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    Playing with Fire
    Playing with Fire
    Playing with Fire
    Ebook117 pages58 minutes

    Playing with Fire

    By Grevel Lindop

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    About this ebook

    A dazzling blend of intellectualism and eroticism, this poetry collection employs sumptuous, sensory language to explore a wide range of subjects—including a blood-drinking Tibetan deity, lemons in Robert Graves' garden, and an East London strip club. By boldly traversing the boundary between the erotic and the sexual, these love poems are both passionate and strikingly original.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCarcanet Press Ltd.
    Release dateApr 28, 2006
    ISBN9781847778659
    Playing with Fire
    Author

    Grevel Lindop

    Grevel Lindop was born in Liverpool, educated at Oxford and now lives in Manchester, where he is a freelance writer. His books include A Literary Guide to the Lake District; The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey; Travels on the Dance Floor; and Charles Williams: The Third Inkling, as well as editions of Chatterton, De Quincey and Robert Graves’s The White Goddess. Luna Park is his seventh volume of poems.

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      Book preview

      Playing with Fire - Grevel Lindop

      Copyright

      I

      Alle sind Ausgeburten der Flamme. Der Schmetterling: in mir wird die Intensität des kurzen Lebens und der Gebrechlichkeit zu Farbe…

      We are all creatures of flame. The butterfly: the intensity of a short life and fragility become colour…

      Hugo von Hoffmansthal

      Lighting the First Fire of Autumn

      Here they are, the quartered logs in their wicker

      basket woven of what I take to be

      birch and split willow plaited together,

      the copse offering itself for the burning

      indoors, twig against twig, tree within tree:

      rough-cut block capitals of an alphabet

      older than writing: poplar, beech, pine,

      chainsawed joints of the wood bled and dried out

      for a year, lodged in the season’s calendar,

      their rituals subordinate, now, to mine

      as I build the pyre of oak twigs and newsprint

      in the middle of the year’s first cold morning.

      The TV news shows tropical forests on fire,

      drought in east England, and the Midlands flooded,

      a crude mosaic of weather that looks like a warning.

      St Columcille said he feared death and hell –

      but worse, the sound of an axe in a sacred grove.

      Now every grove is sacred, and still we burn

      wood at times, for the fire also is sacred

      and a house without it like a heart without love

      when the world heads into darkness. The heat’s core

      will show you again lost faces and glittering forests,

      mountain passes, caverns, an archetypal world

      recited in the twinkling of a dark pupil.

      The epic buried inside us never rests:

      fire is the dark secret of the forest.

      The green crowns drink sunlight until their dumb

      hearts are glutted with fire. Then, decaying or burning,

      give up whatever they have. A match flares

      and the paper ignites. Watch, and the poems will come.

      Sicilienne

      Fauré pours chords across chords and under

      my daughter’s hands, plunged wrist-deep into the music,

      the barred and mottled light of sunshot water

      is shadowed into shape, the unexpected

      tinge of an arpeggio rippled and glinting

      as the tide harps on a rock, and hesitates

      then covers it. Repetition is decisive: I’m upstairs

      and the music fills the space between the floors

      with its lovely tangles, like a chaotic flowering

      vine, a mesh of times whose fruit in the heart

      is recollected movement. The returning wave

      splashing light on the roof of a sea-cave

      at Fydlyn plied that tentative pattern as she waded

      cautious on pebbles deep-sunk in the cold

      summer rockpools, the cave-mouth arching an O

      of astonishing turquoise where a seal gazed

      back at us, doglike paddling among ribboned

      rocks and she climbed out near to it, placing those same

      wet hands decisively on the sharp and unwelcoming

      stone. Yards overhead seagulls scream and thrift

      stars pink on precarious grass, and she is finding

      her way back through heavier, less congenial

      chords. The weather is changing, August is now

      the far mouth to a tunnel of dark seasons

      and the stairwell is full of echoes which are the rampaging

      of discords on discords back to something simple,

      a recurrent time-pattern, something heard but unspoken.

      The last chord tolls into distance, endstopped by the

      thump of the piano-stool and bang of the door,

      decisive step on the stairs, firm evidence

      that it’s time to go on to something else, something more.

      Five Lemons

      Here are five lemons from the poet’s garden,

      the colour of white gold and icy sunshine,

      flooded with green around the pointed nipples.

      My younger daughter cuts one into quarters,

      careful of fingers, bites the white-furred pith out,

      devours the quartz-white segments with her eyes shut,

      sighing and swaying in the sharp enjoyment.

      Here are four lemons from the poet’s garden:

      one perched on three, a perfect tetrahedron.

      The poet’s widow showed me where to pick them,

      kindly and shrewd, helping me find the best ones,

      holding the branch down while I snapped the stalks off,

      the cold breeze in our faces from the mountain.

      We’ll halve this one and squeeze it over couscous.

      Here are three lemons from the poet’s garden

      still in the bowl, turned in a neat triangle,

      yellower now. My elder daughter chooses,

      after long thought, one for her still-life painting,

      the twisted leaves like green airplane-propellers

      with a Cezanne pear and a Braque violin,

      fractured into art-deco Cubist slices.

      Here are two lemons from the poet’s garden

      below his tall house on the terraced hillside,

      red earth black-pitted with his fallen olives

      between the gnarled trunks trailing silver foliage,

      beside the boulders of the dusty torrent

      rainless above that sea of sparkling turquoise.

      The juice is perfect for a tuna salad.

      Here is a lemon from the poet’s garden,

      the last of them. Long is the poet gone,

      silent his grave on the hilltop under the cypress,

      long the shadows drawn by moon and sun

      out from the low walls and high gate of the graveyard.

      I press

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