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    Plan détaillé Texte intégral BUY ONE, GET ONE FREE THE SEASONS OF SYBARIS THE ATHEIST’S COMEDY THE DREAM HOTEL WAR IS OVER HAYDN FOOTBALL Auteurs

    (Re)Mapping the centres Membership and State

    Ce livre est recensé par

    Précédent Suivant
    Table des matières

    Poetry

    Peter Porter et George Szirtes

    p. 93-101

    Texte intégral BUY ONE, GET ONE FREE THE SEASONS OF SYBARIS THE ATHEIST’S COMEDY THE DREAM HOTEL WAR IS OVER HAYDN FOOTBALL Auteurs

    Texte intégral

    1On the evening of Friday 18th September, the conference decamped to an Irish venue in the centre of Tours to hear two of Britain’s best-known poets, George Szirtes et Peter Porter, read some of their work.

    2Peter Porter was bom in Australia in 1929, but has lived in England since 1951. Along with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, he had already established himself in the 1960s, with his highly formal verse and his dry, epigrammatic wit, as one of the leading figures on the British poetry scene. Now in his 70s, Porter is still a major presence. His complete works were recently published, in two volumes, by Oxford University Press.

    3George Szirtes left his native Hungary following the unsuccessful insurrection of 1956. He has published a considerable number of works, in both Hungarian and English. His most recent collection is A Portrait of My Father in an English Landscape (Oxford Poets, 1998).

    4The poems presented on the following pages are being published here for the first time. The conference organisers and all the participants would like to offer their thanks to Peter and George for their very enjoyable reading and for their generosity in suggesting that these poems be published as part of the conference proceedings.

    BUY ONE, GET ONE FREE

    I stood with words about my ankles
    and looked to altar and north light
    in Sankt Jacobus, Rubens’ church.

    Those reject words were challenging
    the rains of a robot faith,
    The Counter Reformation High Baroque.

    I brought my Art Historian’s half-knowledge
    to the scene: not my sort of church, I said,
    but guessed there was a message here for me.

    The Catholic faith of Flanders –
    a kind of woolly stuffing of the ears
    of poddy-calves beneath the knife.

    The Brewers in the Temple,
    the martyrs’ entrails skeined upon
    a windlass – calm and civic scenes.

    It took photography or something like it
    to break my wise composure –
    a picture made in 1855,

    Coloured daguerreotype or painting?
    I couldn’t tell – inside the tomb
    two decomposing shapes in open coffins:

    Painter and wife quite odourless,
    no longer hand in hand among
    the garden urns and furniture.

    The lid lifts on the Rubens’ style
    showing black stained bolts of rottenness,
    a God-lit blaze burnt out.

    Get a Life, the paintings say,
    and let death’s careful fingers wrap
    your body for eternity.

    THE SEASONS OF SYBARIS

    Diverted rivers, flock-paper fields,
    Glistening shoe-shops like grapes peeled,
    Migrating cranes whose mast-high nesting
    Fatigues us when we should be resting,
    Milk-fed lambs brought into town
    By Airships drifting on the Downs –
    A magazine-like decadence
    That goes on making fiscal sense.

    Here horticulture is entailed
    For dancers’pension-rights, and veiled,
    The folklore of the South imputes
    Bad taste to laryngitic flutes.
    Calyx and pistil trap the moon’s
    Intrusion on sawdust Saloons
    While changes to
    jus prima noctis
    Mean having sex in helicopters.

    Our screaming ghosts are sailing dhows
    Through soft Symplegades of clouds
    And Epirate effusions bring us
    Prolixities of ballad-singers.
    How did the world get in this state?
    Why do beginnings start so late –
    The ghosts have gone back to the trees,
    Our enemies are on the seas.

    The calendar has lost its wits,
    High time that God and Man called quits.
    Our fat-stock world is on the cusp
    And numbers have caught up with us.
    Unfairness is the richest spice
    Ever to flavour Paradise –
    That history’s print is on the sands
    Misunderstanding understands.

    THE ATHEIST’S COMEDY

    Variety’s the life of spice words say
    Stumbling from the oracle of dreams
    Once misled by sound’s confused decay.
    This rocky hinterland has only streams
    Of consciousness, The Boyg of Underuse
    Leads fire-lit dancers on his gamepath haunt:
    We gasp, ‘Le radeau, c’est, de la Méduse’,
    Our education’s boast become a taunt.

    And that’s the lolloping of Heaven’s hounds;
    Their hot breath stinks of childhood’s aniseed;
    They hunt used condoms in your Prep School grounds.
    Ridiculousness is forced to intercede
    On every tragic option; fear alone
    Maintains its rugose countenance; we die
    In earnest but pallidity of bone
    Is all the colour of the empty sky.

    But don’t complain as poets do too much
    That while we’re doomed we don’t rate very high
    Among the villains and that none we touch
    Is cured of anything. For how could I
    (I dare say you as well) be self enough
    To earn as Quisling or as Tamburlaine
    A singularity: there go the rough
    We knew at school, as natural as rain.

    The play ends happily – that is, it ends.
    It’s left to tragedy to champion hope
    And promissory time to make amends.
    Sheet lightning (punning on the darkened slope)
    Lights up a joking face, abandoned now
    By its fair-weather friend, ironic doubt,
    But still for closure keeping to its vow
    To see the Inward outed by the Out.

    THE DREAM HOTEL

    As if the sea were entering through the window,
    it was that close. Fleck of burning ice thrown
    from the rocks it struck, each single fleck blown
    sharp-toothed into the house. Meanwhile, below
    there were guests waiting to check in, a clerk
    to register them, luggage piling at doors.
    This was the form of the dream. Polished floors
    were swimming in water, a green-grey dark.
    From the top of the cliff you could see rain
    gathering on the horizon, not yet ready
    to fall but on its way. In one room two lips
    were joined together, hands resting on hips,
    the pair of them increasingly unsteady
    as the flood rolled in like an enormous stain.

    You wake to a light on the ceiling. How long
    have you been awake? You lie next to him
    the one you always lie with. Some vague, dim
    recollection. Years of memory. The song
    of the sirens. The glow of the clock-radio
    is green and gentle. Classical music, faint,
    barely audible, oozes from it. Something quaint
    about all this, your life passing on its slow
    unforgiving way. The shape in the bed stirs
    in its sleep, rolls over. You hear the sea again.
    It is still far off, a slowly approaching train
    down a long tunnel that leads to the hotel
    and the two lovers, just as his lips touch hers.

    WAR IS OVER

    One of those wet Junes with the skylight tapping
    its fingernails on the thin drum of the house.

    Yesterday, in the underground, a dark brown mouse
    ran zigzag between live rails, vaguely unwrapping
    the present of its small life, and when the train came,
    the mouse disappeared beneath it. Along from us
    a woman was writing a letter with ferocious
    concentration, on her lips constantly moving to frame
    the words as the letters appeared. Beside her
    an Asian girl was reading Jane Austen, a boy
    dived for an empty seat. The war was over,
    said someone’s paper. There was little joy
    on the faces, it was much as usual. Permanent night
    down here. Upstairs the emergence into daylight.

    HAYDN

    1.

    No wind at all. The clothes-pegs on the line
    are hardly shivering. An even grey
    has closed the world off. It is Saturday
    in the quiet towns of the east. A fine
    distinction between two adjacent tones
    of sea and air carries no distant cries
    or the light dust of ground or broken bones.
    There are no fresh news in the mouths of flies.

    No flies at all. No wasps. No bees. Nothing come
    nor gone. The day stands like an untouched drum:
    Haydn on Radio Three. Letters in the tray.
    It is the spaces in between that are dissembling.
    The neighbours are asleep or gone away,
    the clothes-pegs on the line still trembling.

    2.

    One syllable short. How does anything get in
    to this stoppered corner of England where
    the dust is the dust of the fields, layer on layer,
    and the grass is a tight comfortable skin
    in the churchyard by a mined monastery?
    The lost incomprehensible syllable is stuck
    in the throat: the bones’ dying industry
    winds down like an old tenement block.

    Until it blows. Until the fuse catches the thumb
    That triggers it in the distant capital or the screen
    by the wall and the fields are suddenly dumb.
    Until a faint red seeps beneath the green
    among ground elder, earthworms, and the lost
    coins of the realm bent and scaled with rust.

    FOOTBALL

    5for Francis Gilbert

    1.

    It was what he wanted to write about
    all these years, but they wouldn’t let him. Who?
    The bastards of history. The usual crew
    of Class, Taste, Precedent, Nostalgia, Doubt

    and other capital personifications. But
    here was how things were. Firstly the father
    melting into the terrace. The damp leather
    flying in semi-darkness like lead shot.

    But not quite in this order. Who can remember
    the first premature taste of adulthood,
    the call of downbeat heraldry in a shirt,

    the enormity of a crowd like the biggest number
    you can think of? Had you misunderstood
    your own body, so small and full of hurt?

    2.

    It hardly matters now. But it was there:
    the stadium with its single focus and you,
    fragmented, anxious, someone they let through
    with gestures of diffused parental care

    because you too were to be initiated
    into what they were, which made you proud,
    yet careful. You were and were not the crowd
    its passions high, ironic, understated,

    brutal, like an earthquake just beginning
    with a drumming of feet and the small roar
    rising as teams appeared on the far side.

    They dapple the pitch. The notion of winning
    and losing hardens into focus. One keeps score
    of losses. There’s the small matter of pride.

    3.

    It’s premonition. The whole thing’s premonition
    and there’s the poetry. The lilac team
    is (phonetic) D
    όzha. Do you remem
    ber? Time is fracture and compression,

    like this line. They’re only names you recall
    with a certain vividness. But later
    when the ball came your way, like rainwater
    in a winter pantomime, like any ball

    a challenge, a threat, something personal
    and you practised juggling with it or ran
    zig zags between markers, you were chosen.

    The hours you spent by a suburban brick wall
    in northwest London! You were already a man
    without a future, as if all time had frozen.

    4.

    It is what dance is, only with a brief
    dumb purpose: courage, grace, power, speed and guile
    at the service of pride glimpsed through a turnstile,
    accompanied by the sharp, interim grief of any loss. Even a dull game will serve
    to keep things ticking over and the great ones
    survive in fragments beyond their seasons
    in a leap, or run, or tackle, or body-swerve.

    But I’m dumb, like everyone else. It is the way
    it must be, that you must understand:
    it’s what we are, who can’t speak or dare to think

    that it or we matter. It’s just another day
    in the league. I hold my father’s hand
    both of us pitched forward, over a common brink.

    Auteurs

    • Peter Porter
    • George Szirtes
    Précédent Suivant
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    Porter, P., & Szirtes, G. (2000). Poetry. In T. Harris (éd.), (Re)Mapping the centres Membership and State (1‑). Presses universitaires François-Rabelais. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pufr.4333
    Porter, Peter, et George Szirtes. « Poetry ». In (Re)Mapping the Centres Membership and State, édité par Trevor Harris. Tours: Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2000. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pufr.4333.
    Porter, Peter, et George Szirtes. « Poetry ». (Re)Mapping the Centres Membership and State, édité par Trevor Harris, Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2000, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pufr.4333.

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    Harris, T. (éd.). (2000). (Re)Mapping the centres Membership and State (1‑). Presses universitaires François-Rabelais. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pufr.4314
    Harris, Trevor, éd. (Re)Mapping the Centres Membership and State. Tours: Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2000. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pufr.4314.
    Harris, Trevor, éditeur. (Re)Mapping the Centres Membership and State. Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2000, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pufr.4314.
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