Two Tongues

By Claudine Toutoungi

Slip-ups, skirmishes, and the sidelong glance characterise Claudine Toutoungi's Two Tongues, a surreal and startling second collection that takes on the dislocations and double takes of modern life and weaves from them poems of wit, grit, and delicious abandon. In a landscape populated by levitating snailfish, sotto voce therapists, melancholic kittiwakes, and collapsing stage sets, boundaries blur, languages merge, vision is partial, and identity nothing but fluid. Misdirected medical reminders, discarded letters, crossed wires, and linguistic mash-ups proliferate as the urban and natural worlds collide in an exuberant exploration of confusion—spatial, verbal, and psychological. A gallery is overrun with mushrooms, a scientist takes home a fox-cub to nurse, a wild swimmer grapples with sharks, and all the while these questing, querulous poems shape-shift from searing to soulful to droll to defiant, as they confess, cajole, sometimes ponder, occasionally pout, and perpetually wrestle with our fractured world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Dec 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781800170018

Claudine Toutoungi

Claudine Toutoungi grew up in Warwickshire and studied English and French at Trinity College, Oxford University. After a Master’s at Goldsmiths, she trained as an actor at LAMDA and worked as a BBC Radio Drama producer and English teacher. As a dramatist, her plays Bit Part and Slipping have been produced by The Stephen Joseph Theatre. She adapted Slipping for BBC Radio 4, after it was featured in a international reading series at New York’s Lark Play Development Centre. Other work for BBC Radio includes Deliverers and Home Front. She lives in Cambridge.

Book preview

TWO

TONGUES

Claudine Toutoungi

CONTENTS

Title Page

Rift

Chronic Waiting Zone

Domestic Fox Physiognomy

By Small Signs We Betray Ourselves

Acuity Index I

Zugzwang

2 am

New Modern Drama

Disclaimer

Not My Best Work

The Age of Invention

Hungarians

Acuity Index II

Stumpery

Plea

Chiaroscuro

Sequoia

Glacial Erratics

The Last Kittiwake

Cusp

Shipwreck

Modern Song

Contortionist

There Are Mushrooms in the Gallery

Several misogynistic remarks before breakfast

Suspension

Why I Am in Love with You

The Marmots Are Suffocating

Hunter Forager

Welsh Retreat

Bygones

Cumberbatch

The therapists of my friends

Translated in Cumbria

Amendment

Lost ü

The man who learned English from poetry

Apology, for Ayano

Bogus You

There should be a name for

An Endurance Athlete Hallucinates His Abduction By Aliens During The Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon

Remember the afternoon we stared at not vital’s camel pelvis in brushed steel?

The architecture of sky

Interior with Still Life

Affirmations

Collaboration

Self-portrait as a Major Motion Picture

Numbers

Lammas Land

Acuity Index III

There is no narrative

Lambs

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Claudine Toutoungi, from Carcanet

Copyright

TWO TONGUES

RIFT

Pretend it’s August. Pretend there’s sunlight on bare arms, dappled

water, louche, marauding ducks.

Pretend the sheep wear serious faces, slouch in groins of gouged-out

rocks and far-off human chatter’s growing slack,

losing all heft until there’s nothing on the breeze but buzzards

mewling. Nothing more incomprehensible than that,

nothing more consoling.

CHRONIC WAITING ZONE

These are the daylight hours but

we absorb beneath the surface

tepid lighting, shrink (Feet

please!) for a husband-wheeling

woman, fixate on trollied

notes and staff who pass

and pass… Does anyone believe

in all this striding? Or the litany of

strange stranger names: Shahido

Hulk? Dawn Carrier? Angela

Chart? Something is up.

Something is very definitely

crawly and dark on the outskirts

of our vision. A girl tells Hazel

on reception they were 9.15 and

now it’s 12.08. Gets back We go

by numbers