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    Enchantment
    Enchantment
    Enchantment
    Ebook109 pages1 hour

    Enchantment

    By David Morley

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    About this ebook

    Exploring questions such as How does a blacksmith make fresh life from fire? Why does a creature that is half-man and half-hedgehog decide to take on the human race? and How do you ride a horse through time? this ambitious and prize-winning anthology reclaims the magical short story on behalf of the medium of poetry. Revealing a myriad of tales and charms, these poems take their imaginative energies from Romany life and lore, delving into lives lived intensely on the margins of reality and creating a language for poetry that is as entirely fresh as it is natural. Opening with a celebration of the friendship between the author and one of his late friends, this compilation enters and evokes strange new worlds, resurrecting the oral tradition of poetry as a form of magic, marvel, and making.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIndependent Publishers Group
    Release dateFeb 1, 2011
    ISBN9781847779311
    Enchantment
    Author

    David Morley

    David Morley won the Ted Hughes Award for New Poetry in 2016 for The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems and a Cholmondeley Award for his contribution to poetry. His collections include The Gypsy and the Poet, a PBS Recommendation and Morning Star Book of the Year; Enchantment, a Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year; The Invisible Kings, a PBS Recommendation and TLS Book of the year. A dramatic long poem The Death of Wisdom Smith, Prince of Gypsies has been published by The Melos Press. He is Professor at Warwick University and Monash University, Melbourne.

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      Book preview

      Enchantment - David Morley

      DAVID MORLEY

      Enchantment

      To my mother, Rose

      with rocks, and stones, and trees.

                         William Wordsworth

      Acknowledgements

      Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications in which these poems first appeared: ‘The Lucy Poem’ in Feeling the Pressure: Poetry and Science of Climate Change (edited by Paul Munden, British Council, 2007); ‘Alaskan Salmon’, ‘Mayflies’ in Horizon Review; ‘Abandoned Christmas Tree Plantation’, ‘Colin Clown’, ‘Demelza Do-It-All’, ‘Dragonflies’, ‘Port Meadow, Oxford, 1983’, ‘The Water Measurer’, ‘Zhivakos the Horseman’ and the opening forty lines of ‘The Library Beneath the Harp’ in The London Review of Books; a complete version of ‘The Library Beneath the Harp’ in Long Poem Magazine; ‘Hedgehurst’ in PN Review; ‘Nightingales’ in The Poetry Paper (The Poetry Trust); ‘Camargues’, ‘The Circling Game’, ‘Skeleton Bride’ and ‘Spinning’ in Poetry Review; ‘Moss Eccles Tarn, Far Sawrey, 1983’ in The North; ‘Papusza’ in Polarity; ‘Proserpina’ in The Rialto; ‘Chorus’ and ‘Taken Away’ in The Wolf. Six poems were published as a pamphlet, The Rose of the Moon, which was one of the prizewinners of the 2009 Templar Poetry Pamphlet Competition. Some poems were issued as part of a limited edition by Nine Arches Press as The Night of the Day (2009). Some poems (and fragments within poems) were part of a ‘Slow Art Trail’ commissioned by Chrysalis Arts sited within Strid Wood in Bolton Abbey, some of which were released as poetry films on iTunes and www.youtube.com by the University of Warwick.

      Many thanks to a magician of ink, word and sound, Peter Blegvad, for responding to the poems and creating two images and a cover; to Chrysalis Arts for a commission; and to Phil Brown, Peter Carpenter, Jane Commane, Peter Davidson, A.L. Kennedy, China Miéville, Philip Neilsen, Fiona Sampson, Daniel Soar and George Ttoouli for editorial help; to Dan Allum and the Romany Theatre Company; and to members of Peter Jolly’s Travelling Circus. I am grateful to the University of Warwick for a period of research leave during which this book was completed. My deepest thanks, as ever, go to my wife Siobhan Keenan for her support and love.

      Enchantment is the final book of a three-part cycle of poems, the first two parts of which were Scientific Papers (Carcanet Press, 2002) and The Invisible Kings (Carcanet Press, 2007).

      Any Romany or Parlari (circus language) is given in English translation at the foot of the page. The alphabet used in Romany language is phonetic.

      Contents

      Title Page

      Dedication

      Epigraph

      Acknowledgements

      Fresh Water

      The Lucy Poem

      Chorus

      Proserpina

      Abandoned Christmas Tree Plantation

      Hedgehurst

      Taken Away

      Romany Sarah

      The Circling Game

      Camargues

      The Library Beneath the Harp

      Nightingales

      A Lit Circle

      Spinning

      Skeleton Bride

      Notes

      About the Author

      Also by David Morley

      Copyright

      Fresh Water

      in memory of Nicholas Ferrar Hughes, 1962–2009

      Port Meadow, Oxford, 1983

      Walking to Woodstock Road from Wytham Wood

      where leaf-worlds welled from all the wood’s wands,

      we talked salmon, midges, floodmeadows, the energy system

      cindering softly under us, slow-cooking the marshlands.

      The gate ought to be here. The map said so.

      That map back at my flat… Look, there’s a spot

      somewhere this way where sheep shove through.

      See those fieldfares and redwings? They landed last night.

      Then a step within a fence nobody bothered with for years

      or knew, except the sheep. So Nick stepped up

      and through, and there on the other side, two horses

      with thrilled-up ears, barged him skilfully to a stop.

      I said that gate was around here – pointing a mile or two.

      Worth the way – Nick’s arms across both horses – to know these two.

      Dragonflies

      This water’s steep and deep. There are signs in artery red.

      Their letters pump with advice. But it’s June and we have trod

      ourselves senseless sampling some imaginary species of coleoptera…

      So, there are our cautions slung down like life-vests by the river

      and with stone-drop certainty we launch out from a hanging ledge

      to collide with a chill so stinging it was like flinging your body

      into a bank of nettles. Then head-butting the surface to see

      at eyelash-level the whiphands of Common Backswimmers surge

      and sprint, each footing a tiny dazzle to prism.

                                                                            Then these

      sparking ornaments hovering then islanding on our shoulders

      each arching its thorax into a question: what is the blue

      that midnights all blue? How can crimson redden before you?

      The old map mutters that Here Be Dragons, and it lies. 

      Here be Darters, Skimmers, drawn flame. Here, are Dragonflies.

      The Water Measurer

      We could have watched him until our watches rusted on our wrists

      or the tarn froze for the year’s midnight. The Water Measurer

      struck his pose and recalibrated his estimates as if he had misplaced

      his notebook, or perhaps his mind, with all that staring at water.

      Why does he walk on it with such doubt and mismeasure

      when he has the leisure of hydrophobia (those water-fearing hairs

      on the undersides of his legs)? Maybe that is his secret,

      that he doesn’t know his step will never or not quite penetrate

      the depth below, glowing with prey

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