The Red-funnelled Boat

By Peter Armstrong

The Red-Funnelled Boat charts a course through richly varied territory, from theological obsession to the paranoid fantasies of the armchair footballer, the vernacular hell of mental illness and the author’s lyrical yearning for the elsewheres of the Hebrides and the cinematic Midwest. These precisely imagined, disturbing and fascinating poems establish Armstrong as a powerfully assured new voice, and a phrase-maker of startling originality.

‘Armstrong’s is indeed an excellent collection. Though his allegiances – which seem to me wholly natural – reach back to Auden and Durrell, he is very much his own man, with individuality sometimes pressed as far as undoubted quiddity. Throughout the book the sheer presence of places and denser poems are impressive and demanding at once and the balance between the particular and the characteristic nicely held; though perhaps I am most moved by some of the shorter, more lyrical poems, where the language is made into a real sculpture: this truly is authority at its least questionable. Such poems are rather like sounds forming themselves from invisible thoughts and feelings, and emerging before the reader’s eyes’ Peter Porter

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Jun 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781447218241

Peter Armstrong

Peter Armstrong was born in Blaydon on Tyne in 1957. He trained as a psychiatric nurse and, more recently, has worked as a cognitive therapist. He lives in Northumberland with his wife and two children.

Book preview

PETER ARMSTRONG

The Red-Funnelled Boat

PICADOR

for Aelred Stubbs, CR

Contents

The Red-Funnelled Boat

Figures Beneath the Tree of Healing

Sunderland Nights

An Englishman in Glasgow

In Transit

Quo Vadis?

The Seeds of Doom

A Litany in Honour of St David

From the Virtual Terraces

We Apologize for this Interruption to Our Programmes

The Demon in the Synapse

John Omer

From Our Man in Mania

Radio Pieces

Column Inches

From the Diary

On the Eve of the Triumphal Entry

A Letter to the Editor

Across the Great Depression

Letters from Catatonia

The Psychologist’s Companion

Dirty Halva

From an Imaginary Republic

Retreat, or At the Bar of the Forth Hotel

West

Blues

Road Movies

North of Thunder Bay, or Highway 61 Reconstituted

Disclaimer

from The Labyrinth

Nativity

A Song of Daedalus

Epistemology

Epiphany

A Song of the Anachronists

NDE

Light

Vigils

Sabbath

Sunderland Nights Revisited

Among the Villages

Force Eight, Barra

Area Forecasts

Notes

The Red-Funnelled Boat

Comrades, since it’s evident

that the voices teasing us at nightfall

with their inklings of another island

where Jerusalem might be builded,

are at best of shady origin,

and more likely beg the question

of the demon in the synapse,

let’s go line up at the jetty

for the red-funnelled boat to take us

by black-watered sea-lochs

to its approximate asylum

– aliéné, égalité, fraternité

inscribed on the gateposts

and the inside of the inmates’ foreheads –

where we might hope to be permitted,

under the benevolent dictatorship

of the monthly needle,

to establish our republic

of tweeds and decorum:

one last collective indulgence

in the dreams of the mind politic.

Between the ashlar ward-blocks

and the rusticated boundary,

the light will be democratic

on the backs of garden details

and the chronically second-sighted,

the electrodes reserved only

for those weeping over their Isaiah.

Tell those who come after

how we boarded in one body,

feeling, but not flinching at

the bow’s one long incision

down the firth’s dark mirror:

the red stump of its funnel lifted

as high as it was ploughing under.

Figures Beneath the Tree of Healing

(An allegory)

However long those seeds, those ash-keys or whatever,

have been twisting down the shadows beneath the lowest

branches,

these chiaroscuro veterans have neither brushed them from their

jackets

nor mentioned how they gather like a dandruff on their

shoulders;

how they drop into the beakers of what must be small beer

for all they hint at rum and could be whispering of