Elder

By David Constantine

Like the work of the European poets who have nourished him, David Constantine's poetry is informed by a profoundly humane vision of the world. Many of the poems in his latest collection spring from particular localities: Scilly, the North of England, Southern France, the Aegean, Wales; others from certain places (loci) in literature and mythology. Inspired by such 'local habitations' and the people who live there, the poems of Elder express gratitude and loyalty, but also grief at every harm and death. Published on his 70th birthday, David Constantine's tenth book of poetry sounds many personal elegiac notes as well as -in the story of Erysichthon, for example -anxiety at the abuse of Earth, but there is also much celebration of love, beauty and the hope and aspiration in human beings to live well in the time allowed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780371313

David Constantine

When I write I give my mind, soul and my heart to the page...in love with every word on my page. Just the thought of seeing my thoughts on the page, organized on paper and to read it now and read it later is a release for me. To write whenever I get the chance, steady writing deep and intimate on every page! All my feelings, soul and heart, sweat and tears. Writing is my number one thing to do, it's fun.

Book preview

DAVID CONSTANTINE

ELDER

Like the work of the European poets who have nourished him, David Constantine’s poetry is informed by a profoundly humane vision of the world. Many of the poems in his latest collection spring from particular localities: Scilly, the North of England, Southern France, the Aegean, Wales; others from certain places (loci) in literature and mythology. Inspired by such ‘local habitations’ and the people who live there, the poems of Elder express gratitude and loyalty, but also grief at every harm and death.

Published on his 70th birthday, David Constantine’s tenth book of poetry sounds many personal elegiac notes as well as – in the story of Erysichthon, for example – anxiety at the abuse of Earth, but there is also much celebration of love, beauty and the hope and aspiration in human beings to live well in the time allowed.

‘The mood is both tender and desperate, with something of the uncanny in its blend of the recognisably human and aparently Other… His religious regard for the world (not the same thing as religious conviction) produces a strange translation of its ordinary terms. Its colours and joys and terrors are heightened as though by fever, yet at the same time brought into clearer focus’

– 

SEAN O’BRIEN

, Poetry Review.

‘Drawing on the sensibilities of the European poets – Goethe, Hölderlin, Brecht – whose work he knows so intimately, Constantine’s humane and serious volume weighs the life of the individual against the crash and tumble of the wider world and finds in favour of the subtler forces and complexities of the former’

–

SARAH CROWN,

Guardian.

COVER PHOTO (DETAIL)

Peplos kore, Acropolis Museum, Athens (c. 530 BC)

MARBLE, 121cm high

UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/SUPERSTOCK

David Constantine

ELDER

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems first apeared: Agenda, The Best of British Poetry (2012 and 2013), Between Almanach (Gdansk, 2013), Oxford Magazine, Poetry London, The Reader, The Rialto, Resurgence and Saudade (an anthology of fado poetry).

CONTENTS

Title Page

Acknowledgements

1

How will they view us, the receiving angels…?

Old Town

A local habitation

Swallows on the island

Love story

Under Samson Hill

L’amour, la mer

Mirror, window

Facing east, at the window

Facing the wall, north

Elder

On the bridge

Bad dream

Limestone

Shameful

Miranda inland

Idyll

2

Hydrofoil, fish, gulls

The Gate of the Charites

House by the ancient agora

Pan

Kouros carrying a ram

Stele

Marble quarry

Horse, man and woman, Hermes

Sanctuary of the Dioscuri

Stoa

Sanctuary

Stoa and sanctuary

3

Orphic

Baucis and Philemon

Phaethon’s sisters

Daphne

Myrrha

Erysichthon and his daughter Mestra

4

The Rec

Gwyn Robert and the seal

Our Lady of the Blackthorn and the Snow

Owls

Hölderlin Fragments

5

Foxes, rain

Bread, full moon

High tide, early, 19 February 2011

The makings of his breathing…

For a while after a death…

Cloud opening, 19 February 2012

6

Told one of the goldfish wouldn’t last the night…

J.P.

As though… because…

Envoi

A Faiyum death mask

Tomba 736, una donna, Enotria, VI secolo a. C.

Red on black

Cast of a woman of Pompeii, Manchester Museum

Heysham, rock tombs

A love of churches

Romanesque

A Romanesque church in the Rouergue

Roman sarcophagus of a man and wife, Salerno Cathedral

NOTES

About the Author

Copyright

1

How will they view us, the receiving angels…?

How will they view us, the receiving angels

Who perhaps find it easier when the dead are shipped in smoothly

Headfirst, arms across the breastbone, smiling

As if all along this is where they had wanted to be

How will the angels receive our kind

Who will be dragged in feet first, face down, hands

Far outstretched, the broken nails

Black with the dirt of some local habitation?

Old Town

Old town, dirty old town

Thirty-five miles from the sea

But from there to us

Through the buttercup fields and the moss

The big ships crept

And stepped up the great canal

Trailing gulls, and believe you me

That was a sight to see!

Dirty old town

Smog in the mornings, the buses came

Like timid beasts being led

By Master, the bus conductor,

Walking slowly ahead.

And when we came home

Wide-eyed from the glittering Christmas pantomime

Oh the lamps had haloes of rain.

The big ships passed

Big as tenements through

The placid cows in the fields

And there was a lock

We could bike it to

Where the jovial idle singing sailors threw

Us oranges down

That were meant for market in the dirty old town.

And courting couples rode home

On the top of the Number 9 bus

From a Sunday walking out

In the bluebell woods.

Oh armfuls of bluebells came down

Like streams from the slopes of the hills

Into the dirty old town.

A local habitation

Foreknowing the absence – that one day elsewhere,

Not here, oh very far from here, you will look up

And, missing something, for one split second not

Know what it is and through that heartbeat’s gap