Finding a Leg to Stand On: New & Selected Poems

By Connie Bensley

Connie Bensley's poems are sharply satirical, often poking fun at social pretence and suburban pretension. They present a comedy of manners in which mismatched characters are bounced between love, death and disappointment. Hers is a seemingly small world but one which spans a whole universe of everyday life. Finding a Leg to Stand On is a retrospective selection of her delightfully pointed poems drawn from six collections published over three decades, plus new work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780370729

Book preview

CONNIE BENSLEY

FINDING A LEG TO STAND ON

New & Selected Poems

Connie Bensley’s poems are sharply satirical, often poking fun at social pretence and suburban pretension. They present a comedy of manners in which mismatched characters are bounced between love, death and disappointment. Hers is a seemingly small world but one which spans a whole universe of everyday life. Finding a Leg to Stand On is a retrospective selection of her delightfully pointed poems drawn from six collections published over three decades, plus new work.

COVER PAINTING

Lovers, Queen’s Gate SW7

by Katherine Cuthbert

OIL ON CANVAS, 80 x 100cm

Connie Bensley

FINDING A LEG TO STAND ON

New & Selected Poems

for Harriet, Catherine, Tom, Iona, Violet

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This edition includes poems selected from these books by Connie Bensley: Central Reservations: New & Selected Poems (1990), Choosing To Be a Swan (1994), The Back and the Front of It (2000) and Private Pleasures (2007), all published by Bloodaxe Books. Central Reservations included poems from two earlier collections originally published by Peterloo Poets, Progress Report (1981) and Moving In (1984).

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications in which some of the new poems in the Finding a Leg to Stand On (2012) section of the book first appeared: Acumen, The North, Orbis, The Poetry Paper, Poetry Review, The Reader, The Rialto, Smiths Knoll and The Spectator.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

fromPROGRESS REPORT (1981)

Annual Dinner

April

Cardiac Department

Comfort

Commuter

Crossing London to Suffolk

Desires

Dig

Dropping Out

The Emigré

Evidence

Father Christmas

February

God’s Christmas Jokes

Hiatus

Life Study

March

May

1915

Parent and Child

Permissive Society

Provence

Recluse

The Stable Relationship

A Suitable Case for Treatment

Synopsis

Technique

Time Slip

Travelling Light

Trespass

Underground Car Park

An Interesting Case

Vauxhall

Vicious Circle

formMOVING IN (1984)

Deadlines

‘It’s the Position That Counts’

Masters’ Common Room, 9 a.m.

Gardening

Charity

A Summer Afternoon

Moving In

Coming Out

Loss

The Night Light on the Mantelpiece

Dorothy

Bloomsbury Snapshot

A Luminary to Tea

Choices

Self Selection

Accountability

Last Words

Tidying Up

Survivors

Postcards

Perspectives

Short Story

Mutability

Chance Meeting

The Innocent

Cookery

Is It Anything to Worry About, Doctor?

fromCENTRAL RESERVATIONS (1990)

Clay Pipes

Bed

Central Reservations

August in the Offices

The Claimant

One’s Correspondence

Compassion

Confession

Heaven on Earth

Diversions

Trouble Ahead

Choice

Entrails

Moscow Spring

Faidagery

Jessie’s Bakery

Frank’s Journal

Wants

The Badminton Game

Albert Memorial

Terribly Weak, Please Come

Tête-à-Tête

Bargaining

Chacun

Leaving Jenkins

History

If You Come

In the Summerhouse

The Last Great Fog

Waking in the Garden

Lost Belongings

Modus Vivendi

Visiting Time

The Slipping Glimpse

Hour by Hour

Your Laugh

Dear Mother

‘It’s Up to You’

Mutual Assured Destruction

The Letter

Love Song

Two Pheasants

The Sack

Waiting

Degree Ceremony

A Friendship

fromCHOOSING TO BE A SWAN (1994)

Choosing To Be a Swan

Cars

Wheel Fever

Surprised on a Train

The Covetous Cat

Jump

Politeness

In the Conservatory

Prey

Egged on by Passion –

Angela on My Mind

Shopper

Soothsayer

Adaptability

The Idea

Single Parent

Our Life in Cars

Immortality

Blackheath

Just Until

Thin Ice

Thresholds

Choir Practice

Mr and Mrs R and the Christmas Card List

Hoi

Incubus

Mrs Scipio’s Umbrella

The Night He Had Thirty-Two Pints

The Optimist

Harriet

Pastoral

Sunday Lunchtime

The Star and the Birds

Here Today

Tabula Rasa

Last Haiku

fromTHE BACK AND THE FRONT OF IT (2000)

Apologia

The Back and the Front of It

Taking a Taxi to a Wedding

Rewards

The Go-Between

‘The Unexamined Life is not Worth Living’

Natural Selection

Cut

Twelve Things I Don’t Want to Hear

Birth Day

Get a Life

Insomnia

English Dictation

The Visit

Holding Hands in the Movie Show

Metropolitan

Leviathan

The R Word

Escape

Ice Cream

At Kill-Two-Birds

Getting Out of Hand

In the Palm of His Hand

House Detective

Home Truths

The Aspirant

The Upper Hand

At Madame Tussaud’s

Elephants

Keeping on Top of Things

Next Please

Mésalliance

Good Girl

Reunion

Friend

Musical Chairs

Convalescence

fromPRIVATE PLEASURES (2007)

Under Your Skin

Awakening

All the Kissing We Do Now

Biography

Colouring Book

End Game

De-familiarisation

Out of My Mouth

Background

Needs

Advice

A Change in the Weather

Loose Connections

Landscape with Figure

Marrying the Car

Private Pleasure

Waving

Song

Piccadilly in the Sunshine

Then

Universal Primer

To those People I’ve Annoyed by My Infatuations

Page-turner

Pack

The Speech

Funeral Dog

We Are So Many

Those Old Gods

Horticulture

In a Flash

Why Didn’t You Tell Me You Were Dead?

FINDING A LEG TO STAND ON (2012)

Getting It Right

Finding a Leg to Stand On

Save Your Breath

Day of the Doors

Game On

The Slope

On the 10.15

Stations

My Lunch with Karl and Fleur

The Lost Lover

November

The Body in the Library

Settling Down

Too Many Metaphors

Reculer

I Am Sending You This Present

Late

Edited Out

Gait

Fever

Telepathy

Blu-tack

Cat haiku

Only Connect

Witness

Aunt Maud and the Battle of Britain

Retirement 1948

I Am My Son’s Fourth Child

Ceremony

Some Rejections Are Unexpected

Spring Through the Looking-glass

Plants Behaving Badly

Feeding Your Cat

O Tell Me the Truth

Quest

About the Author

Copyright

FROM

Progress Report

(1981)

Annual Dinner

I have sat here at this table now for years.

I have a race memory of this place;

Its formal flora, face-distorting spoons,

And the indigenous tribes, of bearers and borers.

Sometimes I dance, held hot against black serge,

And often I ask,

Shouting above the music,

About Croydon, or the Common Market, or the children.

Before the dancing we had the speeches,

And that was a peaceful time.

An interval of pleasant stupefaction

Infused with coffee and brandy.

Further back still, there was the cream gâteau

And, penetrating deeper layers of the past,

The lamb, the trout, the soup,

And, with each, a subject briskly explored,

To right and to left,

With eye contact and ego projection.

In the prehistoric, previous world

I was still here,

Empty and chattering over gin,

And smiling winningly into unfamiliar faces.

But, unlike some younger people,

I can still remember the world outside,

And I know that one day we will all go home

And find rest, and the cat waiting to be fed.

April

Here comes Spring.

Season (stirring dull blood) of spots

And suicides.

Better, those of us who are at risk

To skip April, May,

Miss the worst of the disorientation,

The conviction that life

Is coming up with some colossal romantic musical

For which the casting director has, yet again,

Overlooked you.

The hard light, the sudden knife-like breeze,

The grey pallor of those strips of skin

So tentatively bared.

The tender vulnerability of the pale buds in the hedge.

Dig up the garden

And stop your mind with your transistor.

This dangerous change will soon pass.

Cardiac Department

Discrete, disconsolate,

The heart patients gather in the waiting-room.

Drawn together, but facing apart

And thinking about their ECGs.

They’d like to pretend

They’re in the buffet at King’s Cross

Waiting for the 6.15:

But more serious matters are at stake:

Life insurance; or life itself.

The nurse is their mother here,

Her smiles flow out

Bright and inexhaustible as conjurors’ bunting.

The cleaner is having a mysterious mid-morning clean.

‘Don’t move love,’ she says,

‘Don’t move. I can dust round you.’

Comfort

In a meadow, redolent of summer,

Deep in green, each leaf gilded

Against the sky, sit three women

Smiling at the camera. They are fat

Beyond the merely Rubenesque.

Corseted in folding chairs,

Armoured in synthetics;

Their considerable legs stretch forward in unison.

In the East, they would be collectors’ pieces.

One has a striped umbrella

Over her head. She suffers with the sun.

Another has the thermos, which she’s