Void Studies

By Rachael Boast

Void Studies, Rachel Boast's extraordinary new collection, realizes a project that the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud had proposed, but never written. Études néantes was to consist of poems written as musical études; these would not convey any direct message - but instead summon the abstract spirit of their subject. This 'impossible project' has been completed by Boast in the most astonishing way, and in doing so she has increased the expressive possibilities of poetry itself. These tone poems are indeed works of pure music - but despite their esoteric nature are by no means 'difficult' in the usual sense: instead they conjure the recognizable states, emotions, moods, ambiances and strange atmospheres that lend our lives meaning, and together comprise a kind of lexicon of feeling. Void Studies is an airy and beautiful book - one in which Boast has spun a pure music to both ask and answer the most profound questions poetry can frame.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Nov 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781509811465

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

Rachael Boast

Void Studies

PICADOR

Contents

I

Afterlife

A Second Time

Reverdie

Sunday

Night Vision

Rooms of the World

Anonymous

Snow

Airtime

Night Porter

The Script of Sleep

Quicksilver

Seeing Double

Human Torch

Pleasant Thought for Morning

Moment

Secret Alphabets

Testament

The Call

Return of the Song

Poem of the Dream

Night of Echoes

II

The Glass-hulled Boat

Double Exposure

Album

Clair de lune

Wine Bar

The White Sun

Atrocious fanfare

Dream of the Poem

Fireplace

Heat Wave

Flash of Lightning

Door of the Rose

Eleventh Hour

For one night only

Another hive

Ten string serenade

You tried the door

Reverie

Shattered

The Other Woman

Contretemps

Château Néant

POEMS OF THE LOST POEM

From the French

Autumnal

Special Reserve

Orpheus’s Cloak

Ranchera

‘Travailler toujours’

Peonies

Found Poem

The Abyss

Fairytale

Coda: Lost Poem

Notes & Acknowledgements

I

Afterlife

Late nights like unopened letters

the fold coming unstuck

from this one in the moist air

the message made prescient

by the way in which a wave

lifting from the surface of itself

could be lifted further

enough to reach into it and grasp

from under its erratic stars

the unwritten hour before dawn

A Second Time

Time stops where the vision

left off and the miracles began

the freak fall of snow

storm that opened the inner door

then the front and back until

the walls turned deep red

home was