex in mindless echo.
I stare, I stare –
I am cut from clear air,
brutal and planetary. Call
my name, I won’t answer. Twist
my arm, I won’t yell.
My cell, my cell –
this black rictus,
it’s hell – still I stand,
smudged, in this circle.
Just to see
glass to eye, eye to glass,
what I am.
*
The Idea of Mountain
And of that kind of permanence –
we long for it sometimes,
the obstinacy of a single stone
and its mindlessness. To be less alive
to each particular sadness. Monolithic.
Unmoved as the old man who wakes
and knows no pleasure or disgrace
can harm his tired heart any more
because he has lived, in practical terms, for ever.
Beyond cold or heat. Beyond all of it
except our itness. Five years I lived
by that black mountain range, the heights
of which let nothing grow, not yellow aspen
or even blue spruce, just the barren peaks
shouldering the snow and sun and surviving.
I would lie in the thistle-grass and watch
wasps mating below the sheer persisting rock,
frantic, their torsos the bright colour of pollen,
their heads the purest black –
and I saw, finally, how our last hours play out
against the continuing earth, how we wake
consoled by the morning’s petty smallness,
the kettle’s steam, fat hissing on the stove,
and the cat nudging our ankles, its hunger and our own
never fully appeased. But I would have it still –
the aspens, the hunger, the wasps,
and this happiness, sidling slow
as a foal towards the phosphorescence of new grass:
naïve, and wedded to a predictable end.
*
The Art of Disappearing
The moon that broke on the fencepost will not hold.
Desire will not hold. Memory will not hold.
The house you grew up in, its eaves, its attic will not hold.
The still lives and the Botticellis will not hold.
The white peaches in the bowl will not hold.
Something is always about to happen.
You get married, you change your name,
and the sun you wore like a scarf on your wrist has vanished.
It is an art, this ever more escaping grasp of things;
imperatives will not still it – no stay or wait or keep
to seize the disappeared and hold it clear, like pain.
So tell the car idling in the street to go on,
tell the skirmish of chesspieces to go on,
tell the scraps of paper, the lines to go on.
It is winter: that means the blossoms are gone,
that means the days are getting shorter.
And the dark water flows endlessly on.
*
from The Hazards(2015)
No End to Images
No end to tissues of tears beside the bed
or to avenues of trees and cathedrals,
no end to bee-eaters in the rose apples
or summer on the balcony in Neukölln,
no end to the pharmaceutical clouds over Kraków.
No end to the hour I stood and shook
like a leaf in the shower’s privacy,
no end to my name, snagged like a burr,
no end to the body which is colossally small
with its pains and plainer longings.
No end to grief, never any end to that.
No end to the silver train stalled in Budapest
where I wept in the empty sleeper,
no end to iron shoes along the Danube,
to history, the convalescent light
that falls on my desk so evenly,
no end to the gardens of Europe
with their murderous symmetry,
no end to picnics on the forest’s edge
or piazzas of pure Carrara marble,
to cruelty, madness, oblivion,
massacres and women’s scarves,
the hunger of wolves, ripening stonefruit,
no end to fear and secret police,
and no end to Bach fugues on the turntable
whose ideas resolve so cleanly
into a life infinitely more gentle and orderly
than our fraught morning fights
or the cries we send echoing at night
down the hollow halls of love.
*
from The Jaguar(2022)
The Kindest Thing
The doctor with an Armani model’s jawline
is brisk when he tells me the kindest thing
is to withhold antibiotics. Pneumonia is the old man’s friend, he says,
his stare so piercing I feel compelled
by his beauty – he is almost shining
with charisma and vitality, this man who coaxes
patients towards death like an emerald boa
stretching its pink jaw by inches
until the glass frog is entirely inside the snake’s head,
subsumed into the hypnotic knot of its body,
its scales flexing electric green as new leaves,
its white lightning bolts rippling and contracting –
or like the sinister musk blossoming
of an orchid mantis – limbs variegated
like borlotti beans in flecked rose and cream –
swaying like a silken flower to lure
the dreaming crickets in. The kindest thing
is to hand yourself up to death’s calling,
I know this, but I am not handing myself up,
I am offering over my father, tenderly
unhinging death’s jaws until he is swamped
with fever, his pupils tracking some invisible thread
as he eases into unconsciousness, his eyes
bright with the knowledge of one
who senses he is being carried away
but does not know why or where.
*
Terminal Lucidity
After twenty years away, an intercession of clarity
in your final hours: surfacing from a morphine surge,
suddenly you were there again,
your eyes lighting on my face, gold-panned hazel,
alive with the old intelligence.
In the small hospital room at the corridor’s end
we listened to Clair de Lune
as vague rain prickled outside in the garden bed.
You listened, dozed, awoke. I spoke,
and you stayed until my words petered out,
then stayed through the silence after.
It’s all silence now – the profound silence
which makes all other silences loud –
yet in the caesurae of days, I hear you listening.
*
The Jaguar
It shone like an insect in the driveway:
iridescent emerald, out-of-season Christmas beetle.
Metallic flecks in the paint like riverbed tailings,
squeaking doeskin seats. Bottle green, my father called it,
or else forest. A folly he bought without test-driving,
vintage 1980 XJ, a rebellion against his tremor.
The sole bidder, he won the auction without trying
the day after the doctor told him to draw a line
under his driving years. My mother didn’t speak
for weeks. It gleamed on the terracotta drive,
wildcat forever lunging on the hood,
predatory, the chrome snagging in the sun,
ornament of my father’s madness,
miraculous and sleek, until he started to tinker,
painted the leather seats with acrylic
so they peeled and cracked, jacked the gearstick,
hacked a hole into the dash with a Stanley knife,
jury-rigged the driver’s seat so it sat so low
you couldn’t see over the dash. For months
he drove it even though my mother begged,
he drove it as though he was punishing her,
dangerously fast on the back roads, then
opened up the engine on the highway, full
throttle, even though he was going blind in one eye,
even though my mother and I refused to get in,
and for the first time in years my father
was happy – he was happy to be driving,
he was happy my mother and I
were miserable. Finally his modifications
killed it, the car he always wanted and waited
so long to buy, and it sat like a carcass
in the garage, like a headstone, like a coffin –
but it’s no symbol or metaphor. I can’t make anything of it.
Contents List
from ARIA (2008)
I
19 Pocket Mirror
20 Shore Acres
21 Francesca in the Second Circle
22 Ruined Estates
23 The Woodpile
25 Cavendish Road
26 Rock Roses
27 Atonement
28 Tracery
29 January: An Air
31 Late Aspect
32 Circles and Centres
34 Meditation on the Plums I
35 Elégie
II
36 Misery and Pizzicato
37 Letter to Robert Lowell
39 Exhaustion
40 Two Kinds of Stubbornness
41 The Sewing Room
42 Mythos
43 Materials
44 Athenian Jar
45 The Crow
46 Un bel dì, vedremo
48 Not a Life, But Like One
III
49 Remedios the Beauty
51 Stormclouds over Mexico
52 Letter from K
53 Laughter and Forgetting
54 Aria for a Painted Dancer
56 The Idea of Mountain
57 A Good Marriage
58 The Fires
60 Salem Song
61 The Art of Disappearing
63 Notes
from THE HAZARDS (2015)
I
69 Medusa
70 This Landscape Before Me
72 The Orchid House
74 Tropic Rain
75 Botany
76 A Scrap of Lace
78 An Illustrated History of Settlement
80 The House on Stilts
82 Galah’s Skull
83 Desert Pea
84 Approaching Paradise
II
86 The Vulture
88 Essay on the Toucan
89 The Capuchin
91 The Macaw
93 Life Cycle of the Eel
94 Orange-bellied Parrot
96 Green Ant Tarantella
97 Three Sketches of a Favourite Cat
98 Possum
99 A Crab Tide
III
100 Of Germany
101 Late Hammershøi
103 Collioure/Love Poem
104 Beauty Is a Ticket of Admission to All Spectacles
105 Primavera: The Graces
106 The Quattrocento as a Waltz
107 Interbellum
109 Rain, Ravello
110 Embouchure
112 Against Ingres
114 Liebesträume
115 Umbrian Sketch
116 Reclining Nude
118 Goya’s Dog
119 The Flowers on His Bedside Speak of Eternity
120 No End to Images
IV
121 Insurgency
122 Night Sonnet
123 Impressions of April
124 Morningside Spring
125 Mercado
126 Garden Apartment, Taube
127 Via dell’Amore
128 The Atlantic
130 O California
131 The Invention of Ether
133 Last Goodbyes in Havana
134 Ensign
135 The Hazards
137 Notes
from THE JAGUAR (2022)
I
143 My Father as a Giant Koi
144 The Gift
146 The Parachute
147 Brazil
148 Empires of Mind
150 The Gurney
152 Time Remaining
154 Lime Jelly
156 The Kindest Thing
157 Terminal Lucidity
158 Nessun Dorma
160 The Outing
162 The Clearing
164 At Springbrook
II
166 Thalassography
168 Light Years
170 Pikes Peak
172 Substantia Nigra
173 The Midpoint
175 Tijuana
177 Kneeling Figure
179 The Jaguar
181 The Odds
182 The Grip
184 Neurostimulator
186 The Night Shift
188 Maidenhair
190 Vital Signs
III
192 Instructions for a Lover
193 Epithalamium
195 Classical Allegory
196 Affidavit
197 Parable of the Clubhouse
198 Cipriani
200 On Tiepolo’s Cleopatra
201 Ode to Cartier
203 Alaska
205 The Proposal
207 The Worst of It
208 Blue Quandong
210 Serious Moonlight
IV
212 Driving Through Drystone Country
214 Gin & Tonic at the Rock Hotel
215 Lago Nicaraguense
216 Quetzalcoatl
218 Sketches from the Nile
220 Meditation on Risk in New Hampshire
222 Upon Viewing a Still Life by Chardin and Thinking of the Marathon Bombing in Boston
224 Monopoli
225 On Worthing Beach
228 Great North Road
231 Mediterranean Steps
233 In My Father’s Country
233 I The Burr
234 II Your Dying
236 III The Hex
237 IV Long Division
238 V Antipodes
239 VI Anti-Gravity
240 VII A Brief History of the British Raj
241 VIII Brain Surgery
242 IX The Tremor
243 X Indirect Address
244 XI Winter, Worthing