Maze

By Hugh Thomas

Intentional mistranslations that set a meandering path through the maze of language.

Drawing on the patterns of words, speech, and identity we encounter in the wider world—subway ads in Mexico City, a Dutch-Japanese phrase book, multi-lingual airplane safety instructions, one of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities—the poems in Hugh Thomas's Maze playfully translate the maze of languages and language into moments of amazement.

"A clever, complex debut, Maze will draw you into its labyrinthine, snakelike halls."—Winnipeg Free Press

• Language: English
• Publisher: Invisible Publishing
• Release date: Jun 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781988784335

Hugh Thomas

 Hugh Thomas is the author of The Spanish Civil War, Conquest, and many other books. A former Chairman of the Centre for Policy Studies (U.K.), he was made Lord Thomas of Swinnerton in 1981. He lives in London.

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Invisible Publishing

Halifax & Picton

Text copyright © Hugh Thomas, 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any method, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or, in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Maze / Hugh Thomas

Names: Thomas, Hugh, 1973- author.

Description: Poems.

Identifiers:

Canadiana (print) 20190085290 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190085304

ISBN 9781988784274 (softcover) | ISBN 9781988784335 (HTML)

Classification: LCC PS8639.H5738 M39 20019 | DDC C811/.6—dc23

Edited by Leigh Nash

Cover design by Megan Fildes

Invisible Publishing | Halifax & Picton

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

Lack of Communication 

The solution is, as usual, dynamite. 

You hand me the match, shooting cartoon sparks.

I light the fuse. Bang!

An explosion of confetti,

the sparkling remains of words we thought we knew,

marries us until we hit the ground

which, strangely, we never do;

suspension of disbelief supports us

further and further into Saturday morning.

Pantoum

Once again, poem becomes pantoum.

Everything repeats, even the moment of indecision.

Following its own footsteps, the picayune detail

reflected in a hundred mirrors

becomes part of the grand design

that you didn’t even know about until

someone came to the door selling encyclopedias,

and told you about progress,

about the course of the twentieth century.

You don’t believe him, never did

for an instant, but you think of him sometimes,

when sweeping the hard-to-reach corner of the stairwell,

all that stuff about planets,

and walking on the moon,

how long it takes to fall.

The Guitarist

It’s useless to call her.

Laura monotonous,

Laura like water,

Laura like the wind

over Nevada.

Laura for distant causes.

Arena of the South calling her,

paid in white camellias.

Oh, guitarist!

Heart badly buried

by five shovels.

Bastille Day

In Paris, crossing this bridge with you

and many other people over hundreds of years.

Fireworks appear in the night