Allison McVety: Selected Poems

By Allison McVety

Allison McVety's first collection, The Night Trotsky Came to Stay (Smith/Doorstop, 2007), was the overall winner of the 2006 Book & Pamphlet Competition, and was shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection Prize 2008.

Her poems have appeared in The Times, The Guardian, Poetry Review and Poetry London, have been broadcast on BBC radio and anthologised in the Forward Poems of the Decade 20022011 and The Best British Poetry 2013.

A second collection, Miming Happiness, was published in 2010 and a third, Lighthouses in 2014. In 2011 Allison won the National Poetry Competition and in 2013 was recorded at the Southbank Centre for the Poetry Library's 60th anniversary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Poetry Business
• Release date: Feb 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781910367117

Book preview

from The Night Trotsky Came to Stay (2007)

Portrait

My father carried his mother through Yugoslavia

and Greece. Stitched into the lining of his coat

and, against regulations, she kept him company

through the days he hid in back rooms and under stairs;

suckled him on nights huddled in churchyards,

with only the chatter of his pad and key. He folded her

into his wallet, where she rubbed up against

pound notes, discharge papers, a thank-you letter

from General Tito. Around her neck, in miniature,

her brother, on a row of cultured pearls: his face

crimped by the crease of leather. His eyes give no hint

of my mother, though he has her lips. He is his pre-gassed,

pre-shot self. And I am the daughter of cousins, a woman

with no children. I think of losing her in a crowd, slipping her

into someone’s jacket, an open bag, that sagging pocket

on the train, for her to live another life, our line travelling on.

Telegram

When it came, she put the envelope,

moth wings still folded, still sealed,

into a box too small to hold a dead-

not-dead man. The lid, worked

from the burl of an oak, is mortise

and tenoned, closed on a blind

hinge. For eighty years he’s been missing,

presumed dead, killed in action.

A telegram not read places him

in a war grave, on last parade

and in a field hospital on the fringe

of a battleground healed with grass,

his own scabs a knotty veneer,

his memory lost. This box, a trousseau gift

to tot up the cotton, linen, copper years,

not meant to end with paper,

is never opened, its dowels as raw

as when the bradawl, auger, granny’s tooth

had scrawled their marks, its lining spared

the fading light. Imagine a man inside

an envelope, inside a crowded box,

tired of being; imagine lives lived inside out,

of always being a hair’s breadth,

a paper-knife, a bayonet slit from fact.

How you can know a place

and not. How you can know it

through your feet, through the pitch

and crack of pavement, through games:

their stones and sticks,

through hopscotch numbers

scratched on flags with chalk or coal.

Through the clip of ropes on kerbs,

the tap on grids, through the clap of hands,

the toll of dustbin lids, the spark

of studs on boots. Through Messerschmidt

and Spitfire arms, strobed or flecked

with rationed sun. How you can see a thing,

defined through shadows,

the twitch of nets, the very thick of it.

Through the snatch and flare

of two fags lit with the same