Pilgrim's Flower

By Rachael Boast

Rachael Boast’s first collection, Sidereal, was one of the most highly regarded debuts of recent years, winning the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize. Her second, Pilgrim's Flower, richly confirms and dramatically extends that talent – but where Sidereal’s gaze was often firmly fixed on the heavens, Boast’s focus here has shifted earthward. The book sings life’s intoxicants – love, nature, literature, friendship, and other forms and methods of transcendence – and sees Boast’s pitch-perfect lyrical metaphysic challenge itself at every turn. Pilgrim's Flower gives an almost Rilkean attention to the spaces between things – the slippage between what we think we know, and what is actually there – and in doing so brings the language of rite, observance and rune to the details of our daily lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Oct 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781447242185

Rachael Boast

Rachael Boast is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Hotel Raphael. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Blackbox Manifold, Chicago Review, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review, TLS and The Scores. She is co-editor of The Echoing Gallery: Bristol Poets and Art in the City (Redcliffe Press, 2013) and The Caught Habits of Language: An Entertainment for W.S. Graham for Him Having Reached One Hundred (Donut Press, 2018). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Advisor to the Estate of W.S. Graham and a disability advocate. She lives in Suffolk.

Book preview

nom.

I

The Place of Five Secrets

Resembling Cocteau, the two statues in the pillars

of the fireplace have been busy inside the scenery,

guarding the room where Belle takes her meals

bemused by every fine detail, every gilded hand-held

object offered her, their faces turning as she takes

a moment to look around, lost in the five secrets

of Bête who is not himself, even on a good day.

Suffering the blind world and its lack of faith,

for her he makes sure all the doors will open

by themselves, all the rooms light up

to lead her through the dark that cannot lift

until her love’s second sight revives him as he is,

and not as others see him; ne faut pas regarder

dans mes yeux turned around by key, mirror,

horse, glove, and the rose at the centre of it all.

Re-reading Akhmatova

And so I, stepping somnambulistically,

entered the life and the life frightened me

—Northern Elegies

I’m not sleepwalking, although the border

between sleep and waking

isn’t all that clear . . . I’ve heard the echo

of you pacing up and down:

you left the house, only to stamp out

the cold in the bread queue; you left

the black earth, its buried hoard,

but now I’ve drawn up your necklace of words,

a blue rosary that tells me the border

between the here and hereafter

isn’t all that clear . . . For I’ve long owed

these sparks to your trail, unable

to keep up when, behind my ribs,

the living word remains inarticulate.

Caritas

(St Andrews Cathedral)

These stones speak a level language

murmured word by word,

a speech pocked and porous with loss,

and the slow hungers of weathering.

And there, in the broken choir, children

are all raised voice, loving the play of outline

and absence where the dissembled god

has shared his shape and homed us.

At the end of the nave, the east front stands

both altered and unchanged,

its arch like a glottal stop.

And what comes across, half-said

into all that space, is that it’s enough

to love the air we move through.

Other Roads

IV. Dun Holm

Across the causeway of Lindisfarne

to the high ground,

St Cuthbert’s coffin-bearers

came to a miraculous halt.

Only prayer could get them

on the road again, to a place looped

by time’s immaculate river.

Above it, the cathedral is a bird of prey

guarding her nest of relics,

eyes in the front and the back

of her head; a teacher,

or prophetess,