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    Other Houses
    Other Houses
    Other Houses
    Ebook64 pages27 minutes

    Other Houses

    By Kate Cayley

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    About this ebook

    From acclaimed fiction writer and playwright Kate Cayley—poems that illuminate the deep strangeness of the familiar.

    In Other Houses, Kate Cayley’s second collection of poetry, objects are alive with the presence of the people who have handled them. Myths and legends are interwoven with daily life. Visionaries, mystics, charlatans, artists, and the dead speak to us like chatty neighbours. An imaginary library catalogues missing people. Reading becomes a way of remembering the dead. Home is an elsewhere we are “called to,” a mystery that impels children to wander off, and adults to grow in unexpected directions.

    Cayley couples a rich, meaty lyricism with the intimacy of direct address, creating a poetry that is at once embodied and spectral. She directs us to wonder, “Did light and dark have a taste and texture, like food?” At the same time, her command of voice and narrative is masterful—each of these poems unfolds with the sweep and precision of a compressed novel.

    …Walking alone, you come upon a single glove, or shoe, pressed into the light snow.

    Or find a handprint on the wrong side of a windowpane.

    Or find a collection of marbles, still grouped carefully together in the backyard.

    Messages.(from “The Library of the Missing”)

    Praise for Other Houses:

    "Beware of Kate Cayley. With an agility stolen from some other world she flicks this one open and invites us to watch our certainties scuttling away. Predatory and unsettling, these exquisitely crafted poems suggest that we are at our most human when yearning to reach beyond the visible.” —Martha Baillie

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrick Books
    Release dateMay 15, 2017
    ISBN9781771314558
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      Book preview

      Other Houses - Kate Cayley

      Author

      Writers’ Bedrooms

      The Pied Piper Enchants the Rats

      Mutton, crumbs, rotted heart of the house

      Call you home

      Grey smear of lard, stink-end of cheese

      Call you home

      The stuffing you rip from pillows, nest of sheets and goose down

      Call you home

      I, peacock-bright, needle-sharp, red-heeled, bead-eyed

      Call you home

      The churning whorls of the water,

      Drops of water on your whiskers, rising water

      Call you home.

      Here is the water: swimming with your pretty pink paws

      You find the place you sought.

      The stream is for you, I am for you, my pipe is for you, I lay

      Myself in service to you, there is no love like mine,

      Here is the splashing and the surge, the lightness

      Of the swimmer. You are so tired from the earth,

      You sink under. My music carried with you—

      Humming in your furry ears, everything I promise

      Waiting for you on the riverbed.

      A Partial List of People Who Have Claimed to Be Christ

      Ann Lee, 1736–1784

      I will not sit in your presence, persecutors. Bare-headed

      before you I stand examined, men of English church, men of

      holy cloth, but I was a seamstress, snipping lives in my fingers.

      I could rip a seam like the ocean, which I aim to cross, leading

      my women and men, who sweat alike and walk together, for only

      by the sameness of men and women shall either be redeemed.

      When I shudder, you will say the fit is on me, and mock me,

      but I say you are filth, to see filth. I shake with the Word,

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