The Kingdom

By Jane Draycott

The Kingdom of Jane Draycott's fifth collection is clearly a world we know, altered a little by Draycott's distinctive, prismatic lyricism, whose loving attention to place and our moment is skewed in a way that opens the world afresh. Here are England's towns and countryside, roads and ports and sushi chains, yards and herbs, an airport and a columbarium, and poems that consider art in a time of plague by way of meditation on Titian, Apollinaire and Derek Jarman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Dec 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781800172609

Jane Draycott

Jane Draycott is Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Glasgow, UK. She has written academic books and articles on a range of subjects related to classical reception, ancient history and archaeology.

Book preview

3

The Kingdom

JANE DRAYCOTT

CARCANET POETRY

5

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

The others

The kingdom

The claim

Some children

Our town and the falcon

At this latitude

In their platoons

The circle

The streaming

This loveless library

Marathon

The Gloves

The Yard

Alone that day, I drove, thought

Behind Closed Doors

The little car and the attic

Calendar

In the bones of the disused gasometer

Shine

Emergency kit

Not the peculiar wings

Jack lately

Mika however

Nurse Jameson thirteen years on the juvenile ward

Last day on the futures floor

Visitors’ Book

Wyldernesse

The quiet friend

Magpie

The Skein

Landing Stage

Rain check

Window6

The Long Loft

Close

That’s how they found me

My first-rate friend

Outside the columbarium

Trying to be remembered

Extracts from the Old English Herbarium

Bartholomew: Four Things

Ceaseless tintinnabulation

Neverwinter

My ticket includes access to the rooves

Great-stream-of-the-world

The air still

A Day by the Sea and Other Stories

The Experiment

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

7

for Norman, Holly and Sophie

8

9

The others

Arriving last (having furthest

to travel) I asked the others

what brink or brim this was

– the world under water,

the flood itself flooded

with sun like a rift-valley lake

from which flamingoes

might lift as if from an ark

the whole affair pressed

with a luminous inverted cloud-map

like the other side of a coin

that fell once from pocket

to market-place floor, an unobserved

loss revealed centuries later

not face-down in the mud

but gazing up skywards –

the greatest wonder of all being

how they had called me there,

the others, how I’d moved so much

further away than I thought,

how I might not have surfaced at all.

10

The kingdom

I was hungry

coming up from Kent

resorting hyther after the summer

my tent a riverbed

seeking herbergement

some accommodation among the stone

the men coming on to you

the taxi drivers saying here jump in no

no you don’t need no money.

I was thirsty

languissyng in the doorway

behind the post office

the churchyard water