Wild Court

      from Windows   In my head there are several windows, that I do know, but perhaps it is always the same one, open variously on the parading universe… Samuel Beckett       VII   i remember the expanses between winter the cyclic shifts the lying amongst sand dunes & flax fields i remember…

        Garden God   Easing her flip-flops and ectopic body down the lamp-post, this grasshopper of a girl fringed with electricity from São Paulo and the South Seas hangs with me at three a.m…. touches at herself publicly – and grants her charm in piecemeal at the postern earlier in the night in…

        Villa D’Este   More water, extravagant upshootings and downpourings of it, unbottled from the veins of a Borgia. Such force and power — though to what end other than to cool the minds of those overheating here in the future? Let it rush and hiss and chuckle and spray its optimistic excess…

        Small griefs,   like looking up from the page and realising that the train, for quite some time, has been moving through the kind of scene that feathers your body with desire. Border of buddleia and rosebay, foreground of inscrutable wheat. And how many hedged fields, billowing up and over the hillside,…

          Mindfulness   Imagine truly being in the present, Our every thought upon a plane like one Mapped out by Euclid. Here, the garden sun Is eight minutes old and there is a pleasant Sense of valediction to the moment, As the moment leaves us like a houseguest: Bags stowed, she is…

        The pool below the oak   Remember this: a driftway brimming cow parsley, bramble, its green beaded fruits; the field into which we clamber over wire, balance each other; that pool below the oak, black and bitter with tannins, where the cattle come to lap; the lack of breeze; the oak, its…

image © Marlon James       The Water in the Pond Considers Narcissus   He looks at me and sees right through me, as if I am nothing, as if he could live without me. I bathed him each day, moistly kissing the rise of his flesh, slapping his limbs then falling away, down…

  Oliver writes: These are part of a ‘calendar’ of 12 poems set in Pitshanger Park, near where I live in Ealing. The Park is a place of leisure, but also a setting where small and large histories play out and which is not protected from the mayhem around.           Evening Clouds…

        Re: Application FAO Dr Bob Pintle Senior Lecturer in Professional Creativity, Peterborough University and also dedicated to Dr Andrew Taylor, who did not inspire the poem   Dear Robert, The Board regrets to inform several colleagues, including you, that your recent sabbatical applications will not go forward, after review. The panel felt…

        Chance: a dream   Yes. It was you. From its small source my heart rushed like a flooded beck. But would you lead a writing course? Or choose a tweed with purple check? The others sat, to write and learn. It was too late to learn. Instead I wandered out of your…

    it’s hard at first to comprehend the sleeping man so horizontal all through the day so sleepy despite the hours spent seemingly at rest but like a meadow glimpsed from speeding train of course there are permanent convulsions beneath the topsoil of your matted hair love what horses are at work on you…

Below are two poems from Lisa Kelly’s debut collecton A Map Towards Fluency, recently published by Carcanet. Colchester Native Oysters shucked. Poor man’s beef discardeddown guts and out again to sea. Shells salvaged.Here, concentrated behind wire mesh, hard stuffingfor this upholstered seat placed for musingon the river Colne. Quantities shipped oncircuitous routes to sate Elizabethan…

          Allotment Evening   You left the fire burning. The smoke stirred like a person moving among the brassicas and twine, and for a moment we thought it was you. The ground was steeped in yellow. Daffodils hung their soft heads, surrounded by light, and I lifted the tender net on the…

          Alfreton Town 0, Brackley Town 1 (89’)   for Lloyd Pettiford and Adam Tocock   The pitch is white where the sun’s not been seen on its hill-cresting flight. The tea queue is long and shrouded in breath, as men in fat coats grunt at each other, though the game’s going…

        Glossa   (in response to M. Eminescu)   Remember how you starfished your way across the pool of infinity bay how you and paradise made eye contact beyond the winding slide’s colorful digestive tract how the clouds were milky pterodactyls in the sky how you met the ocean’s eye how you spun…