Results for: “Carcanet Press Ltd.”
23 eBooks
Inquisition |
Burt, Dan | Carcanet Press Ltd. | |||||
Inquisition Sundays they trudged to the downtown schvitz, An old trade rite, to steam suet and grit From grimy pores and from bones the chill of Ice-boxes and concrete floors. Platzas Done, mummy-wrapped in cheap thin sheets Flung over deck chairs from headrests to feet, They rest in rows like corpses gathered After a Cossack raid on the Dnieper. It could have been Odessa, before the war. Gossip flickers from sweating ghost to ghost – Futures and unions, gelt grubbed and lost, How the chains will force them all to the ditch, Whose mother-in-law is the bigger bitch – But sure as grain grinds down millstone grooves Talk rumbles round to ancestral Jews, English fades to Yiddish, newspapers fall, Badinage ends, a defendant’s called. It could have been Toledo, without the Cross. Trial begins in time-honored fashion, Sheeted bencher posing Arendt’s question: How could you go like cattle to slaughter? You don’t understand, a big man mutters, We thought we were going to labor camps. Cheerful cards arrived with Polish stamps. See All Chapters |
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Out of the Heights |
Elizabeth Jennings | Carcanet Press Ltd. | |||||
Out of the Heights Out of the preening and impetuous heights Where we look down and do not fear and risk The snow escaping, the ice-melting flights, And where we spin the sun a golden disc And do not care and watch the clouds attend The tall sky’s dazzling and arched arabesque, Out of those places where we think we end Unhappiness, catch love within a final hand, God, from such places keep us and defend The innocence we do not understand, The darknesses to which we must descend. The Nature of Prayer a debt to Van Gogh’s Crooked Church Maybe a mad fit made you set it there Askew, bent to the wind, the blue-print gone Awry, or did it? Isn’t every prayer We say oblique, unsure, seldom a simple one, Shaken as your stone tightening in the air? Decorum smiles a little. Columns, domes Are sights, are aspirations. We can’t dwell For long among such loftiness. Our homes Of prayer are shaky and, yes, parts of Hell Fragment the depths from which the great cry comes. Thomas Aquinas Thinking incessantly, making cogitations always but as keenly, freshly as the child See All Chapters |
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Paul Eluard |
John Gallas | Carcanet Press Ltd. | |||||
Cardiff Elms |
Clarke, Gillian | Carcanet Press Ltd. | ePub | ||||
Until this summer through the open roof of the car their lace was light as rain against the burning sun. On a rose-coloured road they laid their inks, knew exactly, in the seed, where in the sky they would reach precise parameters. Traffic-jammed under a square of perfect blue I thirst for their lake’s fingering shadow, trunk by trunk arching a cloister between the parks and pillars of a civic architecture, older and taller than all of it. Heat is a salt encrustation. Walls square up to the sky without the company of leaves or the town life of birds. At the roadside this enormous firewood, elmwood, the start of some terrible undoing. See All Chapters |
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Horse |
Elizabeth Jennings | Carcanet Press Ltd. | |||||
You stand on tiptoe waiting for the sun. You always were the optimist while I See through your eyes now, now the dark is done. Listen, a cock is crowing far away. The sky blushes to pink. The birds confide Their secrets to the dawn, the start of day. Give me your world and turn upon your side. We have a link more sure than rings of gold. Our ways together are both deep and wide. I am the nervous one and you the bold, So different, though we never can divide. You have on me what sea has to the cold Moon. I feel chains. O turn back to my side. Horse At first a fume of mist in the morning is The horse, haltered to dawn, smoke round his feet, That herald of the heat. He canters in a sun-disclosing place Before day-sounds, before the hounds will meet. He walks away from psalms and rituals, Is but the remnant of a Pegasus At night riding to us. He is himself and here and nowhere else, Hint of a new event or a first cause. The dawn is clearing but the horse is there Tossing his mane. The sun is pouring through Fragments of mist to go See All Chapters |