Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Another Look
- A Great-Grandfather
- A Great-Grandmother
- Grandfathers
- Grandmothers
- Birthplace
- My Mother and her Two Brothers
- Their Wedding Photograph
- Sticks and Stones
- Hickory Dickory
- Jolson Sings
- First Day at the Grammar School
- Catching an Old Film on Television
- Days of TEFL
- Snap
- May 1997
- Emma at Seven Months
- Somewhere Down the Line
- No Joke
- For the Man I Used to Go Fishing With
- Fishing in the Grounds of a Therapeutic Community
- Not at his Best
- Dead of Winter
- ‘Committal’
- The Dovecote
- The Idea of Order at Hunts Cross
- Jupiter Optimus Maximus
- Squeezing a Poem out of Me
- Fragment
- Something for Gael Turnbull on his Seventieth Birthday
- Making an Arrangement
- An Invitation to Breakfast from Sydney Smith
- Hiroshima
- Sez I Sez I in Stephen's Green
- Seventh Heaven
- At Drumcliff in 1997
- Getting There
- Mnemósynon
- Moonlight on Leros
- Olives
- The Quality of Greek Light
- Scottish Waiter Bringing Squid
- Funerary Monuments, Aegina
- Taking the Hexameter a Walk
- Moonlight on Aegina
- Whalewatching – Vancouver Island
- Seventh-Storey Heaven
- Sarah Biffin
- Ancestors
- In the Dock Canteen
- On Tape at the Old People's Home
- Winter Solstice 2001
- A Long Way from Home
- Publisher's note
May 1997
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Another Look
- A Great-Grandfather
- A Great-Grandmother
- Grandfathers
- Grandmothers
- Birthplace
- My Mother and her Two Brothers
- Their Wedding Photograph
- Sticks and Stones
- Hickory Dickory
- Jolson Sings
- First Day at the Grammar School
- Catching an Old Film on Television
- Days of TEFL
- Snap
- May 1997
- Emma at Seven Months
- Somewhere Down the Line
- No Joke
- For the Man I Used to Go Fishing With
- Fishing in the Grounds of a Therapeutic Community
- Not at his Best
- Dead of Winter
- ‘Committal’
- The Dovecote
- The Idea of Order at Hunts Cross
- Jupiter Optimus Maximus
- Squeezing a Poem out of Me
- Fragment
- Something for Gael Turnbull on his Seventieth Birthday
- Making an Arrangement
- An Invitation to Breakfast from Sydney Smith
- Hiroshima
- Sez I Sez I in Stephen's Green
- Seventh Heaven
- At Drumcliff in 1997
- Getting There
- Mnemósynon
- Moonlight on Leros
- Olives
- The Quality of Greek Light
- Scottish Waiter Bringing Squid
- Funerary Monuments, Aegina
- Taking the Hexameter a Walk
- Moonlight on Aegina
- Whalewatching – Vancouver Island
- Seventh-Storey Heaven
- Sarah Biffin
- Ancestors
- In the Dock Canteen
- On Tape at the Old People's Home
- Winter Solstice 2001
- A Long Way from Home
- Publisher's note
Summary
for my daughter, Catherine
So this, Kate, is History,
concatenating days ending in sleep,
me on the Eve of an Election squaring up
to trickish possibilities? Tonight
a scrounged lift back
from a reading hostile to poetry
belted in beside some Mrs-Woman
gabbing on about bars and coffee shops
shooting up in Liverpool as if
the city's resurrecting just for her.
She doesn't understand my sense
of a diaspora. It's generation-gap to her,
old-fogy ruefulness. Ghost
in my own place, a passenger.
And so the Big Day itself, its decisions,
and the nation drifting to the polls, found me
going on about Chekhov's Vanya,
ennui, fin-de-siècle tackiness.
Two o'clock.
My students wanted to be outside,
sprawled on grass in the out-of-season
unruly sun.
Two o'clock. Someone we loved, Kate,
ten miles from here, was letting go of life,
starting her slide into the tidy-up
of history, uttering her terminal
gargling gasp.
I was gob-smacked that night
watching the pompous po-faced
Tories fall,
thinking of what I'd told the class
about hubris and retribution
when we started weeks ago with Sophocles
and I'd quoted Tragedy requires
the intolerable burden of God's presence.
That night God was handy, Kate,
bringing low.
A week later and the weather changed.
We drove to the crematorium
to greet the bewildered remnants of our kin
with their apologies and ironies.
The world at large was spouting hope,
propounding a new tone,
talked of dumping the old,
of making new.
Our clobbered city is inured to it –
dockings, sailings,
concatenating days that end in sleep,
curtains pulled to, as they were today,
when we said goodbye
to eighty years’ godforsaken timidity
and gas jets rasped and flared.
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- Information
- Getting There , pp. 24 - 25Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2001