Dry Stone Work

By Brian Johnstone

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The third full collection by Brian Johnstone, and his second to be published by Arc in their Poetry from the UK & Ireland series.
A grounded yet playful collection from an assured poet, flexing his muscles into newer territory. As well as the deep lineage of rural landscapes that populated previous collections, here Johnstone treats us to an extended trip to the circus, where the glitz and thrill of the big top and its stunts are peeled back to allow us into the physical and emotional rigour that forms the show's backbone. Elsewhere poems transport you more literally through music, movies and TV history, around Europe and into the distant past, again balancing between illusion and the tension that supports it in the more mundane world. And throughout, the tone and language also plays an ingenious balancing act between the structured, the rhyming and the informal. This is a personal and expansive collection, honest and exploratory.
"Brian Johnstone appears to have taken to heart, or learned by instinct and experience, Robert Frost's advice to avoid approaching a poem's subject too directly. A consequence of this is that Johnstone's poems establish their own presence, leaving room for mystery and lyricism to emerge with a convincing uniqueness. Dry Stone Work is a robust collection, packed with original strengths, delicacies, variety, and a vivid awareness of life. An impressive collection, then, not just to be recommended, but to be read and re-read." - Douglas Dunn
"The use of language is authentic and precise, and the perception of an often-hidden world fascinating and genuine." - David Morley on The Ring Cycle sequence
Born in Edinburgh in 1950, Brian Johnstone has lived in the Fife countryside since 1972. He has published two full collections and three pamphlets, as well as appearing in anthologies and other publications in Scotland, elsewhere in the UK and in Europe and the Americas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arc Publications
• Release date: May 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9781908376633

Brian Johnstone

Brian Johnstone is a poet, writer and performer who has published six poetry collections to date. His work appears on the UK Poetry Archive website and has been translated into 10 different languages. A founder in 1998 of StAnza: Scotland’s International Poetry Festival, he was Festival Director from 2000 to 2010, and has been active on the Scottish literary scene for over 25 years, organising poetry events in Edinburgh, Pittenweem and St Andrews.

Book preview

Contents

FOOTINGS

Tobacco Road

The Thousand Blows

Reservoir

Dry Stone Work

Ghost Story

The Tattie Line

Concrete Poem

The Ring Cycle

I Whip Hand

II The Dividing Line

III Heft

IV A Studied Fall

V Long Shot

VI A Certain Swing

VII The Caring Blade

VIII Pitch

Sonny Rollins on the Williamsburg Bridge

The Method

TRACINGS

Dolls’ House Skies

Making the Change

On the Site of the South Side Joke Shop

Surfin’ Safari for a Small Town Boy

Storm Chaser

Who Knew

Lady Day’s Experience

As From A Car

To Live Apart

Parable

Codicil

Contracted

Blanket

Back at Bash Street

Askew

HEARTINGS

Reading the Book

Zakros

Source

Tokens of Admission

The Garment District

Craiglockhart

Sappers

How Well It Burns

A Hotel in the Berenese Oberland

Opening Up the Bag

A Disused Cinema in Lithuania

Rope Trick

An Executive Decision

Mercenary

Out-Station

Wake Up Call

Dark Matter

COPINGS

The Accents of Mice

As We Watch

Favour

In Passing

In the Flood

The Bitter Fruits

Spreading the Net

Freeze

Changeling

The Jaws of Wasps

Tree Surgeons

One Last Breath

History

Behind Your Eyes

One for the Road

Notes on the Poems

Author’s Note

Biographical Note

The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.

ORHAN PAMUK

Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech,

December 2006

FOOTINGS

Tobacco Road

when every man jack lit up no-one expected worse

a shortness of puff

dry hoast

fingers stained lino brown

and that tobacco breath overall air

meant these men were men

there in their place

feet on the rail

slops pooling the top of the bar and something they’d all made

their fathers’ their grandfathers’ smoke

tinting the walls

the sweat of their work

still pocking the ceiling with dots

where the reek had condensed and dripped off

like their lives

truncated by work

slid like a nip down the length of the bar

and lost in the smoke

that fizzled from nostrils as the tip of each roll up

glowed

The Thousand Blows

What’s done to wood cannot be

undone; to steel

abrasives can rub down,

a whetstone can restore,

and could with time

this edge

that hasn’t seen its like

for years. The thousand blows

this handle took,

shivered in the splintered grain,

splits so old

they’ve taken on

the patina of age, the tally

of time spent

over chisel, over bench

where cord was little use

to bind the stock,

damaged by the hefted knock,

no more than

accident deferred. It’s held

but would not do

for long. This long. As long

as steel is dull,

the edge unused,

the rust grown slowly

on the blade,

the sweat that soaked

into the handle

with each blow glowing

in the dim electric light

that aids a rummage

in the drawer where each one

of the thousands

has its twin

in other blows,