#carcanet

you can’t unload the caravan for one lame donkey It’s six a.m. We’re swarming up a drain. Someone up the front knows what we’re doing. Me and Tich are flying up the flueing. Snap! My leg falls off. You can’t complain: you can’t expect an army on the trail of half a dog and sugar-sick to stop and say Oh dear, Goodbye. I squirm and flop along the gutter’s edge. A wizened snail laced up in cobwebs…

‘Musk is known by its smell, not the shopkeeper’s words’ ‘As smooth as a sheet and as sweet as a sweet; nutritious, delicious, delightful and sprightful and dreamy as silk; as fat as a sausage in sassafras, creamy as milk; a Quazi of Fishes, a Mogul of Dishes; capricious, lubricious, the Sultan of Mambo, the Queen of the Deep; scrumptious with camel’s milk, aubergines, pickles and beans; with…

So there you are, clambering amongst the topmost golden apples when – ker-boom! A storm! an avalanche! comes hurtling through, ripping round the orchard-side. And you?  Down that ladder smartish. Catch your breath. Shelter in the shed, whose wobbly walls squeal with lightning-snaps , whose old roof pings and rattles in the hail. And then? Then things go back to normal. Rosy sky. The…

‘The soldier is F. Come (NZ), to be killed soon after on the crest of Chunuk Bayir.’ Churchill sat in a smoky chair and watched the London rain: We’ll chase the Turks to Hell, he said, and chase them back again. The Beautiful Battalions sailed under a seething sky: they landed at Gallipoli to do his work and die. We’ll be in Consty-nobble soon and drinking pink champagne, and then we’ll get our…

a man will cross the world at the smallest hope of love Beep. Wrrrr. Clickclack. Ssssss. ‘Hello?’ Ssssss. Ssssss. Ssssss. ‘It’s’ – crackle – ‘Geet.’ Crackle. ‘We could’ – buzzzzz. Ssssss – ‘meet.’ Ssssss. Ssssss. ‘If’ – crackle crackle – ‘Joe?’ Umm. ‘I’mchangingtrainsatLeuvenstation halfpastfiveonTuesdaymorning’bye.’ Clickclack. Beep. The Monday midnight sky shuddered like a fridge. Our…

Micro-reviews (4): Two Tongues

Two Tongues, Claudine Toutoungi (Carcanet), £10.99 – NB currently 10% discount on site Another ‘brief sentence’ that got away from me – perhaps because I’m always very impressed by poets who’ve worked out – as Claudine Toutoungi has in just two collections – what their angle of approach to their subject matter is. Especially when it is, as here, playful and so linguistically and imagistically…

An Arabic Inkwell A Poem on the Underground