The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

  Inistiogue itself is perfectly lovely,

  like a typical English village, but a bit sullen.

  Our voices echoed in sunny corners

  among the old houses; we admired

  the stonework and gateways, the interplay

  of roofs and angled streets.

  The square, with its ‘village green’, lay empty.

  The little shops had hardly anything.

  The Protestant church was guarded by a woman

  of about forty, a retainer, spastic

  and indistinct, who drove us out.

  An obelisk to the Brownsfoords and a Victorian

  Celto-Gothic drinking fountain, erected

  by a Tighe widow for the villagers,

  ‘erected’ in the centre. An astronomical-looking

  sundial stood sentry on a platform

  on the corner where High Street went up out of the square.

  We drove up, past a long-handled water pump

  placed at the turn, with an eye to the effect,

  then out of the town for a quarter of a mile

  above the valley, and came to the dead gate

  of Woodstock, once home of the Tighes.

  *

  The great ruin presented its flat front

  at us, sunstruck. The children disappeared.

  Eleanor picked her way around a big fallen branch

  and away along the face toward the outbuildings.

  I took the grassy front steps and was gathered up

  in a brick-red stillness. A rook clattered out of the dining room.

  A sapling, hooked thirty feet up

  in a cracked corner, held out a ghost-green

  cirrus of leaves. Cavities

  of collapsed fireplaces connected silently

  about the walls. Deserted spaces, complicated

  by door-openings everywhere.

  There was a path up among bushes and nettles

  over the beaten debris, then a drop, where bricks

  and plaster and rafters had fallen into the kitchens.

  A line of small choked arches… The pantries, possibly.

  Be still, as though pure.

  A brick, and its dust, fell.

  Nightfall

  The trees we drove under in the dusk

  as we threaded back along the river through the woods

  were no mere dark growth, but a flitting-place

  for ragged feeling, old angers and rumours…

  Black and Tan ghosts up there, at home

  on the Woodstock heights: an iron mouth

  scanning the Kilkenny road: the house

  gutted by the townspeople and burned to ruins…

  The little Ford we met, and inched past, full of men

  we had noticed along the river bank during the week,

  disappeared behind us into a fifty-year-old night.

  Even their caps and raincoats…

  Sons, or grandsons, Poachers.

  Mud-tasted salmon

  slithering in a plastic bag around the boot,

  bloodied muscles, disputed since King John.

  The ghosts of daughters of the family

  waited in the uncut grass as we drove

  down to our mock-Austrian lodge and stopped.

  *

  We untied the punt in the half-light, and pushed out

  to take a last hour on the river, until night.

  We drifted, but stayed almost still.

  The current underneath us

  and the tide coming back to the full

  cancelled in a gleaming calm, punctuated

  by the plop of fish.

  Down on the water… at eye level… in the little light

  remaining overhead… the mayfly passed in a loose drift,

  thick and frail, a hatch slow with sex,

  separate morsels trailing their slack filaments,

  olive, pale evening dun, imagoes, unseen eggs

  dropping from the air, subimagoes, the river filled

  with their nymphs ascending and excited trout.

  Be subtle, as though not there.

  We were near the island – no more than a dark mass

  on a sheet of silver – when a man appeared in midriver

  quickly and with scarcely a sound, his paddle touching

  left and right of the prow, with a sack behind him.

  The flat cot’s long body slid past effortless

  as a fish, sinewing from side to side,

  as he passed us and vanished.

  JAMES FENTON In a Notebook

  There was a river overhung with trees

  With wooden houses built along its shallows

  From which the morning sun drew up a haze

  And the gyrations of the early swallows

  Paid no attention to the gentle breeze

  Which spoke discreetly from the weeping willows.

  There was a jetty by the forest clearing

  Where a small boat was tugging at its mooring.

  And night still lingered underneath the eaves.

  In the dark houseboats families were stirring

  And Chinese soup was cooked on charcoal stoves.

  Then one by one there came into the clearing

  Mothers and daughters bowed beneath their sheaves.

  The silent children gathered round me staring

  And the shy soldiers setting out for battle

  Asked for a cigarette and laughed a little.

  From low canoes old men laid out their nets

  While on the bank young boys with lines were fishing.

  The wicker traps were drawn up by their floats.

  The girls stood waist-deep in the river washing

  Or tossed the day’s rice on enamel plates

  And I sat drinking bitter coffee wishing

  The tide would turn to bring me to my senses

  After the pleasant war and the evasive answers.

  There was a river overhung with trees.

  The girls stood waist-deep in the river washing,

  And night still lingered underneath the eaves

  While on the bank young boys with lines were fishing.

  Mothers and daughters bowed beneath their sheaves

  While I sat drinking bitter coffee wishing –

  And the tide turned and brought me to my senses.

  The pleasant war brought the unpleasant answers.

  The villages are burnt, the cities void;

  The morning light has left the river view;

  The distant followers have been dismayed;

  And I’m afraid, reading this passage now,

  That everything I knew has been destroyed

  By those whom I admired but never knew;

  The laughing soldiers fought to their defeat

  And I’m afraid most of my friends are dead.

  JEFFREY WAINWRIGHT 1815

  I The Mill-Girl

  Above her face

  Dead roach stare vertically

  Out of the canal.

  Water fills her ears,

  Her nose her open mouth.

  Surfacing, her bloodless fingers

  Nudge the drying gills.

  The graves have not

  A foot’s width between them.

  Apprentices, jiggers, spinners

  Fill them straight from work,

  Common as smoke.

  Waterloo is all the rage;

  Coal and iron and wool

  Have supplied the English miracle.

  II Another Part of the Field

  The dead on all sides –

  The fallen –

  The deep-chested rosy ploughboys

  Swell out of their uniforms.

  The apple trees,

  That were dressed overall,

  Lie stripped about their heads.

  ‘The French cavalry

  Came up very well my lord.’

  ‘Yes. And they went down

  Very well too.

  Ove
rturned like turtles.

  Our muskets were obliged

  To their white bellies.’

  No flies on Wellington.

  His spruce wit sits straight

  In the saddle, jogging by.

  III The Important Man

  Bothered by his wife

  From a good dinner,

  The lock-keeper goes down

  To his ponderous water’s edge

  To steer in the new corpse.

  A bargee, shouting to be let through,

  Stumps over the bulging lengths

  Of his hatches,

  Cursing the slowness

  Of water.

  The lock-keeper bends and pulls her out

  With his bare hands.

  Her white eyes, rolled upwards,

  Just stare.

  He is an important man now.

  He turns to his charge:

  The water flows uphill.

  IV Death of the Mill-Owner

  Shaking the black earth

  From a root of potatoes,

  The gardener walks

  To the kitchen door.

  The trees rattle

  Their empty branches together.

  Upstairs the old man

  Is surprised.

  His fat body clenches –

  Mortified

  At what is happening.

  1979 CRAIG RAINE A Martian Sends a Postcard Home

  Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings

  and some are treasured for their markings –

  they cause the eyes to melt

  or the body to shriek without pain.

  I have never seen one fly, but

  sometimes they perch on the hand.

  Mist is when the sky is tired of flight

  and rests its soft machine on ground:

  then the world is dim and bookish

  like engravings under tissue paper.

  Rain is when the earth is television.

  It has the property of making colours darker.

  Model T is a room with the lock inside –

  a key is turned to free the world

  for movement, so quick there is a film

  to watch for anything missed.

  But time is tied to the wrist

  or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

  In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,

  that snores when you pick it up.

  If the ghost cries, they carry it

  to their lips and soothe it to sleep

  with sounds. And yet, they wake it up

  deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

  Only the young are allowed to suffer

  openly. Adults go to a punishment room

  with water but nothing to eat.

  They lock the door and suffer the noises

  alone. No one is exempt

  and everyone’s pain has a different smell.

  At night, when all the colours die,

  they hide in pairs

  and read about themselves –

  in colour, with their eyelids shut.

  CHRISTOPHER REID Baldanders

  Pity the poor weightlifter

  alone on his catasta,

  who carries his pregnant belly

  in the hammock of his leotard

  like a melon wedged in a shopping bag…

  A volatile prima donna,

  he flaps his fingernails dry,

  then – squat as an armchair –

  gropes about the floor

  for inspiration, and finds it there.

  His Japanese muscularity

  resolves to domestic parody.

  Glazed, like a mantelpiece frog,

  he strains to become

  the World Champion (somebody, answer it!)

  Human Telephone.

  TED HUGHES February 17th

  A lamb could not get born. Ice wind

  Out of a downpour dishclout sunrise. The mother

  Lay on the mudded slope. Harried, she got up

  And the blackish lump bobbed at her back-end

  Under her tail. After some hard galloping,

  Some manoeuvring, much flapping of the backward

  Lump head of the lamb looking out,

  I caught her with a rope. Laid her, head uphill

  And examined the lamb. A blood-ball swollen

  Tight in its black felt, its mouth gap

  Squashed crooked, tongue stuck out, black-purple,

  Strangled by its mother. I felt inside,

  Past the noose of mother-flesh, into the slippery

  Muscled tunnel, fingering for a hoof,

  Right back to the port-hole of the pelvis.

  But there was no hoof. He had stuck his head out too early

  And his feet could not follow. He should have

  Felt his way, tip-toe, his toes

  Tucked up under his nose

  For a safe landing. So I kneeled wrestling

  With her groans. No hand could squeeze past

  The lamb’s neck into her interior

  To hook a knee. I roped that baby head

  And hauled till she cried out and tried

  To get up and I saw it was useless. I went

  Two miles for the injection and a razor.

  Sliced the lamb’s throat-strings, levered with a knife

  Between the vertebrae and brought the head off

  To stare at its mother, its pipes sitting in the mud

  With all earth for a body. Then pushed

  The neck-stump right back in, and as I pushed

  She pushed. She pushed crying and I pushed gasping.

  And the strength

  Of the birth push and the push of my thumb

  Against that wobbly vertebra were deadlock,

  A to-fro futility. Till I forced

  A hand past and got a knee. Then like

  Pulling myself to the ceiling with one finger