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24327 results in Literary texts

Page 300 of 1217

  • Four Seasons, St Giles Cripplegate

  • Emily Hasler
  • Book:
    The Built Environment
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    19 November 2019
    Print publication:
    14 March 2018, pp 45-45

  • Summary

    Time is upon us and so few days are ours entirely

    in the slip of our mid-to-late-twenties. A hard sun

    drives us to this hushed cool. St Giles is a very old

    church. Here a string ensemble sometimes rehearse

    and today rehearse. Strong breezes stirred these stones.

    Three times they have built, rebuilt, partially rebuilt.

    The church is quite old. The lead violin calls the players

    to halt, to start from the middle: ‘Again, more drunk this time.’

    We will listen and leave before the end, go and drink,

    as so often, practising our giddy autumnal theme. That music

    is quite old. When all our work is done, our harvests in

    —we are quite old/quite young—we will be ready then.

  • Difference

  • Emily Hasler
  • Book:
    The Built Environment
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    19 November 2019
    Print publication:
    14 March 2018, pp 38-38

  • Summary

    All winter the river was one creature.

    It shrank and expanded, but maintained

    its borders. I saw to the bottom. Firm sinew.

    Clear curve. I swam in it long as I could bear.

    Now it is many things: muddy-shored, grass

    fuzzing edges, trees that overreach

    and vibrate with reflection. Insects came,

    pocked the surface with legs and wings.

    Then clumps of grass, detached weeds,

    fur of blossoms pollen the bottom

    too became confused lifting off in slicks

    of mud brown trout and me

    temperate following a mirrored

    vapour trail an inverted bankline

    green and yellow bands bobbing

    beyond reach we are bodies I think and unthink

  • Swallow Hole

  • Sarah Corbett, Lancaster University
  • Book:
    A Perfect Mirror
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    19 November 2019
    Print publication:
    14 March 2018, pp 8-8

  • Summary

    A dry spell. Gorse starring the rocks

    above the ghyll. Far down on a shelf

    her body, soft, intact. No more than

    three days dead. Maybe she climbed,

    nimble as a girl. But her black bob,

    glossy in death, is white at the temple

    where there is a crack, half-healed,

    a row of bilberry beads gone dull.

    She died slow. Maybe she fell, leaning

    too far in –I've almost done it myself –

    smelling depth, darkness, distance;

    that breath, that call, that pull.

    You have to take care, in such places.

    We have ropes, lanterns, body-suits.

    On her feet are yellow plastic sandals

    over ankle socks greening at the rim,

    and there – blue indents on her knees

    where she must have knelt,

    skin off the back of one hand,

    two lines on her neck like tribal marks.

    Now I see her, head-down, toppling.

  • Woman

  • Alice Miller
  • Book:
    Nowhere Nearer
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    19 November 2019
    Print publication:
    14 March 2018, pp 27-28

  • Summary

    The burned moss is tight on the ground.

    Too tight to own its own

    shadow. Too long

    since the morning's hallway leading down

    to the locked room, where green

    afternoons stay unseen. I am

    what exactly, the woman says.

    She won't go back to the room.

    *

    A moment earlier

    with the man's knee bent, the honey

    ring's glint,

    she looked up, not at him, but at the stone's façade

    behind, where rock scrunched, crumbled

    under her live gaze. She knew she should speak

    but was thinking

    robbers came here, marauding

    and raping, taking what

    they fancied. They fled and she'd like

    to flee too, to take what she liked and begone. She wished

    she weren't greedy but she also thinks

    who's not greedy with time's a fool.

    She has seen a creature in the burned moss

    and it resembles her,

    far more than a kneeling man ever could.

    She crouches as the other women walk in slippers,

    she waits to watch them

    stroll, their hair fall

    and shine the outer layer of

    a lemon rose. I am so determined

    she said to make a

    shadow even when

    I'm dirt. The man nodded

    although he understood nothing.

    *

    An ant's legs rattle under the leaf 's edge,

    onto the moss burned yellow – it's been a hard

    summer, though easy for him, who does not

    have to bother about fields. She will keep

    bothering, liking the fresh breeze

    of decision. The window creaks,

    open-shadowed trees make cameos

    in the reflecting glass.

    The burned moss pushes back at the feet and knees

    of the woman as she crawls, it pulls water from her

    soles, her skin. It drinks. Soon

    the man will return with his armed guards

    but none of them will find her.

    The moss slices itself open

    and the woman crawls inside.

  • The Fall

  • Alice Miller
  • Book:
    Nowhere Nearer
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    19 November 2019
    Print publication:
    14 March 2018, pp 41-42

  • Summary

    What William felt for a yellow-haired girl, I felt till I heard

    the furniture fall

    during gravity's return

    when the planets settled

    and silence translated

    to siren

    Maud knew only ill love lasts

    and the sisters dreamed of unlonely Moscow

    even if this repeats it will still be first light,

    first thought, the rubble of stones that clack against flood

    the gap-between-teeth of sea-through-rocks

    Tolstoy knows the cast of the world's show

    and Flaubert knows how to walk and catch

    a-mind-at-sprint, in word-pour, as his curtain creaks open on day

    and what William felt for a yellow-haired girl

    was what's felt for a known ghost

    and only Maud knew ill love lasts

    but is there nothing better

    for the brain or ear

    than the song? For the brain

    or ear, what William felt for a yellow-haired girl, I felt till I heard

    the furniture fall

    during gravity's return – which made

    song – when the planets settled

    and silence translated

    to siren

    so we learned only ill love lasts

    and followed, unlovely, to Moscow

  • Palace

  • Alice Miller
  • Book:
    Nowhere Nearer
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    19 November 2019
    Print publication:
    14 March 2018, pp 24-24

  • Summary

    In the tiny crypt of Diocletian's Palace

    Santa Lucia is surrounded

    by notes for instance please

    take care of my father or thank

    you for our life here.

    Everyone's feet ache on the steps of the bell tower

    and the man has been looking for hours but cannot

    find the temple

    of Jupiter. He has been looking all morning and now

    he is sick of the pale stone squares on the ground.

    Nearby a guide avoids the word Christian

    so as not to admit a ruin's newness.

    Two men raise their phones

    to snap Santa Lucia

    in her lake of letters. This place is like a maze,

    a woman says. The man decides if he doesn't

    stumble across the temple soon

    he will look at it on the internet in his hotel room

    even though he has already today referred

    to the hotel's internet policy as draconian.

    At least he can say he was there.

    If there is anything you have forgotten you can ask me how it was,

    says Jupiter. In the temple he holds one palm out

    with fingers gnarled upwards, still stuck

    holding the globe he's lost.

  • New Moon

  • Sarah Corbett, Lancaster University
  • Book:
    A Perfect Mirror
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    19 November 2019
    Print publication:
    14 March 2018, pp 53-53

  • Summary

    This evening

    the temperature drops

    and the air is clear of rain.

    The clip of moon

    with its attendant hoop

    like the bright-ringed bottom of a pan

    catches an ember of winter sun

    and you can

    almost hear it – a sky-note rung

    in the ear, at the finger-tips,

    on the back of the tongue.

    In the valley

    the streetlight's cupped votives scatter

    into the hills

    and high above the town

    the bank of cumulous

    volcanoes.

    One-by-one,

    then in a rush – stars – a multitude

    of eyes,

    nocturnal creatures

    lighting the dark wood.

  • Notes: A Monumental Brass

  • Emily Hasler
  • Book:
    The Built Environment
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    19 November 2019
    Print publication:
    14 March 2018, pp 11-13

  • Summary

  • Brand, T.C., ‘An Uneven History: Monumental Brasses and Stone Ledgers in English Church Floors’ (Oxford 1982).

  • Husbands are almost always specified on women's grave inscriptions.

  • Having no husbands, and therefore no sons, we remained daughters, sisters.

  • It is less than one-quarter the size of the memorial placed to Elizabeth Etchingham's father and grandparents, one of several factors suggesting economies were taken in the production of this memorial. On the reverse is an inscription to Thomas Austin, son of a London mercer, who died in 1405. Although we cannot be certain that the brass's placement in the south chancel is original, the location would be of a piece with these cost-saving measures.

  • The depictions of the women bear the conventional signs of unmarried status. Elizabeth Etchingham is smaller and her flowing hair shows her as a nubile maiden, whereas the larger size, coifed hair and uncovered head of Agnes Oxenbridge tell us that she was older but still maidenly.

  • K. M. Phillips, ‘Maidenhood as the Perfect Age of Woman's Life’, in Young Medieval Women, K. J. Lewis, N. J. Menuge and K. M. Phillips (New York 1999), 1–24.

  • 94 per cent of aristocratic women made their careers as wives, mothers and widows. However, singleness was not unknown.

  • Gatskill, James, ‘As she were mine sister’: Extra-familial Female Relationships in Late Medieval England (London 1991).

  • As Paul Binski has noted, ‘The turning of figures on their axis enabled the intimacy of the marriage to be expressed’. Although the move to showing the female figure in semi-profile is sometimes attributed to a desire to better illustrate elaborate headdresses.

  • I have not found a single example of a design in which the husband is turned towards a front-facing wife.

  • Neither the artisan nor anyone else seemed to have considered this affective turn unsuited for a female couple or unseemly for their families.

  • I have learnt to hear, to feel almost, the particular fall of your foot on the stair, the cracking of the air as your gown brushes mine.

  • Women's gowns on late-15th-century brasses generally fall in folds so deep, stable and balanced that they seem to root the women to the ground rather than propel them in one direction or another. Yet, the gowns of Elizabeth Etchingham and Agnes Oxenbridge were arranged in such a way as illustrate their movement towards each other.

  • Plain Tongues

  • Alice Miller
  • Book:
    Nowhere Nearer
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    19 November 2019
    Print publication:
    14 March 2018, pp 12-12

  • Summary

    We cobble up a language on the fire

    forge words for voll and leer

    for sense and sound,

    for song is sinnvoll. Signs are soulful, unless sent

    from cities we've not sanctioned. Stop singing,

    it confuses. We must speak in our

    plainest tongues, from our palest our

    silkiest bodies. Listen to famous mouths

    for our messages. We will never complicate

    our meanings. We'll make all clear,

    in small words from spun worlds.

    You won't even know we're here.

  • The Henry Hudson Bridge

  • Emily Hasler
  • Book:
    The Built Environment
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    19 November 2019
    Print publication:
    14 March 2018, pp 25-25

  • Summary

    1.

    The estuary's deepened by centuries of concern.

    Massive and slow, lowing like cattle, the ships draw our eyes

    down the channel. What a silly shallop a word is—

    but the names they give these enormous container ships!

    The Henry Hudson Bridge: a boat named for a bridge,

    named for a man. We looked him up. A time of trade over nation,

    passages. Belief in progress. Simple forward movement.

    Ships: Discovery, Hopewell, Halve Maen.

    Then the bridge, beautiful as any bridge, straddling the hollow

    between the eyes and the gut—which loves such shapes.

    2.

    In sepia, the half-constructed bridge, two parts reaching.

    We know the pieces fit. And the ship—we check where in the

    world she is.

    A yellow isosceles gives the last known position. Between reports

    and sightings we suspend a structure trusted to span the breach

    —the thought is latticed, girded by gaps.

    The Half Moon, a pub in

    this same town, or close enough, an adjoining village.

    We can't tell between the truly connected and contiguous.

    We see the half and believe… in time—the fullness of it.

    We see the moon and it gives us the sun, a memory of

    beergardenness.

    The Russians probably have a name for this.

  • Bernini's Apollo and Daphne

  • Emily Hasler
  • Book:
    The Built Environment
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    19 November 2019
    Print publication:
    14 March 2018, pp 4-4

  • Summary

    A statue in the Villa Borghese, Rome

    I fooled the sculptor—thinking he could

    catch my undying trick. How did I

    become a container and pour myself into it

    at the same time? I flowed from marble,

    I flowed back into it.I'll endure, perpetually

    tightening the tiny gimbals in each

    foliated fingertip. Staying still is unceasing,

    always becoming: girl, god, stone, tree, sculptor.

    And these who come to stand, circle, stand—

    do they know they have forgotten themselves

    a moment too long? Moments are large as villas,

    parks, mythologies, centuries of Art. Thoughts

    run through me like a fountain, water in constant

    escape—which is no escape.

  • The Ghost of a Flea

  • Sarah Corbett, Lancaster University
  • Book:
    A Perfect Mirror
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    19 November 2019
    Print publication:
    14 March 2018, pp 18-18

  • Summary

    What is this that comes, tongue out,

    bug-eyed, gripping daintily behind

    what could be a tail but is a knife,

    come with a bleeding bowl, fingers

    curved like long-dead nails? What is this

    apparition, stars in the wake of his comet?

    The corner of the bedroom housed him,

    gigantic in a speck of dust, eyes

    soft white pods of spider nests

    where the million bodies might

    any minute come rushing. These days

    I name the horror, frame by frame,

    but then there was a pit, me clinging

    to it, pushing back at what I could

    not see. What is it the poet sees,

    now speaking silently, now creeping

    from gold curtains, tongue moving

    between its teeth, stilled but approaching,

    coming, coming; at once huge

    and far away, immensely tiny and close?

  • The Unicorn

  • Sarah Corbett, Lancaster University
  • Book:
    A Perfect Mirror
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    19 November 2019
    Print publication:
    14 March 2018, pp 41-41

  • Summary

    It wasn't there, and yet we believed in it,

    the milk-white beast, barleycorn twist of its

    impossible horn, horn now proven

    to be narwhal tusk; oh how we love proof.

    It wove itself into the tapestry

    of myth where we chained it in gold filigree;

    let's say, yes, it is gold that enslaves it.

    Its chaste self saves us if we imagine it.

    In the garden where the pomegranate

    evolves its own bloody secret

    the creature that has never been

    tentatively puts out one silver hoof,

    shimmering and oblique as an antique

    mirror into which we can no longer see.

  • Katana

  • Emily Hasler
  • Book:
    The Built Environment
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    19 November 2019
    Print publication:
    14 March 2018, pp 6-6

  • Summary

    It's an exact art; to cheat two types of steel

    to turn them to face one another then heat,

    hammer and heat. To fold and fold again:

    eight times, sixteen times over. There,

    it starts to feel—in its united heart—

    that it is strong, light, supple, hard.

    So flexible this silver tongue, this collusion

    of men and metals. Now it acts as though

    it were always one. Cooled too quick

    to rethink its false society of parts. I could tell

    how the air rings when the sword slices through.

    The sound: true. The balance true, and the shine

    too—which was two weeks’ work.

  • Saving

  • Alice Miller
  • Book:
    Nowhere Nearer
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    19 November 2019
    Print publication:
    14 March 2018, pp 1-2

  • Summary

    Any time there is a window, or a winter, or a news

    report strung out to minute-by-minute;

    Any time there is a letter, a philosopher, a question of

    travel through time or Wien; any time there's a claim

    we can learn to stretch our minds across the greys of this precise universe

    which itself slouches in an infinite series

    of likewise or elsewise universes;

    Any time someone reaches down to pick up a copy

    of the New Yorker, and it is March 2008, and this

    gesture changes their whole-life-plan because of a poem

    by W.S. Merwin which says (among other things) that all flowers are a form of water

    and the whole world's burning;

    Whenever our hands touch like swords

    and we bow, either because we want

    to obey the rules of combat

    or because it might help to save our necks;

    Whenever the blue hour;

    Whenever fathers wait for children

    to arrive on a plane

    when even the 24 hour news cycle

    has had to admit the story is over

    with the wreck fished out

    and no survivors;

    Whenever I promise but send you nothing

    what I am failing to say

    is that some of the moments we cling to most

    are the futures we never let happen.

  • The Frozen River

  • Sarah Corbett, Lancaster University
  • Book:
    A Perfect Mirror
    Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    19 November 2019
    Print publication:
    14 March 2018, pp 24-25

  • Summary

    In this dream, the river is frozen,

    it is not a river, perhaps, but a glacier

    reaching to the horizon –

    I mean this: that the river, or glacier, lifts

    skyward and appears to disappear

    or meet the air. Is this what matters?

    Or that under my feet the frozen rifts

    and ridges – the small hard waves

    that are like skiffs of royal icing

    on a Christmas cake – have started

    to thaw so that I must pick my way

    cautiously, judiciously, like a bear

    (a Polar Bear) finding its paws

    in the soggy melt where they should

    have met the compact fluff and crisp

    of snow on ice. But I digress. Somehow

    people have been driving their cars

    on the river leaving slushy tracks; this is

    reassuring and disconcerting. The ice

    can take my weight, I must only pick

    carefully around the pools that are now

    forming near the centre, where the river

    threatens to collapse inwards towards

    the dark eel of river freeing itself

    beneath me in slow humps and lurches.

    The river is in a faraway country where

    the vendor of hot drinks and donuts parked

    precariously at the river's edge politely bends

    his tongue around my language andI've

    never felt so at home as here, among

    the cars and day-trippers and polar bears.

    This is not an environmental poem, this

    is nothing more than a dream poem; this may

    not even be a poem. I ponder for a while

    after waking whether I am missing

    something. Suppose that however much

    we ply the surface, worry the depths, pore

    over the detail, there is always only ever

    ahead of us the gravity-defying

    sky-reach of the river/glacier, at once

    suspended, at once inexorably moving

    towards a horizon we will never touch.

Page 300 of 1217