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CAUGHT IN THE NET 152 - POETRY BY BRIAN JOHNSTONE
Series Editor - Jim Bennet -
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|
The headlights beam into the dark,
illuminating silence the vehicle moves
into,
distant till it Dopplers past, a fan of
light
that breaks upon a sky so full of stars
it’s nothing but the swipe of us
intruding for a moment on the pitch of
night
from One For The Road by Brian Johnstone |
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CONTENTS
1 - BIOGRAPHY
2 – POETRY
Concrete Poem
Surfin’ Safari for a Small Town Boy
Tokens of
Admission
How Well It Burns
Tree
Surgeons One for the
Road
Gable
After
Mallory A Reading
of Bark
The Book of Belongings
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3 - PUBLISHING HISTORY
4 - AFTERWORD
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1 – BIOGRAPHY: Brian Johnstone
Brian Johnstone is a poet, writer and performer from Fife. His poems are ‘fields of force, in which every word plays a precisely calculated part' (Manchester Review) while being ‘a calm meditation on the tenuousness of surfaces' (NorthwordsNow). His work has appeared throughout Scotland, in the UK, North America and various European countries. He has published six collections to date, his latest being Dry Stone Work (Arc, 2014). Translated into over a dozen languages, Terra Incognita (L’Officina, Vicenza) a chapbook in Italian translation appeared in 2009. In 2015 his work appeared on the UK’s Poetry Archive website. He has frequently collaborated with artists in other media, and is well known for his poetry & jazz performances with Trio Verso. A founder and former Festival Director of StAnza, he has appeared at international poetry festivals from Macedonia to Nicaragua, as well as at many festivals and poetry venues across the UK.
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2 - POETRY
The ghosts of men who haunt this track
won’t fade the way their footprints in the dust
are driven off by wind or rain. For men
it surely was, whose urgent need
to get to fields and flocks, trumped every sign
for drying concrete, drove their boots and trucks
across the still-to-set but hardening surface
of the past. A past where traces
of a shovel or a rake are secrets held in stasis
a roadman might detect, while others
see just shadows, creases in the finish of the road;
unlike those flagrant tyre tracks scrawled
from gate to gate. Or these deep scores that tell
of grasping far too late that one man’s truck
had sunk up to its axle in the stuff,
sloughed in the footprints of his rescuers;
and this past, this one deed imprinted in the place
as clear as time will print its passing in a face.
The best pop is
like a rush of lust
Alastair McKay
The deuce coupe threads the dunes, back of the sands:
her daddy's car, but he will understand
that parties must be seized, she says, like days,
thrown as hand-made pots, agreed the way
they've signed their surfboards, waxed them down
like documents. In this grey town
the sounds of doo-wop only surface from the drains
that overflow, the malice of late summer rains
determined in their pock-marked progress
over sands and shallows, all that acned skin, to mess
up every wrung out joy that they display,
gleaming in convertibles: the Wilsons, Jardine, Love, gay
in some forgotten sense. The discs stack up,
the portable Dansette slaps platter on to platter, enough
to wind the Provost up, his bike a solitary patrol
against the shameless pleasure of it all.
Awful in his cycle clips, flat cap, he gets around, his face
a sucked in breath of disapproval. Go on, chase
the blues away before he gets on to your back.
The surf is up. The wind is from the north. But fuck,
all summer long this is as good as it will get. The needle
hits the groove. Love's voice. You paddle
out beyond the waves, youth tied on with a cord.
She watches you, God only knows, holds your reward
in supple limbs. You feel the surge. You sing it. Sea
rips at your board. She says: sing it one more time for me.
Tokens of
Admission
Bound in, the way the foundlings were for permanence,
each strip of cloth is both their future and their past
cut so with blades that one will match the other
should the latter change, the mother find the wherewithal
to make the journey back. Few did, so few that even
one page in a score of scores matched up is rare;
while pattern after pattern, warp and weft, pins
every child nameless to its place, to noted features,
measurements and dates, each mother more than absence:
twill or damask, linen, silk or lace, a sliver of the clothes
the infant wore when circumstance reduced them
to a bundle, a parcel passed on unaddressed.
How well it burns, the sugar that your parting hands
would throw frustrated on a sulking fire,
its blue flames urging each reluctant coal to life.
You’d gaze at it back then, a world you’d changed
with just one act, drawn into the smoke
that raced towards the sky like all your dreams.
What shape they took, bar flight, you scarce recall,
eyes fixed on dials or peering out at night,
your target not too distant, not too exposed to flak.
The coast is clear. No moon but still the water far below
glistens like molasses, the islands blacker yet
against the estuary you creep up like some sneak.
The turn to east-north-east is unmistakeable, drilled
in maps, in night-flight training as you are;
and there it is. You ease the joy-stick, take her round.
Below, co-ordinates ring true. The oblong of the dock
betrays the sheds, the streets behind them
full of families you must banish from your mind.
How well it burns and will do if you have your way.
The bomb doors disengage like parting hands.
This whole town of sugar must see flame tonight.
The Greenock
Blitz, 6th May 1941
Tree
Surgeons
They range amongst the upper limbs
like primates encumbered with care,
find parts of trees we'd recognise
as human gestures on the level,
pass rope through crooks of elbows,
bends of knees, and anchor on
to laterals that bear the strain,
the dead weight of the saw
to make their surgery complete.
Down here, we're squinting at the sun
and, grounded by our lack of skill,
point out the deft incisions we require
to lighten up our lives. They make it so,
disguise it in the cut and pay down
branches, green and dying, each
a stretcher's girth, a sleeper's weight.
One for
the Road
The headlights beam into the dark,
illuminating silence the vehicle moves into,
distant till it Dopplers past, a fan of light
that breaks upon a sky so full of stars
it’s nothing but the swipe of us
intruding for a moment on the pitch of night
much as a match flares till it’s shaken out,
or as we try to make our mark
but stumble, spill its substance, light up
our surroundings only briefly, see
there’s nothing more than we’d steered into,
find we’re fumbling for the map.
Long gone, those derelict tenements,
half-demolished,
a row of parlour walls stacked up
like sample cards
for someone's granny's wallpaper. Their slivers,
flapping in the wind,
goodbyes. Unlaid,
their fires all died, burned shadow
black into the grates that stamped each wall
with absence, empty
as some broken jug which stood once –
held the milk, some flowers, loose change
for the meter, warmed the baby's bottle – whole,
on each one of these mantleshelves,
in living rooms complete
with hearthrugs, tables, easy chairs,
the neighbours in to borrow tea, just
floating there.
After
Mallory
It is not
difficult for me to believe that George's spirit
was ready for
another life,
Ruth Mallory
Strung out like votives on an icon, below
the yellow band, they search the mountain
like a crime-scene, for a clue. A half hour
from the highest of the camps, they find it,
face in prayer, buried in the shale, fingers
clawing at the gravel with the vengeance
he would never have: the English corpse.
Name tag stitched on what the weather left,
fibres winnowed from the shirt are proof
enough. Like breath, the question hangs
condensing in the chill. Did this cadaver
make the summit, focus, take the shot?
The search picks wool from layers, rope
from rough abrasions on the waist. It finds
no camera to bring him back. In thin air,
something close to hope evaporates.
Some tokens from the jacket's folds
are all they take, then lift a cairn to lay
upon the desiccated flesh that slid off,
caught and held. What's left they give
the mountain with a psalm. Unproven,
this is just remains again, a bag of bones
until, ten thousand feet below, hands
receive each object, turn it to the light:
a box of matches, faded Swans; his knife;
his altimeter, smashed and dumb; papers
in a wad he carted, absent-minded to the top:
a letter in his brother's hand, a bill deferred
till his return. And this is when the breath
seeps back, the bones unite again, the man
steps from the photographs, flesh whole.
From faded cuttings, dotted maps of routes,
he picks his way through rocks, crevasses,
glacial moraine, making for the tent.
A Reading
of Bark
This is a script to hazard a guess at,
a language of skin and growth
shifting before the eyes, unobserved.
The little we read
from knife cuts, twists of wire,
the necessary nail hammered home,
translates to a human scale,
preferring years
to the centuries bark has sheathed each tree.
Behind this ring a rope burn has left, is time
for the washing to dry,
the garments to fade, be passed on
beyond derivation. Which is there
for the taking alone
in these nicks, intrusions in bark
these laughter lines, birth marks, scars,
like this set of initials, thickening with age,
rehearsing a future in stone.
The book of belongings of those found dead
lies open across my lap. I cradle it and look and look
not knowing what I must find, half hoping to recognise nothing.
Photograph after photograph, page after page
of someone's jacket, trousers, shirt: I'm searching the fabric
for stitches my hand has known, for threads my thumb has pulled.
This book is heavy with more than belongings:
with gestures an arm has left in a sleeve,
with breath filling the breast of a shirt.
I place a plate on a table surrounded by empty chairs.
Each speaks to me in the voice of a husband, a son.
Those found dead are a handful. I sweep away the crumbs.
Tokens of
Admission
Tree
Surgeons
One for the
Road
All above from Dry Stone Work (Arc Publications, 2009)
Journal Publication
Tree Surgeons – first published in New Writing Scotland, 2011
featured in Best Scottish Poems 2011, Scottish Poetry Library
One for the Road – first published in Gutter, 2010
After
Mallory
A Reading
of Bark
All above from The Book of Belongings (Arc Publications, 2014)
Journal Publication
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4 - Afterword
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