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CAUGHT IN THE NET CHRISTMAS SPECIAL - POETRY BY
COPLAND SMITH
Series Editor - Jim Bennett for The Poetry Kit -
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Each year the fledglings fall from cornered nests into a perpetuity of sky, to sleep in sky, wheeling on the upflown heat and falling only to the muddy musts of prodigy, clinging briefly, beaks full of captured wings to fuel the future that soon will drop in turn, footless, into light.
from; APUS APUS by copland smith |
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CONTENTS
1 - BIOGRAPHY
2 – POETRY
Arabella Beach glass Novel The Last Entomologist A Woman Peeling Apples a male poet sits between two mirrors Llais craig yn syrthiaw Apus apus [Apodidae] Hedge Much |
3 - AFTERWORD
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1 – BIOGRAPHY: copland smith
copland smith, always small case, once a mathematician and ecologist, is a poet, fiction writer, songwriter, playwright, translator, essayist, Guardian letter-writer, naturalist, photographer and writing teacher. Born and adopted in Liverpool, brought up in Wallasey and North Wales, he now lives in Manchester, where he runs Manky Poets.
copland writes both serious and light verse, and has won many poetry prizes, including three times being amongst the runners-up in The National Poetry Competition - he was on the shortlist again last year. He has been published in many magazines, anthologies and in his, so far, only collection, one-eyed seller of garlic. The title is the answer to a particularly stupid Old English riddle.
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2 - POETRY
Arabella
We like to go on bike-rides,
explore deserted houses.
She laughs as every joke glides
as silky as her blouse is
and I would like to do it
with Arabella Hewitt.
She joins us in the garden
for tea, and whispers
Salt please.
Of course, I stammer “pardon.”
She whispers
pass the salt please
She knows I want to do it
does Arabella Hewitt
We seem to talk for hours
of Plath and Robert Lowell
and when we’re caught in showers
I dry her with a towel
and very nearly do it
with Arabella Hewitt.
At uni, off my head.
In love. Exalted. Smitten.
She married Tim, and said
I thought you would have written.
I never did quite do it
with Arabella Hewitt.
Arabella - The Best of Manchester Poets (anthology, 2009)
Beach glass
Ignoring the jet and quartz and amber,
you push aside the more ordinary stones
and in between these and the sea’s usual lumber
of crabshell, polystyrene and fishbones
you find tokens of translucent green:
sea-smoothed glass, in curve-cornered squares,
or triangles, that have lost all sheen,
all transparency.
“Whales’ tears,”
you say, collecting them to keep.
White is rarer, blue almost extinct,
and this green has faded from its deep
prime.
Once someone drained their drink
and tossed this bottle seaward. Or maybe
some castaway stoppered in an SOS.
The ocean worked. It stripped the label,
used stones to crack the glass
and filed away at the jagged edges,
then it spat the kernels out on this shore
for you to gather,
to make into badges,
or to drop in your mantelpiece jar.
Greenness goes, and transparency, in time,
from bottles,
from you and me —
I guess that was us in our prime.
And we’re not as we used to be.
Beach glass - rain dog (magazine, 2005)
Novel
I’ve reached the end of chapter one;
I have some inkling of the plot
but when I look at what I’ve done,
there’s nothing quite defined.
Nothing to say that what I’ve got
is worth the trouble. I may find
It’s not.
The
Preface/Prologue took
the best half of my life.
I may omit it from the book.
I’ve reached the end of chapter one
at the foot of page thirty-five,
but when I look at what I’ve done —
at what survives —
there’s nothing quite defined.
No recognition still to come
is worth the trouble. I may find
the Preface/Prologue
took
my marriage, job and half the life I would have liked, my children, relationships that I can’t begin again, my name, contact with all the friends that I’ve let down, my career (whatever that means), my sporting prowess, as I imagine it, and if I drown in all of this, I’ll drag down gods know whom . . .
I may omit it from the book.
No room.
Novel - Rialto (magazine, 1992) and one-eyed seller of garlic (Headland collection, 1994)
The Last Entomologist
was shown how to find
under stones, flat in figure-hugging
hollows
under logs in their first rot,
beetles hibernating, waiting for the
gallows
of the cyanide jar, and
pseudo-scorpions
waiting for eternity in a tube of
alcohol,
Homo sapiens
collecting laurel leaves
to line the killing bottle,
collecting specimens for a long series.
In Edwardian cabinets, crystals settle,
Naptha sublimates around
the last populations. There is no
sound.
The last entomologist - Outposts (magazine, 1991) and one-eyed seller of garlic (Headland collection, 1994)
A Woman Peeling Apples
after a painting by Pieter DeHooch 1629-1684
In the light from a high
window, mother and child in linen hats
and formal layers. A clog beats,
scrapes the floor. A fly
settles on the white
prepared russets.
The child stands. Her mother sits
turns worlds against the knife.
A woman peeling apples -
Ambit (magazine. 1990), and not
otherwise (anthology, Poetry Business 1990) and
one-eyed seller of garlic
(Headland collection, 1994)
a male poet sits between two mirrors
On his left, a mirror; on his right another.
Whichever way he looks
he’s writing the same poem over
and over — making the same mistakes.
He’s part of a perspective of poets
sipping at similar drinks
from a synchronicity of pint pots.
All are short of money, tight with booze.
They look up as the pub door shuts.
They’ve all read Larkin, Heaney, Hughes
— pretend they’ve read some Hill.
He looks again — left, right and sees
receding selves — a crestfall
of depressives, a collective noun
of the dysfunctional.
There’s one won’t answer the phone,
another can’t make an apology.
They all say they’ll get it right soon.
Their problem’s the psychology
of rejection —
mothers that didn’t bond properly.
On the left, confessional,
on the right, the landscape
puts itself in words unfashionably
but make sure crows don’t creep
or bog-bodies emerge
Glob-like from the Selected deep
This pub’s a church
of cool reflections — backs
of writers arch
symmetrically. Pens like pricks
are held as if
in religious acts.
Head up, he is the performer
and all the watchers.
And each watcher,
in perfect time, looks,
then, head down, writes about his father
in one of many slim books.
A male poet sits between two mirrors - …therefore I am (anthology, CETH 2008)
Llais craig yn syrthiaw
The next moment we heard a blast, and then a thundering sound: “Llais craig yn syrthiaw; the voice of the rock in falling, sir,” said John Jones
‘Wild Wales’ George Borrow
Half the slate in England, some time back,
was pulled by horses down a small canal
away from the sound of falling rock.
From this intruded granite hill
in a flashing silent film
I watch the black slope slip, begin its fall.
And I’d hoped for breathless calm,
for peace to mourn the broken stone.
The rolling sound engulfs. Press nail to palm
and the roar subsides. The moan
turns heads in a further valley.
They falter, muted one by one —
each man who hears his father calling:
llais craig yn syrthiaw —
the voice of the rock in falling.
Llais craig yn syrthiaw - Manchester Poetry 4 (anthology edited by John Silkin, SBT 1991); Readaround (Tarantula anthology 1995)
Apus apus [Apodidae]
Once, when swifts were larger, I discovered
death. In a crunch of bloody flesh
an untouched wing curved up — a bloodless arc
of lift: drying muscle, tendons, feather.
I scalpelled it to keep — a thing apart,
not of the airless ground where it had crashed.
A black, tight-feathered treasure, a slice of sky,
a cloud-sleeping moment from Africa’s season
lent to this of fresh emerging flies
that gave the long migration cause, lent reason
to the jerks of flight, from bite to chitinned bite.
Some years ago my mother threw it out.
Each year the fledglings fall from cornered nests
into a perpetuity of sky, to sleep
in sky, wheeling on the upflown heat
and falling only to the muddy musts
of prodigy, clinging briefly, beaks
full of captured wings to fuel the future
that soon will drop in turn, footless, into light.
Again I watch the no-foot no-foot bird —
the wing my mother chucked has rotted white
through bone and powdered bone to mealy word.
And still I watch the no-foot no-foot bird.
Apus Apus - Stargazy Pie (magazine, 2008)
Hover-flies co-ordinate the air,
framing the space I work in;
St Mark’s flies tumble in grass,
hunched in black polished armour.
Ladybirds fall from the cut branches.
I’ve honed the privet back —
its dark inside is opened;
Sycamores spear from the soil—
I pull them out.
There’s holly spiking from nowhere
and elder urging softly.
I’ve pruned the overhanging trees.
It’s tidier: light can filter through;
it seems I’m letting the world see in,
thinning the barriers. For now.
The age of a hedge can be guessed
from the number of species in it.
No matter how neat the facing,
there’s a space inside that grows
darker every season — some incurable species
whose root can never be found.
My father was my hedge against
the world, but something grew along
his branches — burst them open.
Fourteen years on, cutting this hedge,
I look up expecting to see him,
hoping he will, with a nod
and a well trimmed phrase, approve.
Hedge - Lift the Veil (anthology, The Writers’ Bureau 1994)
after Much ado about nothing Act II scene 3
I heard a shout from my master’s orchard.
Boy! a man called. He did not know my name.
Not my master — a guest called Benedick.
I ran to him. I said, Signior? I watched
and waited.
In the window of my chamber
lies, he said,
a book. Go fetch it quick
to me here in the orchard.
I am already here, sir, I said,
meaning I would be that fast. Instead
he showed his wit and said,
I know
that. but I would rather have you
there
and here again. And so I left, face full of blood,
and galloped to his chamber. At his window
stood a glass, half full of honey beer,
a comb for his curls, a discarded hood,
and, yes, the book — a golden glow
from its spine, and the smell
of its covers! — as if the calf were just killed.
I opened it. It was not my business
to open it. I opened it like the draw
of the curtains on my other master’s play
and saw the dark swirl, the characters
playing their parts, dancing on the floor
of the page, spouting words that may,
to those whose business
is reading, be heard through the book’s silence.
To those who do not have such talents,
this is a great magic. And so I closed
the book and ran back toward the orchard:
down the oaken stair; into the darkening garden;
through the arch of columbine and rose,
until I stood, alone, in that same orchard.
By Benedick and by William, I have been forgotten
and all that I will ever have said is:
Signior? and
Sir, I am here already.
Much - 5th prize,
National Poetry Competition
(2007)
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3 - Afterword
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