poetry nottingham
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Submission to 'Poetry Nottingham' should be made to Adrian
Buckner (Editor)
11 Orkney Close, Stenson Fields, Derbyshire DE24 3LW, enclosing SAE for
return.
From Vol 61/3 Winter 2007
Your gable window peers down Finlay Street.
Even now you might, a hatpin away,
lever back the bent lace.
They have sanded the facade. Men deranged
in masks have sourly sealed the bricks
that once steamed with many-crated scents.
You had kept them all out - Fritz, burglars, taxmen -
had retained your chestnut wall, gingham cage,
glass cobaltic swans, Degas: Awaiting the cue.
The bell-push repels. You never would have one.
Or that prissy window-box with gentians.
And your twilit room, thirty years on?
Not a decent plan to knock and ask, "Could you
arrange for me? You knew my gran?
Bright as yellow gloves, in her mauve cardigan."
Philip Burton
NO JOKE
It never was much of a joke -
the large parcel wrapped
in layer after layer after layer
of celebratory paper
revealing in the end,
nothing.
Until someone,
perhaps seeking
a little humorous modification,
a modest denial of nothing,
left under the final
purple tissue,
an ordinary stone.
But was it not from stone
that life here sprang?
And is it not the case
that deep down,
beyond all the frippery
and the flim-flam
there is always the hope
that we are given,
not nothing,
but everything.
Michael Jennings
THE CLOUD PAINTER
Just as Fra Angelico painted only angels,
their minds on higher things,
he chooses to paint clouds, nothing but clouds,
finding them nearest the heavens,
in an age where angels fear to tread.
On clear blue days he stays in bed
imagining huge cloud chambers
and the forms within he'd watch evolve,
then dissolve in truant indolence.
Outdoors he makes watercolours as an aid
to memory, brush hurrying after fitful shapes.
Quick to react to creative accidents
he can reproduce the mother-of-pearl
low sun inlays on highest strata.
He picks painting titles from schoolday poems:
'Cloudy Trophies', 'Unending Columns',
but for freak formations like mammatus
choses from Suckling, Lovelace, Marvell,
appreciation of their mistress' attributes.
In galleries, he examines only
the top third of any picture,
trying to figure out the craft
in mares' tails, mackerel sky or thunderheads.
Then he's back to the studio's chill light
to study all the notes and sketches,
mix, thin, thicken, drip and spread the paints
with brushes, palette knife, sponge and thumbs.
Come morning, he's sure his flock has drifted away,
lost in the angelic empyrean.
John Younger
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