frontiers and fault-lines

By graham bowers

This new collection from Graham Bowers is characteristically eclectic in its range of subjects and technique, at the same time as it speaks with a clearly personal voice deriving from the poet's commitment to the craft and careful attention to musicality, the moments of humour, and the clear desire to welcome the reader into the text, to provide an open interface.

One of the concerns running through the book is the navigational challenges we are presented with by the dynamics and uncertainties generated by the frontiers and fault-lines which cross-cut our lives, at every level from the personal and private to the international.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Release date: Nov 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9789178516032

graham bowers

Graham Bowers was born in Shropshire, England, and lives in southern Sweden.

Book preview

October

Ducks and drakes

When we were children on our summer holidays

we'd go down to the River Tees

to scramble on the rocks, scoop for minnows

and bullheads in home-made nets,

and skim stones, trying to get them over

from our side – Durham – into Yorkshire.

The rear-view-mirroring strangeness of being

so much older now: eyeing, though front to back,

the disparate pieces tiled into the mosaic,

and the crumbling cracks between which separate and fix.

Some stones simply broke the surface and dropped without grace,

swallowed at once by the gurgle, drag and flow.

Some were well-enough chosen, well-enough thrown,

to skim and skip, looking like joy

heading for freedom, to skate and lift before being lost

to view. And now I'm on the other side

of all the years – of all they've held

and all they haven't

held,

and I wonder, did I get myself across.

The quiet life

I was staring at this piece of paper,

and the piece of paper was staring back,

going, "Here I am, white and empty,

so go on, show me the colour of your black."

But I looked at it in a spirit of refusal;

if nothing needed saying, why then write?

The whiteness kept on trying to taunt me,

and I kept trying to keep out of the fight.

You might think in the end the paper won

when it forced these graphite scratchings into sight.

But all those quiet gaps between the shapes

and round the edges, where it's still: the black

is often just encroachment on the white.

We similarly think life's what gets done,

and view the non-doing lacunae as fallow space.

But our senses are beguiled by fuss and facts

and footprints are a flat and narrow trace:

what someone is is in between the acts.

Bellwether, touchstone

Bellwether, touchstone:

I hereby summon you.

Yardstick, wishbone:

help me to come true.

Pole star, milestone:

let me find a way.

Dice cup, knucklebones:

what has fate to say?

Arrow-head, tally-stone,

score of blood and tithe,

dowsing rod, backbone,

gravity and tide.

Linchpin, flint-stone:

hold me with a flame,

Rune stone, carved bone:

bring me an old name.

Ridgepole, keystone:

grip the brick and beam.

Plumb line, whetstone:

keep me straight and keen.

Ratchet wheel and millstone

dole the mete of time.

Shadow thrown and crossbones

guard the final line.

Cycle

Autumn,

season of renewal, growth,

root-feed, reconnection,

in being a move away, or rather in,

from distraction, from easy warmth

and pleasing lap and dapple, towards

the harder-edged rule of the intrinsic.

Wind-snap, leaf-drop, colour-slip attune us

to the truer shape of trunk and limb.

Winter,

season of renewal, growth,

focus, reconnection

with the unadorned mechanisms of time,

a move down and in to the world

where words reassume their weight,

an anchoring,