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Umbrella
Hemisphere of bat, wing
that blots out heaven’s rinse cycle,
dark yurt I raise against the general
dropping of things, fish,
toads and jet refuse, translator
of possible tektite into mere dropple;
skullcap for the distended bruise of my aura,
black windscreen which meets
the gnat streams of the vertical sky freeway,
wee planetarium emptied of stars
above a thinning audience of anxious greys –
to close you is like collapsing night.
You’re shaken like a dog
shakes its one-thought head
and shrouded in that flimsy sheathe I carry with me from
the cohort of the drenched,
gladius of drab Brittunculi.
Artificial palm leaf relief
from the foggy falling dew –
I have lost a legion of your long-limbed ancestors, as though
I leant out on my parapet
and bayed, ‘Release the umbrellas!’
I love the way you’re named
for a shade you’ve never seen
as though you were ashamed of rain,
our would-be skin. Seed of dryness,
sit inside my man-bag’s hairless scrotum
and dream of Lady Parasol.
Crossing the Forth in Fog
First a deeper clucking throat of rails
reveals the unfelt air that feathers under-
neath. There’s still a glimpse of jetties
but not what they run into:
stale grit droplets make the void we cross
taste perplexing. Girders flick
like gulls’ concentration; islands, tankers merge.
Only in the effort to make this momentary
weather of confusion gel, remember
the iron of names, is our impulse to persist.
The train returns to small certainties
of back-green, brickwork, Fife.
Derailments may come, but in these fictions,
these best confabulations, we know what we will see.
The Blessing of the Fleet
It’s a clear morning: clouds keep
to their fathomed horizons
and starlings stroll in the street
where the beacon used to be;
I watch from the High Light’s top
As a dozen boats, pennants flapping,
press themselves against the quay
in a punkish thrash of diesels,
almost drowning out that rolling voice
which keeps on giving thanks,
Amid some crumpled drumrolls,
for their surviving not so much the storms
as a continual ebb of quotas,
the xylophone band accompanying
their straggly hymns as if on fish scales.
Hedge birds, panicked, soar
over the dismantling harbour:
I catch wing muscles’ flex
as they fly below my window
and the fairground rides get ready.
Doughnuts in fresh oil overlay
the intestinal stench of river;
stubby-nosed, the boats head out,
white-boxed amidships, small-craned aft,
shrimp- and crab-snatchers, inshore grabbers.
They seahorse-parade up and down,
turn in neat slews back into the Gut,
one captain roaring dogged
oggy-oggy-oggies to a muted oy
from the canny observing few.
Much later sunlight
glances off the cabin windows
of small boats anchored opposite,
each heliograph washing my bookcase,
slicing spine after spine.
Dead Gull Kabitika
Floating in the tide like rope
spliced to tow
splayed and boneless yellow
even the quills
softened in the swell
Ageing Kabitika
Look in the mirror, ask it who or what
the fucking fuck it clearly thinks is you?
Because this terrified chihuahua’s not
that man who lived the half-life you once knew.
Housework Kabitika
Whauriver it is she's bendin ower
and dargin thru a glowrin brood,
her bahookie aye gees me a grin
that pits the shine back oan ma wood.
dargin: working
bahookie: behind
Dawn Kabitika
A Cretan dawn's priapic in the hills:
an hour at least of gunshots, cockcrows, dogs,
and, through all this libido's loud to-do,
the women wake and work, or worship under bells.
Bog Cotton Man
Meanwhile in Eire a decade ago
it happened tae Liam as coontless afore
while me and meh faither werr wurkin wir gobs
his da and him werr oot on thi bogs.
noo thi Ferrys cut turf a few miles awa
a lang wey tae waulk if you’ve tooken a faa
and while we werr liftin thi pints tae wir mous
he’d sodden his jaiket and also his trews.
In fact he’d gone heeliegoleerie in glaur
till his een werr lyk pearls fae thi bay’s glitty floor,
sae Billy noo sends him back hame fur a waash
and meanwhile we drink as tho unner thi cosh.
And aa thi bog cotton that flochts owre thi hills
sticks til him lyk harlin richt up tae thi gills
till mair lyk a fledgelin or houlet or ghaist
he drifts doon thi glen that thi giant laid waste.
He’s fleggin thi bairnies, thi sheep think he’s God
and meanwhile in Mickey’s we’re tucked up and snod.
Eh lift up a Guinness that’s black tae thi brim
then intae thi bar strides uts opposite twin,
white fae his broo tae the black o his heels –
anither wan back fae Elysia’s field.
heeliegoleerie: in a head-over-heels manner
glaur: especially sticky mud
fae: from
harlin: pebbledashing
flegging thi bairnies: scaring the little children
snod: comfortable, neat
Shields Bicyclist
The old man cycling in a neat blue jacket,
check shirt and tie, flat cap and clips –
his bike a black-framed ancient, basket-
hanging, chrome bell trilling –
brings a decade in his rust-free slipstream,
his air force posture, bowling club pin:
the hot street swithers in a tarmac dream,
slang-reviving, drought-dispelling;
till the lard breeze rises from the ship-shorn harbour,
charver’s rations, gun-fodder grub,
and he shakes in the wake from a four-wheel Barbour,
discount logo, gastro-pub.
The thread his wet-tyred wheel has sewn
between the streets will dry up soon.
Faint Light
It summons you somehow
after the sleepless verdigris
of night, the slow blossom
of rust through every cabin;
the collapse of every box
of cufflinks, jewels, pens
that didn't hit the ceiling,
their filling up with snow.
You see them with your midnight eye
in all the slurred, half-open spaces
though you really see nothing
in this liquid dark, this dirt suspension
like every liverish spot
your eyeball ever owed
to the liquor still gummed
in its sloppy swirl of crystal.
You press to the holding glass,
imagine your fellow passengers
who found their way like you
back among their ex-belongings
through the disjointing fathoms
flesh a long-gone cloudy tatter
bone beached at a depth
beyond imagining of shore.
The faint light passes all our faces
framed in glinting bubbles
and fixes our stricken mother
on her side, still giving suck.
My Grandfather's Eyelids
When the flash went
in the fish restaurant
my daughter closed her eyes
and in that instant I saw
the outside of my grandad's lids
in photo after photo
as though he had a knack,
could estimate the shutter speed
and catch it exactly.
Decades in which he changed
from a sleeveless cyclist
wire-haired in the glen
to the half-shut knife
at a wedding, mouth grizzled,
fingers folding his jacket's hem
instead of a cigarette –
and in them all
his unknown eyes are closed.
I know it was involuntary as
the stories left unsaid
by the curtained morphine room:
what glen that was
and when his lungs first knew
became like everything unphotographed
but it still feels like
those shut lids hold in time,
perfectly focussed, undeveloped.
The Birch Tree
By the metro there’s
a silver birch that’s leaning
on the municipal blue
wrought iron railing
so that a spear blade finial
and the ball cap on a post
have gradually pierced
the bark and entered its flesh.
It’s like a stabbing from
some old epic, slowed so much
the scar’s already formed
before the strike’s withdrawn.
It’s like the tree decided
to accept its wound,
to trail the club and point
beneath it as it goes
on to the following tale,
the winds and sleet
that curtain it from home.
It’s like the wound was home.
Sheathed in that unlifting lid
the ball becomes an eye:
what it can’t see is
why the tree persists.
The spear’s tongue tastes
the sap in which it is
still being written, ring
by ring, into the past.
On Dipping into Above the River With a Hangover
I love the way all American poets sometimes seem to be
or actually are nutters, except for Whitman Denise
Levertov and Frank O'Hara who are just utters -
even Gary Snyder is just too damn calm,
poised between otter and postal worker,
if you can call that poised. And then there is
Rapid Titles Phenomenon, the way when watching Star Trek
you half-discover that apparently sane characters are played by actors
with a lunatic nomenclature: Gail Parent, Gates McFadyen -
similarly with Silliman and Armantrout: you hardly dare read
what turns out to be perfectly sensible ravings
indeed the only possible ravings, lucid and unreadable.
I love the way they're always discovering movements
no-one else can see, the way that folk believe
chickens are addressing them through cellophane,
the way they probably have another word for 'cellophane',
the way they call mobiles 'cellphones'. Why can't Simon
Armitage be called 'Silliman Armantrout'? Shall I call him on
his cellphone and ask or is he too much the Minneola Prepstar?
Perhaps he is called Silliman but only in those alcoholic universities
where they preserve Glyn Maxwell for future generations,
only on those bridges besieged by poets falling
from girders like the snows, saying 'yes dear no dear'
into cellophane masks and tugging on the reins of their
black bear spectacles and tying kellie-bows as they die like walruses
opened up by Russian pistolry in the hostelries of the Bronx
marching determinedly into the mid-Western paths
of lumbering Californian taxis in the backs of which
like butterflies expiring into lingerie they are
self-inducing heart attacks to get their nutty flatline kicks.
White Armour
shelled now of their little
noble occupants
they stand around in cases
in case of curiosity’s
unfired missile
their empty resolve
effete and combative at once
in their pointy armadillo shoes,
their sabatons, the faulds and tassets of portcullis girdles,
their shoulder plates or spaulders arced like society eyebrows
disdaining all blades
stylish in stainless in steel
in
emphatically that,
within, all that
ingenuity of Missiglia and Gratz engineered to contain,
their interiors
crabby with doubt
is there anywhere an aperture a besagew forgot
a loosened lames
a slit or grille or occularia
where anything
thin
could search out, pin and skewer?
to be in
is to be housed in hedged in hopelessness
coddled cast in aketon
encroached
they make us enemy
with their eyeless gaze
whereas
their long shanks and bubble breasts
show exactly
how we shaped up once
to the pike the mace the battleaxe the bolt
exactly how
we shape up still
to being bare
Mr Nearies
Mr Nearies wiznae sad
altho he very nearly had
a toap wan hundred hit;
Mr Nearies aften slipped,
in fact his middle name wiz ‘Pipped’,
but sad? well, jist a bit.
Mr Nearies sawed his sangs
and hammered hame his hooks:
thi puntirs almost sang alang
and nearly liked his looks.
He wurked thi haas, he pit his baas
upoan thi squiggly line,
and won applause fae crosseyed craws
fur faain in thi Tyne.
Mr Nearies wiznae young
and anely hud a paper lung
but didnae waant yir pity;
Mr Nearies’ talent hid
aneath thi nearest giant squid
tae whom he sang this ditty:
‘Meh inky pal, embrace me please
within yir clammy arms,
and sink me in yir silent seas
ayont this life’s alarms.’
His fiss wiz brave richt til his grave
or nearly, fur, before
they slid ablow, he asked a crow,
‘Did you jist sey “Encore!”?’
craw: crow
faain: falling
ayont: beyond
ablow: below
Berries
I hated the weeks when we ran to the end
of our street and vanished into berry dreels
all day, picking eating packing till
I felt ill, waiting for the punnets to fill
and be weighed, berries half-digested by
the heat, a squashy bruising mass,
the viscera of bushes turning into coppers,
the others amassing bushels of shillings
though I never made enough for that boredom,
hands frittering in hedges like the beaks of chaffies,
sun reddening all napes, never ate enough
but still felt sickened, never got
the stickiness in my fingers’ crotches out,
that stain of fruit’s anatomist.
Saint Francis Tells the Birds the Truth
‘You mean we’re mildly ridiculous?’
The ducks were most upset.
‘you’ve never mentioned this before.’
I could see the swans thought me petty
for pretending not to worship them,
but the wood-pigeons were distraught --
‘We might not be up there with the nightingales,
but “Your song drives me fucking mental,”
isn’t criticism, it’s abuse.’
The penguins were quite pleased:
‘Slapstick and bondage, baby!
Passes those long winter nights.’
The hoopoes and red cardinals disdained
my entire category of ‘psycho-avians’:
‘It just looks like we’ve got screwdrivers
rammed through the back of our heads
and they’re not really drenched
in Catholic gore.’ The budgies refused
to forgive my infant assassinations,
my felling of the cages of, as luck would have it,
Emperors Bobby I through IV.
The giant owls were brilliant, drawing me
deeper into their conversation and the forest
until I was completely enveloped
in their snow and soot-flecked bosoms,
their slowly nodding, head-high beaks.
W.N. Herbert was born in Dundee in 1961, and educated there and at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he published his Ph.D. thesis on the Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid (To Circumjack MacDiarmid, OUP, 1992). He has published seven volumes of poetry and four pamphlets, and he is widely anthologised.
His last five collections, all with the northern publisher Bloodaxe, have won numerous accolades. Forked Tongue (1994) was selected for the New Generation promotion, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot and Saltire prizes. Cabaret McGonagall (1996) won a Northern Arts Award, and was shortlisted for the Forward and McVities prizes; and The Laurelude (1998), written whilst he was the Wordsworth Fellow at Grasmere, was a PBS Recommendation. All three books won Scottish Arts Council book awards. The Big Bumper Book of Troy (2002) was longlisted for Scottish Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Saltire Prize. His most recent Bloodaxe collection, Bad Shaman Blues (2006), was a PBS Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Saltire Award and the T.S.Eliot Prize.
He taught in the Department of Creative Writing at Lancaster University (1996-2002), and is now Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing in the School of English at the University of Newcastle.