Lighter

By starlight on a clear night
insects sing, a music apart
on margins we thrill to. Leaving
presents we can't leave. Kind.

Made sounds always answered -
Bamboos bending in wind -
heartbeat to a friend's pulse
in aching times, breath

under moon, and the journey
itself is home. Wideopen.
With thanks for this new naming -
clear singing light.

Richard Caddel

Luif is an aigre, douce delyt and greif:
Greif is in luif ane lustie langing lyf:
Lyf may not last quhair luif pretends mischief:
Mischief of luif is evirlasting stryf:
Stryf reuling luif than rancor raidgeis ryf:
Ryf raidge is not, gif luifers luif abound:
Abounding luif is scharp as scharpest knyf:
Knyf may not kill moir scharplie with ane wound:
Wound deip with wo and schortlie haill and sound,
Sound syn to swell in syching sour and sweit,
Sweit luif heirwith dois suffer monie stound,
Stound both with cair and confort lairge repleit:
Repleit with luif hes bein both gods and men:
Men luif obeyis, gods will not luif misken.

John Stewart of Baldynneis

At Briggflatts Meeting House

Boasts time mocks cumber Rome. Wren
set up his own monument.
Others watch fells dwindle, think
the sun's fires sink.

Stones indeed sift to sand, oak
blends with saint's bones.
Yet for a little longer here
stone and oak shelter

silence while we ask nothing
but silence. Look how clouds dance
under the wind's wing, and leaves
delight in transience.

No Choice

I think about you
in as many ways as rain comes.

(I am growing, as I get older,
to hate metaphors - their exactness
and their inadequacy).

Sometimes these thoughts are
a moistness, hardly falling, than which
nothing is more gentle:
sometimes, a rattling shower, a
bustling Spring-cleaning of the mind:
sometimes a drowning downpour.

I am growing, as I get older,
to hate metaphor,
to love gentleness,
to fear downpours.

Norman MacCaig

Poetic Darwinism?

Andrew Hughes has recently posted the first part of a conversation with Aaron Tieger, available here.

Giovanni di Paolo

Levels ledges
a filter of ditches
falling the terraces

edg'd with rock
then the plain
pattern'd with pennants

diagonals of walls
waterways vine-poles
the ghastly Golgotha

against it all

Herbert Read

A Location

Below those tall trees
Below those redwoods pines & firs
In which birds gather
Where Cattle Egrets creak & roost
Where eerie shapes at twilight
Where ghostlike spread wings
Underneath that silence & that clatter
At one end of history of art
This part of the blue band goes dark
Where sits the house our house my house
Lit where upstairs a human girl
Downstairs a human male who writes

Elsewhere to this location
Her mother drives, his wife
A history of friends
Breathing & driving
Blood throughout his being
A history of family
Feet on the floor is cold but there
Is cold but here
Is cold but here
But hear, but hear
Re-lo-cate, the word
He's kitten to whose coat

Make new but keep the same
Bottle over here
Else it's all 'Dear reader,
Here's a sentence you can recognize,
You wrote it yourself
Just until you died'
O for a long drink of you dear reader
The neighborhood of poetry's parched
The humdrumming ears
The creaking trees or in their leaves
Put down their roots
Stand tall, & have no expectations

David Bromige

Ken Edwards has posted some thoughts on the campaign to save Salt Publishing, in which he makes a, to my mind, very sensible observation about the place of poetry presses in the UK:

"I hope against hope that Salt Publishing will survive - but I can't help feeling that what's really needed, as well as, if not instead of, one huge small press, is a plethora of small small presses each with its unique vision. They exist of course - but there are not enough of us."

To the Parliament

There's reason good that you good laws should make:
Men's manners ne'er were viler, for your sake.

Ben Jonson

An Interlude . Of Rare Beauty

The seal in the depraved wave
glides in the green of it.
All his true statement
made in his mere swimming.

Thus     we reclaim
all senseless motion from its waves
of beauty. Naming
no more than our affection
for naming.

Robert Duncan

Aaron Tieger's first full-length book, Secret Donut, is now available from Pressed Wafer.
Click here for ordering instructions.

from TIME OFF

Summer bug
window bee
screen

I'm a high
wire bird
in dark

trees
times
skies

      between
here
there

snowflowers
cover roadside
fields

sun downs
lights
halo

smoketrees
lighter dark
trick cross

on a tight turn
certain bright
yellow fate

speed zone down

into town

"The Enchanted Bath-Sponge"

Bucky Fuller says, Fella,
if you don't think it's poetry
call it 'ventilated prose'

Please, if they don't see trees,
please let them see
these 'enchanted bath-sponges'
- John Cotman's manic advice

his space over the water
fills with the noise of birds catching
flies, but the watercolour paper is
completely silent

lines as
lines, spaces
as
spaces

pleasures as
what they
are

I get tired of readers who know everything -
that's all they know!

Jonathan Williams

Shearsman have some exciting looking books scheduled for the latter part of this year, including:

Salt are currently asking that as many people as possible buy a book, in order to help them weather the recession.

Amongst other good things, they've recently put out a new edition of Michael O'Brien's selected poems, Sills, which is well worth picking up if you don't have it already.

On the noyse of Thunder

By Nature w'are inform'd, that when a Cloud
Vapours endow'd with heat and cold do shroud
The active hot, the sluggish cold assaile
So long, till both dissolve their watrie Jaile,
And break their watrie chaines, when through the aire,
The glittring lightning spreads its fluent haire;
So from these factious strugglings, and those throwes
This clouds ore-laden womb is torne with, growes
That dismall clashing, and the noyse we heare,
Which so amazes the astonisht Eare:
But these are but conjectures, it may bring
Its rise and growth from a far higher spring;
For some malignant Exhalations,
Drawne from a Mine of Sulphur, by the Suns
Reflex may be inflam'd, or else that Fire
The upper Region darts, may Flame inspire:
Nay more, some sullen Vapour, which like Hay,
Being long bound up in liquid fetters, may
Give fire unto it selfe, or there may be
Some other dark and gloomie cause, which we
Cannot, while dust hangs in our eyes descrie,
Which may become its first Incendiarie:
God has lockt up the Meteors in a mist,
Which skreenes them from our sight, could we untwist
The second causes, and divide that Line
That Nature ties, yet could we not untwine
The threds they're worn out of, or unwind
The Mint, where their first Principles were coin'd.
Lord, when thou speak'st in thunder from thy Throne,
The Eccho of thy Voyce shall be a grone:
When thou unclasp'st the windowes of the Skies,
Supreme Divinitie, unsluce mine eyes,
That when the spangled Aire its lightning weares,
Those Flames may be put out with contrite teares.

Thomas Philipott

Received a copy of Maggie O'Sullivan's long-awaited WATERFALLS. Issued in a limited edition of only 75 copies, it's a companion volume to her earlier collection red shifts, (also published by etruscan books), and completes a larger poetic project called her/story: eye.

Also well worth tracking down is a CD of the whole of her/story: eye, released by Stem Recordings in 2004.