In The Poetry

The Sssnake Hotel

An Indian python will welcome you
to the Ssssnake hotel.
As he finds you your keys he’ll maybe enquire
if you’re feeling well.
And he’ll say that he hopes
you survive the night,
that you sleep without screaming
and don’t die of fright
at the Ssssnake hotel.

There’s an anaconda that likes to wander
the corridors at night,
and a boa that will lower [...]

Remembering Carrigskeewaun

A wintry night, the hearth inhales
And the chimney becomes a windpipe
Fluffy with soot and thistledown,
A voice-box recalling animals:
The leveret come of age, snipe
At an angle, then the porpoises’
Demonstration of meaningless smiles.
Home is a hollow between the waves,
A clump of nettles, feathery winds,
And memory no longer than a day
When the animals come back to me
From [...]

Watching television cowboys was how they learned to gallop; peeoo peeoo (that was the gun) and they smacked their bums (the horse’s back). We had the wireless: And now for our serial: ‘The Eagle of the Ninth.’ It was the end of the Empire. Hundreds of Roman soldiers had headed north and disappeared. I ran [...]

A woman who longs to buy an antique strand of amber beads imagines the woman who once wore them.

Amber

Coveted week after week on the market stall,
coiled, nonchalant, arrayed under the lid
of locked glass, they grew familiar.
She’d finger them, drop them over her head,
try them for size, spoilt for choice –
red-amber, yellow, cut Russian ruby,
or [...]

Rapture

I can feel she has got out of bed.
That means it is seven A.M.
I have been lying with eyes shut,
thinking, or possibly dreaming,
of how she might look if, at breakfast,
I spoke about the hidden place in her
which, to me, is like a soprano’s tremolo,
and right then, over toast [...]

Eighth Period

Last year’s sexkitten, out of work again,
(mean effrontress, chased and bare)
saunters about the grounds with her great Dane,
as sandy blonde as that lassitude of hair -
boy-hunting, leash seductively in hand.
Four o’clock and time to make a stand.

I plot my progress through the room to reach
the window for a glimpse of her, compare
her insinuity with [...]

This is a poem about a dream I had and which I tried to tell as accurately as I could because it seemed to me a classic one, that is to say a dream that anyone might have dreamt.

The Ride

The horse beneath me seemed
to know what course to steer
Through the horror of snow I dreamed,
And [...]

Well, Francis, Where’s the Sun?

They buried him in this complete basilica
But let him roast the Umbrian countryside,
Brother Sun, baked as hard as silica,
With Clare, as clear as conscience, by his side.

But where’s the sun today? Its canticle
Is sung by orphans on a pilgrimage.
The sun’s not in his high conventicle
As Maga bends to wash the feet [...]

Shortly after our return from the States, our first son was born, and then a little later I saw a television programme about four young ex- soldiers and the effects that the Vietnam war had had on them. It was called ‘The Haunted Heroes’ and I remember that what haunted me most about it was [...]

Several poets, in different ways, have attempted to combine jazz and poetry. As a jazz musician myself – I’m a clarinettist – I relish the conversation set up by improvisation, and what one music critic has described as the “sound of surprise”. I feel that I know exactly what the pianist Earl Hines meant when [...]