Skies / Alison Brackenbury.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brackenbury, Alison, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English poetry--21st century.

English poetry.

Genre:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

84 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Manchester : Carcanet, 2016.

Summary:

Skies is Alison Brackenbury's ninth Carcanet collection. In these poems, Brackenbury sustains delicate proximities between war and love, joy and sadness, summer and winter. Starting out as the first trees 'chatter into leaf, the poems cross through July's 'dripping amber' to January's 'false thaw'. The seasonal shift is reflected in the poet's larder, its variegating hues and tastes: honeycomb, parsnips, apples, broad beans, sprouts, jams and spices summon an air of harvest. But it is also the seasons of life that concern Brackenbury here: the poet's irrecoverable past, her youth 'which I can never visit, like a star', is at the same time the tiling that never stops revisiting: in an unexpected letter from an old lover, in a half-remembered playground song. The poems in Skies are attuned to this musicality, to time's echoes and refrains, the old errors that still 'flower and flower'. Finally, it is the poet's quiet conviction to savour life, to take seriously its succulent variety, that defines this collection: the poems attest to the special privileges of age: wisdom, self-sufficiency, a deepening patience with the world; the ability to be, as the poet says of an apple, 'self-sweet'. The communal warmth of the kitchen finds its double in the exquisite loneliness of rising early, of hearing the barking of town foxes at dawn, or in the contemplation of a garden in autumn, its rows of hips swelled by rain, a rose 'whose name I think means happiness'. Book jacket.

Contents:

Honeycomb 9

And 10

Vesta Tilley 11

Told 13

My Grandmother Said 14

January 15

8 a.m. 16

So 17

Down Unwin's track 18

Prologue 19

Half-fledged 20

At the Bus Stop 21

Peelings 22

Painted Bird, Found in a Roman Grave 23

Three Poems from Steep 24

Playground 26

The Mount 27

Memoir 28

For a Friend, Now Running a Radio Station 29

In the Spare Room 31

What? 32

Arranged 33

Pensioned 34

In May 35

Crops 36

The Methodists 37

Amy 38

Writing Rinaldo 39

Shanties 40

Strata 41

Aftermath 44

Monument 45

5:30 a.m. 46

Falling Down, Falling Down 47

1642

Breaking the Fast 50

The 8:10 to Edinburgh 51

Friday Afternoon 52

Species 53

Under the Stairs 54

February 26th 55

Poppy Seeds 56

The Elms 57

Let 58

The Bramley 59

The Horse's Mouth 60

Break from Poppy Collection, Liverpool Street 61

Eight 62

Criticism 63

Wilton Park (Where Philip Sidney Wrote Arcadia) 64

The North 65

3:12 a.m. 66

2 a.m. 66

Still Dark 66

First 66

Home 67

'Will the Comet Survive its Encounter with the Sun?' 68

Ex-Tutor (1937-2014) 69

Skies 70

False Thaw 72

November Began 73

After the Alarm, Christmas Day 74

Christmas on the Radio 75

January 7th 75

For the New Year 77

Ice Age Art: An Exhibition 78

After Catullus 79

Next 80

The Irish Busker 81

For Anna Adams 82

After Reading the Collected Poems of Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-75) 83

Dickens: A Daydream 84

After Meeting a Friend of Sylvia Plath 85.

Notes:

Poems.

ISBN:

9781784101800

178410180X

OCLC:

945629166