Aliquot

By John Clegg

The chemist with a sample analyses an aliquot of that sample, a part of a part of a larger whole. The title of John Clegg's new collection speaks to the poems' sense of being parts of larger wholes, themselves parts of a larger whole...The scientific knowledge and the sometimes old-fashioned diction that abound in these poems are both part of worlds of reference in which sequencing (narrative, historical, scientific) is crucial and revelatory, as in the series of poems 'A Gene Sequence' which take us from Codon to Coda via a number of -ines (Glycine, Asparagine, Tyrosine etc). The complex exercise grows out of George Herbert ('What though my body run to dust?') and administrative duties at a genomics conference in which the language spoken, the terms used, find their way into the organising imagination and prosody of a formidable, witty verse craftsman, with serious contemporary concerns.Aliquot, John Clegg's second Carcanet book, is storm-spooked and jumpy: haunted by jaguars and lynxes, its uneasy silences broken by the retort of punt guns, lightning strikes, and floodwater breaching defences. Among these stretches of foreboding are moments of calm, especially arising out of the joy and rowdy peace of parenthood. These poems are themselves aliquots, of a realised, restive and unique individual world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Nov 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781800172364

John Clegg

John Clegg was born in Chester in 1986 and grew up in Cambridge. In 2013 he won an Eric Gregory Award. He works as a bookseller in London.

Book preview

Cover: Aliquot by John Clegg

A GENE SEQUENCE LATER RETITLED

Aliquot

John Clegg

CARCANET POETRY

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

The Lecture Notes

Aliquot

Propane Calendar

‘Cervantes ransomed…’

The Sun Box

Lull

The Punt Gun

Ancient Juniper

The Nordeney Dykemaster

‘Faience pendant anthropoid bust amulet…’

‘The superyacht rides off the shore…’

The Ozymandias Protocol

‘Radical Essex’

An Attendant

Convergence

The High Lama Explains How Items Are Procured for Shangri-La

Dormer Windows

Farmer’s Riviera

For the Reintroduction of the Lynx in England

Hurricane Joaquin

Jump, scorpion,

The Chopping Board

Language as Sonora

The Bass Boat

Lucan – the Waterline

Mannerisms

Quebec City

Lightning Strikes School Tree

The Book of the Dead

The Cuspis of the Cone

Mr Knox’s Hammock

Chili Bean Soup

Nothing Affirmeth

Fen

Touch me, touch me not

The Same from the Air

The Regift

Sally Purcell cashes up at the King’s Arms

At Houghall

A Gene Sequence

On the Red-Eye

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

for Annick

When the clock strikes thirteen, doubt is not only cast on the last stroke but also on all that have come before. When the clock strikes fourteen, we throw away the clock.

Thorndike, 1968

THE LECTURE NOTES

On their way home through the springy fen

one of the pilgrims said: Perhaps the second

old man was the real wizard.

So the Clerk

unhoisted his black sack and fiddled through

the lecture notes, well knowing that he’d drifted off by then.

He had the knack of silent reading

but the other pilgrims hung so close

to every flicker of his lower lip

for some word which might unmake their bad bargain.

No hope came.

Their packmules sank into the verges gradually.

The Clerk fell like a dolloped stone

through strata of transcendence

till he came to rest on that damp territory yclept

– he checked his notes – yclept, that can’t be right, The Hall of Swindle.

ALIQUOT

I have watched for a moment, through the basement

window of the Catering School, attention

paid by the Master as her student

scoops a goodsize helping of green peas

from an institutional aluminium

trough,