Blogaria

From Velingrad to Sozopol

2009-11-26T09:27:00.004Z

News from Kristin on the translations so diligently done from English to Bulgarian at the spa hotel at Velingrad in January:

'We - VBV, Nadia and Georgi - will gather on Dec.4 to read the whole En-Bg book once again and make some final touches and go to the next step. (Things with the publisher seem to be fine.)'

So the next stage of exchange goes on. The publisher remains Altera, and the goal remains a launch at the Sozopol Festival, now, perhaps in 2010.

I can feel the anoxic waters of the Black Sea caress my sauna-starved toes even as we dream of Apollo: dream forwards, fellow Northeasters! Never dream sideways -- where has that ever got us?

Night Market Q&A

2009-10-18T23:17:00.004+01:00

This second instalment is from July this year. Here's the poem:

Night Market

These fish have crossed the desert to be here –
belly-up, eyes still eager – and so have we;
so press among the Uigur breaking fast
on long kebabs dry-spiced with smatterings
of paprika and push towards the pile
of pomegranates like a mud-brick wall
translated into juice carbuncles, ask
the man to turn his crushing wheel for glasses
that look like lamb’s blood, taste of rust-edged roses.
The market glows with coal-flares, TVs show
Imams and kung fu, skull-caps pass for skulls
clapped on the tops of turning heads like wheel hubs
as we disturb naan sellers, chicken choppers,
with our un-native faces’ late-night shopping.
Myself and Yang Lian, both alien,
are equally remote from West Xinjiang
while Emran’s instantly relaxing – here
as in Tehran, the Muslim night adheres
to gentler pulses we recover strolling
beneath dry balconies they will soon fell
in favour of the corporate eclipse
of concrete that surrounds this slow collapse
of strollers and their hopes to a midnight bulb,
the one teashop left open in the globe
where Abdul knows to rouse the owner from
his double hajj-earned slumbers. Empty room,
low-roofed, where we can be loquacious on
long-tabled platforms, thin cream cushions;
beneath the dusty beams and over tea –
black, hot – as endless as we’d like to be
ourselves, but we must break this moment up
like bread, not knowing as we drain our cups
how soon this quartet of our well-warmed breaths
will be abbreviated by a death.

Here's the dialogue:

VBV
It starts with "These fish have crossed the desert to be here –...". But I found another version online: "These fish have crossed the Gobi to be here". So?

WNH
It's actually the Taklamakan Desert, tho people tended to refer to it as the Gobi. 'Taklamakan' doesn't really scan, of course -- this is in iambic pentameter with couplet half-rhyme, and Gobi came to seem misleading. So I changed it to 'desert'.

VBV
"so press among the Uigur breaking fast // on long kebabs...". Press? There are 3 verbs - press, push and ask. But the first one sounds strange to me "press among...on..." - I am not sure I am getting the meaning. Can you help me with some clarification - what is pressed?

WNH
'Press among' is the verb unit, it's specific to being in a crowd (we also have 'press' as a noun, meaning crowd, though it's rare); it means the same as 'push through'.

VBV
"breaking fast" - It's just the phrase 'breaking the fast', yes?

WNH
Well, it's specific to Ramadan, where you fast from dawn to dusk, then are allowed to eat when the evening call is sounded from the muezzin. So it has to sound different from 'breakfast' with its morning associations.

VBV
The market glows with all these: coal-flares, TVs show Imams and kung fu

WNH
The imams and the kung fu are on the TVs (it's a reference to the mixed Turkic and Chinese society -- very polarised now, of course with the problems in Urumqi, but then seeming a blur of influences), so the glows are confined to the fires and the TVs.

VBV
"skull-caps pass for skulls" - You mean that we think of skull-caps as skulls? Or I am completely on the wrong track?

WNH
Yes, in the dimness, these little white caps look very like skulls, hence 'pass for'.

VBV
skull-caps... A synonym would be kippah, am i right?

WNH
I've just checked the Uighur term on Wikipedia:

'Many Muslims wear a kippah equivalent called a "kufi" or topi. Until more recent times, men in most Muslim societies were rarely seen without headdress of some sort. A taqiyah covers most of the head. Finally, the modern taqiyahs worn by Muslims are analogous to the kippot worn by observant Jews whether in the Middle East or elsewhere.
The doppa, a square or round skullcap originating in the Caucasus and worn by Kazan Tatars, Uzbeks and Uyghurs is another example of a Muslim skullcap. The doppa is derived from a Turkic, more pointed ancestral cap, which can be seen in some of the portraits of Jalaleddin Mingburnu.
Conservative Muslims in Indonesia and Malaysia , especially in the rural areas, are often seen wearing a thin kopiah, which looks almost exactly like the kippah in outward appearance.'

VBV
Who is Emran?

WNH
Emran Salahi is the Iranian poet the entire sequence is dedicated to. He died shortly after this trip to Xinjiang. There were four of us on this occasion: Yang Lian, myself, Emran, and our Uighur guide, Abdul. Here's the little note I wrote to head off the published version:

http://www.madhattersreview.com/issue7/viva_herbert1.shtml

VBV
"...of strollers and their hopes to a midnight bulb". I am not sure about this... Hopes to? You mean "hopes towards" or something else... Here I am really puzzled...

WNH
The pertinent part is:

'this slow collapse
of strollers and their hopes to a midnight bulb'

'Collapse' would perhaps be better understood as 'contraction' in relation to their hopes. The strollers are tired, and it's like they're shifting from walking to reclining as they approach the bulb and enter the teashop.

VBV
"long-tabled platforms" - what are these platforms? Why they are not just tables?

WNH
The teahouse consisted of a ground-level walkway between slightly raised areas on which there were long short-legged tables. These came to around the same height as the conventional table and chair arrangements in any cafe, but the raised 'platforms' were so people could sit cross-legged or recline on cushions, rather than sit upright on individual chairs.

Chinataur Dialogue

2009-10-07T13:02:00.004+01:00

I promised I'd start posting the dialogues that took place over chatrooms or by email in relation to the Velingrad stage of this project. It's taken me a long time to get going on this, but here's a first go.

This is the exchange between Kristin and myself between 28th January and 2nd February 09 over my poem 'The Chinataur'. More -- and hopefully more about someone else's work -- when I next get a mo.

Here's the poem:

The Chinataur

soon after this debacle found himself
in tunnels lined with crockery, shelf
after shelf of chipped and half-remembered sets
of saucers, fruit bowls, dinner plates:

a coffee cup that, once in childhood, held
to the now-occluded sun, revealed
a brittle geisha haloed by its base –
where had he drunk in that drowned face?

a soup bowl landscaped with grey cherry trees,
the bridge that wished to be Chinese
from which all cuckolds, lovers, cooing birds
were washed away like once-loved words;

the wineglass asterisked in gold as though
at dawn the stars refused to go;
the sea-deep jug on which some rip-tide hand
sketched ‘crayfish’, leaving ‘shore’ unpenned.

He wandered for the only hours between
ghost rows that should be smithereens,
groaned as his skeleton by sharp degrees
transmuted into cutlery;

smiled at the cellars’ sentimental clack,
his salt-and-peppered scrotal sac,
and wept as one obliged to be reborn
to feel his new-grown porcelain horns.

And here's the dialogue:

Kristin

Night Market and The Chinataur (The China Minotaur?) are your last two untranslated poems. Is that correct? Vasil and I will take them. Do you have any preferances, like who takes what?

Bill

As for the remaining two, I have no preferences, and am ready to answer all queries, so do please select between yourselves and ask me anything (except that, as Meatloaf explains, you can't ask me that).

Kristin

I'll take the Chinataur. I have lots of questions. Please, tell me what there is to know about it beforehand.
As Schwarzenegger says, I'll be back.

Bill

I'm supposed to be writing a review, but I have to build up my courage to say all those things about poetry you don't write down in case it alarms the livestock. So I'd much rather talk about the Chinataur...

Yes, it's a portmanteau term, 'china' and 'minotaur', and the image is derived from the old cliche 'like a bull in a china shop' or, as I just wrote by mistake, 'like a bill in a china shop', meaning a clumsy person creating a terrible mess. In this scenario, the labyrinth is lined with china, and we realise that it all has significance for the central character, ie it's symbolic of a smashed-up life, reassembled as a type of punishment as he undergoes a metamorphosis into the chinataur.

Kristin

1. How should I imagine the "He" of the poem - a middle age man walking among the shelves of a chance shop, trying to gather his thoughts?
2. "this debacle" is he himself or something that happened to him? Perhaps both?
3. The bridge that wished to be Chinese (I really love this one) - is it painted by the grey cherry trees or is it a china figurine itself (I find this less likely)?
4. "sketched "crayfish", leaving "shore" unpenned" - is there some "Crayfish shore" you are refering to? I couldn't find any. Do we need a set phrase? A phrase that once you mention the first word, the second one comes to mind?
5. "His salt and peppered scrotal sac" - is it just the colour? Are you implying something I cannot get?
6. "To feel his new-grown porcelain horns" - what do these horns mean? He is turning into a porcelain figurine, a useless, dusty and fragile ornament for the rest of his life because he cannot find a place for himself the way he is in this one? Or somebody had cheated on him (a cornuto)? Or the connection to the Minotaur suggests some strong out-of-the-way masculinity which he finds regretfully improper/useless/misplaced/unfeasible as it is, but which is strong enough to make him feel reborn as a horned beast, albeit a pocelain one.

I hope I am not too much out of track.

The rhyme scheme is AABB, alternating five iambic feet with four.

Bill

1. He is already in the Labyrinth, but it isn't at all the place he/we imagined it to be.
2. Both, but the idea is something embarrassing/shambolic/terrible has just happened to him, which we don't learn anything more about -- in a sense this is his default mode, something like this has always just happened to this character.
3. The whole image is depicted on a plate, actually a soup bowl.
4. The idea is the image on the jar is at once a sketchy crayfish, and like a pictogram standing for 'crayfish' -- no equivalent pictogram/sketch is visible for 'shore' -- it's an elaborate way of saying 'all at sea,' lost.
5. He is turning physically into tableware -- instead of testicles he now has a salt cellar and a pepperpot, hence the clack -- there is also a suggestion of greying pubic hair -- we call it 'salt and pepper' when grey appears on a dark-haired person.
6. These are the same assumptions I came up with -- I suppose which is dominant depends on what you think the 'debacle' was.

Yes, that's the structure, with the proviso that it's nearly but not insistently full rhyme.

Bluba Lu on soundcloud

2009-10-04T13:59:00.003+01:00

There are a couple of sets here by the band Fadia, Mark and I worked with the first time we visited Bulgaria, including World Nostalgia. We still await the release of our much-vaunted spoken word album, Air Pants, a turbulent performance.

Mark Smith in Blogaria

2009-02-03T13:49:00.007Z

I found this on The Fall's labyrin-thine fora (yes, that is a map of Bulgaria), where they claimed MOJO had said the following: 'Bizarro sketches both acoustic and experimental from Fall autocrat and pal, possibly themed around holidaying in Bulgaria.'

It seems highly likely to me that the song 'The Train' concerns a journey made on that narrow gauge track which followed us through the limestone outcrops to Velingrad, and is about a small steam engine containing Burt Lancaster, various works of art stolen by the Nazis, Peter Cushing, and a large bloodsucking neanderthal with a lovely singing voice.

More photos of sheep, wolves and steam

2009-01-31T15:24:00.006Z

I've added some images from the Hotel Velina and The Sheep, Sofia to my blog here.
Some are even populated by real people.

... and Mark.

2009-01-29T00:33:00.000Z

Write your own captions...

2009-01-28T22:17:00.004Z

The Away Team

2009-01-28T22:00:00.003Z

Linda

Bill

Andy

No pics of Mark here as he was taking the photos.

The Home Team

2009-01-28T21:28:00.006Z

Vassil

Kristin

Nadya

Hard at work

2009-01-26T22:27:00.001Z

I've not had chance to upload others yet but will do, to a Flickr page. But here's one to be going on with...

Bill's poems

2009-01-14T09:44:00.004Z

A Midsummer Light’s Nighthouse

1

In Winter the Old High Light speaks
the language of the sea winds
and the hail: cold unwraps itself, sheet
after sheet, around its weeping edge.

In the spring it rediscovers sunlight,
lets the clouds peel off like gulls
from its lead-lidded eyeball. The earth wind mouths
against the landing door, yammering and keen.

But in the simmer-dim and dark it talks
in its own dialect: sudden as a stairwell
and silent as a corridor when the light-switch
flicks, it tells me how to listen.

2

Where do you think the music comes up from,
manifested in the taut ropes ringing
off masts of fishing boats, the grunt of motors rippling
like a fat moon’s dribble on the river
and the knocking tread that’s boxes, dropped upon the quays?

Where do you think the music groups itself
before the year turns over in the night?
It’s propped against these timbers like a giant lens;
it’s like a sunfish that’s warmed itself in top waters
the eye flashing as it rolls away and drops.

3

It is by how we translate silence that
the dead become retongued – listen to
this empty air that fills two centuries
and more of chamber with the dreaming crush
of families: how it holds the creases in
their faces; how it’s poised between their breaths.

4

Let the admiral slither from
his pedestal, turned from guanoed marble to
white walrus, a crawling beluga,
and pipe in his ship-whistle voice canary songs
of old calamities, wars dissolving on water.

Let the smuggler woman come
in her jellyfish petticoats, ribbons fouled with sons,
smearing the walls with rum-thickened venom,
and slur in old tobacco tones her press-gang blues,
her welcoming couplets like cold thighs.

5

The sea does not bring forth in Autumn
like an orchard – it draws back
like a page that’s pinched for turning.
We read in it abeyance, not a swell.

Therefore the mind exerts its right
to halt the story, poise us on this sill
before the river sweeps the chimes away
and buries yet another solstice out at sea.

These other lives that surged before us,
let them be the gap before this midnight’s tick:
our own no more inhabitable void succeeds it,
and the High Light is our common home.

Tyne Tunnel

These days I tune in specially
as I approach the tunnel, hoping for
sopranos, pianistic flourishes,
colouristic passages, as I pay and wind
my window up, switch on dipped lights
and descend to the river’s underbelly.

The static comes in swells, quite leisurely:
it pulls itself over the voice, the strings,
it shushes, couries, smothers, sinks,
and then it reigns like poison in the lug,
a crush of other traffic, a scrape and drag –
cans across rock, silt through gills: the gully.

I always feel it will be troubled by
some voice that breaks in with a song
you only hear down here: the tongue
compressed, half-ham, half-Janacek;
the message cold, eruptive, wrecked –
but there’s nothing till sunlight and, gradually,

the same tune altered by the weight of water.

The Shave

How to re-enter the nineteenth century
with its better class of axe murderer,
its limitless supply of tubercular
courtesans, its autonomous moustaches:
pass through the cervix of a too-hot towel
folded and pressed to your flushing face,
the apparatus of the chair cranked back
like a car-seat in a suicidal layby.
Small panics soften as the lathering brush
approaches with its cool aquatic kiss,
a giant otter on the Tyne’s soft bank.
You find there is still more to be relaxed,
vertebra by intercostal cog, your shoes
loll outwards as the blade – an eyebrow of steel,
the moon’s regard – begins, as wielded by
this nun-battered Dublin Geordie lass who lifts
your jowls gently in the snow-lit morning
and strums upon the fretboard of your throat.
For this is where all opera takes root,
the pulse of your nostalgia for unlived-in
eras, that sin of breathing elsewhere than
this greedy moment’s need to blame, verismo
is only conjured by proximity
to blood. All chatter falls like an old key falls
and cuts the slush, the orchestra of combs
and scissors seems to pause, to concentrate
on this small nearby risping shifting note
as though to cracklings in an infant’s lung.
She is the diva of scrape, the spinta of slice,
her tessitura runs from jugular
to nostril till she smacks you back
into the day you’ll haunt with alcohol
and soap, anachronistic neck,
shaven and shriven and white as a baton.

The Sickle

The second day my hand still trembled from
the sickle. We see it now as attribute,
those ageing symbols' symbol, death and work,
and like to overlook the thing itself,
bulb-handled in warm wood, the cursive blade
a darkened, runnelled metal, cheaply made
and left inside the old tin bath with saws,
fence staples, in the dust-black, padlocked shed
among the furniture and frames thrown out
of the old peoples' version of a house,
the cobwebbed halter for their long-dead mule.
We want to make it moon and question mark,
cedilla of skeletal script, a lip,
but it is quite at ease with all this mess,
the afterlife of things and half-life of
their meanings: it's accustomed to the edge
between the real and the irrelevant.
A little oil would help it sing out as
it's lifted from its bed; serrations, rust,
acknowledge its return to use, to light.
And all I did was cut the long dry grass
behind the outhouse where the washing line
plays out its yellow plastic smile. I took
their three foot nodding lengths in hand,
half baby fishing rods and half the shades
of ostrich feathers, and I hacked them once
or twice, and cut their shins and thistles' throats
until our towels could hang in peace.
And all the time the sickle silently
displayed its neatness, crooking in the strays
and never needing more than three light chops
at any head, and though I cut away
from my leg every time it whispered past
'flesh of my edge, bone of my blade,' and cut
until it was too easy to cut close,
and then I paused, and put the thing away.

The Glacier

Scrambling among the hobo pebbles, pilgrim quartz,
we were speechless on the glacier’s black back,
surfing its slowest wave, listening to its Xhosa click,
its rhotic grind, its kilometre throat’s distracted rattle.

We’d diceboxed off the Karakoram highway up
a broadening valley between the Uigur villages,
their pease pudding walls, their carved palace doors,
corncobs drying on their roofs like giant pollen.

The only oak in Xinjiang spread over twin pillars
of a little mosque, the hills behind like opened crab lungs,
their dead men’s fingers giving way to a vast flat wall
children lay down to see a poplar sit on top of.

The one mine entrance was a cathedral gouge
in a cliff-face so tall it made it seem a mousehole.
Then finally, parked by the concrete yurts painted
with scenes out of the cartoon past and walking

through the churr of magpies towards the first firs,
the first Swiss-eyed glimpse of gull-shouldered peaks,
breathless in the highland air as though we’d smoked
ourselves down to a quarter of our proper size;

there was a flight of steps up to a blind crest
you had to rest before, during, and at the climbing of –
and then it was before you, the blackberry tongue,
the exhausted shit lolly, the lava-stained granita.

It had something to tell us that we could only learn
by climbing on its dead whale belly and holding out
our mobile phones to record its auriculate melts.
There was a voice down in its rootlessness that knew

the root to all our travelling, the small dripping home
of our incomprehension. All our friends yelled at us,
and while their echoes put the eagles off their glide,
the glacier quietly carried on carrying us away.

Ghost

(Variation on a theme by Matthew Sweeney)

The ghost which doesn’t know its way but must get home
stumbles in the desert through the day
and searches through the passes in the dark.
It gathers pebbles into maps to guess at its passage
across the great steppe in winter.
It immerses itself in lakes to feel
what the birch roots feel, it sits
in the bodies of sheep and goats
whose blood can’t halt the chill.
It travels from mosquito to mosquito in
the fat summer air,
it wraps itself up in fallen trees’ bark
like the text in a rotten book.
It only knows North and consequently
may be travelling in the wrong direction for months.
Sometimes it thinks it recognises
a configuration of poplars
and a great dread descends.
It lies with the maggots and the excrement beneath
a row of toilet stalls in Knife City.
It remembers faces seen with no thought that this was for
the last time. Memories are diminished
and must be counted out like beads:
the ratchet in the old woman’s throat,
the smell of cheap newsprint in
a now nameless airport,
the hand nervously gathering a curtain,
the baby’s black button blink.

Night Market

These fish have crossed the desert to be here –
belly-up, eyes still eager – and so have we;
so press among the Uigur breaking fast
on long kebabs dry-spiced with smatterings
of paprika and push towards the pile
of pomegranates like a mud-brick wall
translated into juice carbuncles, ask
the man to turn his crushing wheel for glasses
that look like lamb’s blood, taste of rust-edged roses.
The market glows with coal-flares, TVs show
Imams and kung fu, skull-caps pass for skulls
clapped on the tops of turning heads like wheel hubs
as we disturb naan sellers, chicken choppers,
with our un-native faces’ late-night shopping.
Myself and Yang Lian, both alien,
are equally remote from West Xinjiang
while Emran’s instantly relaxing – here
as in Tehran, the Muslim night adheres
to gentler pulses we recover strolling
beneath dry balconies they will soon fell
in favour of the corporate eclipse
of concrete that surrounds this slow collapse
of strollers and their hopes to a midnight bulb,
the one teashop left open in the globe
where Abdul knows to rouse the owner from
his double hajj-earned slumbers. Empty room,
low-roofed, where we can be loquacious on
long-tabled platforms, thin cream cushions;
beneath the dusty beams and over tea –
black, hot – as endless as we’d like to be
ourselves, but we must break this moment up
like bread, not knowing as we drain our cups
how soon this quartet of our well-warmed breaths
will be abbreviated by a death.

The Chinataur

soon after this debacle found himself
in tunnels lined with crockery, shelf
after shelf of chipped and half-remembered sets
of saucers, fruit bowls, dinner plates:

a coffee cup that, once in childhood, held
to the now-occluded sun, revealed
a brittle geisha haloed by its base –
where had he drunk in that drowned face?

a soup bowl landscaped with grey cherry trees,
the bridge that wished to be Chinese
from which all cuckolds, lovers, cooing birds
were washed away like once-loved words;

the wineglass asterisked in gold as though
at dawn the stars refused to go;
the sea-deep jug on which some rip-tide hand
sketched ‘crayfish’, leaving ‘shore’ unpenned.

He wandered for the only hours between
ghost rows that should be smithereens,
groaned as his skeleton by sharp degrees
transmuted into cutlery;

smiled at the cellars’ sentimental clack,
his salt-and-peppered scrotal sac,
and wept as one obliged to be reborn
to feel his new-grown porcelain horns.

Rabbie, Rabbie, Burning Bright

Atween November’s end and noo
there’s really nithin else tae do
but climb inside a brindlet coo
and dream o Spring,
fur Winter’s decked hur breist and broo
wi icy bling.

It feels like, oan St Andrae’s nicht,
thi sun went oot and gote sae ticht
he endit up in a braw fire fecht
wi some wee comet --
noo he’s layin low wi his punched-oot licht
aa rimmed wi vomit.

We too hae strachilt lik The Bruce
and hacked up turkey, duck and goose;
and let aa resolution loose
oan Hogmanay,
but waddle noo frae wark tae hoose
lyk dogs they spayed.

Each year fails tae begin thi same:
fae dregs o Daft Deys debt comes hame
and we gaither in depression’s wame
aa duty-crossed --
but Burns’ birthday is a flame
set tae Defrost.

Ye dinna need tae be Confucius
tae ken, if Dullness wad confuse us,
ye caa ‘Respite! Let’s aa get stocious --
And dinna nag us.
Grant us that globe of spice, thi luscious
Delight caaed “haggis”!’

That truffle o the North must be
dug frae the depths o January,
but cannae pass oor lips, nor we
cross Limbo’s border --
unless that passport, Poetry,
be quite in order.

Sae thi daurkest deys o thi haill damn year
can dawn in yawns baith dreich an drear –
sae thi Taxman’s axe is at wir ear
fur his Returns?
We Scots sall neither dreid nor fear
but read wir Burns.

Metaphor for Dogs

'Dogs don't use metaphor'
Ruth Padel

I have been burying the delicious white stick.
I have been sniffing the butthole's brown flower.
I have caught the wooden wingbone:
here it is.

I have returned to the stomach's liquid child,
to the lumpy feast. I have been licking
my own soft chestnuts:
here they are.

Why do you tug the neck's strap-on tail
when this Ganges of hot bitch-scent
has just poured past?
There she is.

I make a tripod fountain.
I puddle up to the gadget of my new ipoodle.
I cock a wood'll woo her:
here it is.

She is squatting mother to the fragrant slug.
I am not distracted by the magnetic North
South East and West Poles of wee wee:
but there they are.

She's like the leg of a maiden aunt
I must embrace. She's like the trousers
of the garden invader, ripe for perforation.
So she is.

She's like the white hole in the black air
that sucks out howls. She's like the tendons
that tug the skeleton of the pack together. In fact,
here we are.

Andy's poems

2009-01-14T09:33:00.001Z

Grey Blues

Grey promenade, grey sand, grey day,
Grey road, grey sky, grey rocks, grey clay -
So many different shades of grey !
Like Holyhead on Christmas Day,
Sault St Marie or Thunder Bay,
The deadened rule of grey holds sway
Upon this Headland, locked today
In monochromes of wintry grey.
These welded clouds are here to stay,
Like bunting hung across the bay,
Like dirty clothes on washing-day,
Like tide-marks of the world’s decay.
Ash-grey, slate-grey, rain-grey, steel-grey,
The colours all have drained away
To prismed islands far away.
Grey clouds, grey sea, grey rain, grey day,
This leaden rainbow in the spray
’s a covenant from God to say
That grey will rule the earth one day.

I like this place, I like this grey,
Well-handled, useful, everyday,
Familiar, dull ; I like the way
It flaunts its taste for brazen grey,
And kicks its turquoise shoes away,
Exchanging flaming gold lamé
For army surplus service grey.
But most of all I like the way
This lack of colour seems to say
This disappointing world’s OK,
Not black or white but mostly grey,
And that the spectrum of dismay
Contains no blue at all, just grey, just grey.

Just As Blue

A breezeless, sunny, Summer day
At Brooke House Farm, and I’m just four
Or five, a town-mouse come to stay,
Homesick perhaps, and not so sure
About this world that’s fierce and strange
And full of things from story-books :
The giant oven in the range,
The furnace doors I must not touch,

The home-made broom outside the door,
The baking smells of gingerbread,
And everywhere the friendly, raw
Tobacco smell of Uncle Fred ;
The cellar with its froggy holes,
A fox head stuffed with marble eyes,
The fences hung with rats and moles ;
The piglet wriggles in the sties,

The shippon gloom of dust and straw,
The diesel stink of old machines,
The high-pitched smell of fresh manure,
The dairy’s chapel quiet, its clean
And polished, buttered, sunshine taste ;
The angry, barking dogs on chains
Whose unleashed fury must be faced
If I’m to venture down the lane.

But here, against the haystack sides,
A ladder climbs to heaven knows where,
A stair up which, half terrified,
I slither backwards into air,
Till half way up the clouds unfold
Their magic carpet in the skies,
A square of blue enframed with gold,
A vast and roofless blue surprise.

How close the sky appears from here.
No child could ever paint such blue
As this, an endless, hurting, clear
And lovely, lonely, trespassed view.
Within this blue I’ve built a den,
A musty house of bales of straw
To keep out stupid one-eyed hens,
And hungry wolves outside the door.

How dreamy still and quiet it seems,
As though the giant world is curled
Asleep and I’m inside a dream
Of bean-stalks far above the world,
Where hay bales might be spun to gold,
And happy endings are all true,
Where little pigs do not grow old,
And skies are always just as blue.

As if I’ve had this dream before,
Down tunnels made with itching legs
I reach to find, within the straw,
A clutch of warm and feathered eggs,
Like magic beans which only grow
When all the grown-ups are in bed,
Which lead to where all children know
They grind your bones to make their bread.

The sleepy world below now stirs -
The milking stalls’ electric hum,
A distant tractor’s muddy purrs,
The background mumble of the glum
Suspicious cows, as they’re pursued
By Fe-fi-fo-ing dogs and men.
It’s time to leave this solitude,
The giant world’s awake again.

The Baron Munchausen Bar, Sofia

‘We drink, we sing with recklessness,
We snarl against the tyrant foe,
The taverns are too small for us,
"To the mountains we shall go."’
Hristo Botev

for Bill Herbert

You follow the yellow-brick road through the snow,
Past the topless young girls on the highway,
Through Horrible Valley and Terrible Pass
Till at last you will come to a doorway.

It’s tucked between Schweik’s and Flanagan’s Bar,
Down a side-street of uneven cobbles,
But once you’re inside you know you’re with friends
Who will help you forget all your troubles.

Inside it’s so crowded and smoky and dark
That you can’t tell one hand from the other;
Here a Yes means a No and a No means a Yes,
And the neighbouring sexes mean either.

You hang up your hang ups just inside the door
In exchange for a small token gesture,
Sly Peter will offer to buy you a beer
And ask you to drink to the future.

And after a while you can see that it’s full
Of artists in shades and black leather,
Like talking heads chained in the inferno-dark
They talk of new sins and old lovers.

Here the bar-maids are lovely as Catherine the Great,
And the beer tastes as cold as the Iskar;
On TV the football is never nil-nil,
And the Hristos are wrapping up Moskva.

And the peppers are red as CSKA shirts,
And the vegetable soup is near solid
With the flesh of the Chopski, that gentlest of tribes
Who taught us all how to make salad.

Here the regulars vote for a fairy-tale-king,
Who it’s rumoured supports Barcelona,
He doesn’t like children but comes in to drink
With the tough-looking boys in the corner.

Each night if you want you can drink the bar dry
As long as the Baron has credit,
Though the menu’s as large as the Vitosha hills,
The bill is so small you can’t read it.

If ever you leave here (and some never do)
You will find that the snow is still falling,
In Batenberg Square they’ve forgotten the date,
And the frozen tongued bells have stopped pealing;

And the skate-boarders spin round the partisan dead
In the gardens on Boulevard Levski,
And the tomb of Dimitrov’s been swapped overnight
For an oversize bottle of whisky;

And the past is as clean as the streets under snow,
And everyone’s tired and sleepy,
And the future’s as bright as the man in the moon,
And freedom makes everyone happy;

And the statues outside are stiff with the cold,
And the girls by the road are still topless;
And the children of beggars are sleeping outside,
And the cold constellations are helpless.

The Baron untethers one half of his horse
Which he tied to an Orthodox steeple,
And wishes you all a merry good night
As he flies off to Constantinople.

Some say he’s a con-man, some say he’s for real,
Some say that the Baron’s in earnest,
But don’t take my word for it, go there yourself -
You’ll never believe it all. Honest.

Zoology

Beware the wolves who hunt in packs,
The snake’s insinuating smile,
The low-browed, strong-armed silverbacks,
The sympathetic crocodile;
Avoid the vultures’ scrounging gaze
The tiger playing with his food,
The magpie’s flashy, thieving ways,
The leopard in a hungry mood;
Beware the lizards’ sleepless eyes,
The grizzly dozing in the straw,
The piglets rooting in their sties,
The jungle stink of carnivore;
Stay clear of keepers jangling keys,
The crazy dogs who bark at night,
The laughter of the chimpanzees,
The paws that scratch, the jaws that bite.

But most of all, beware the law
That rattles at the window bars,
The food-chain red in tooth and claw
Of those that hunt beneath the stars,
The moon-lit siren calls of home
Which draw all creatures great and small
To where those midnight monsters roam
That lie in wait, beyond the wall.

An Offer You Can’t Refuse

‘If sharks ruled the world they would teach the little fish that it is a great honour to swim into the mouth of a shark.’
Brecht

for Mike and Anna Wilson

As the actress takes the curtain
They are cheering in the stalls,
Mack the Knife is out of town, dear,
Though his name’s sprayed on the walls.

O the shark has pretty teeth, dear,
And he shows them pearly white,
On the east side of this town, dear,
You can walk home safe at night.

Here the shark is just a story,
Some old song about some teeth,
Though there’s some who think that freedom’s
Just a name for old Macheath.

On the radio, Sunday morning,
Frank Sinatra swings this town;
You had better watch your back, dear,
When the walls start tumbling down.

Now the banks are full of money
And the streets are full of life;
Who’s that sneaking round the corner -
Is that someone Mack the Knife?

All the ladies love a blade, dear,
And the whole world loves a knave,
But he’ll leave you lying bleeding
And he’ll put you in your grave.

You are free to spend your savings
On expensive merchandise,
And you’re free to walk the streets, dear -
Every freedom has its price.

When the shark bites with his teeth, dear,
Scarlet billows start to spread,
On the streets young men are shouting,
Foreign students turn up dead.

Now the knives are coming out, dear,
And the sharp suits cut like glass,
And there’s beggars in the subways
On the razor edge of class.

Unemployment keeps on rising,
While the dole keeps going down -
Oh, the line forms on the right, dear,
Now that Mackie, good old Mackie,
Now that Mackie is back in town.

Too Much

in memoriam, Geoff Croft

You always were too big, too tall, too loud,
The sort of man who took up too much space,
Who couldn’t help but stand out in a crowd,
The kind of Dad who was always on my case,
But as I watched you whittled with each breath,
Belittled by both cancer and its cure,
I needed you still louder than before,
As large as life and larger still than death.

You always were too big, too loud, too tall,
The sort of man who never seemed to stop,
Beside whom other fathers seemed so small,
The kind of Dad I’d call over the top.
But as I watched you lying there so still,
I could not fail to understand the size
Of what I’ve lost in you, to realise
How huge a gap you’ve left for me to fill.

Idiot Snow

for Sergei, Yuri and Olga

This sky’s a foreign language
Whose native speakers know
It takes the earth’s thesaurus
To catch the falling snow.
As well as try translating
The way the weather talks -
In Russian verbs of motion
Snow doesn’t fall, it walks.
It ambles, shambles, gambols,
It sidles, idles, creeps,
It bounces, pounces, flounces,
It pirouettes and leaps,
It does the hokey-cokey,
The twist, the cha-cha-cha
In a silent karaoke
In Snegurochka’s Bar.

Small children play at statues
Outside the ice-carved shops
Till everybody freezes,
And when the music stops
The speechless world is deafened
By the ringing in our ears
Like underwater singing
Or the music of the spheres.
The sound of snowflakes walking
Through Kemerovo at night
Would silence anyone who doubts
That happiness writes white,
The colour of the senses
At ten degrees below,
Where no matter what the question is,
The answer’s always snow.

They Think it’s All Over

And so our first group-game is finished,
Another World Cup tale begins.
With optimism undiminished
We hope that this time England wins,
And that just maybe Peter Crouch is
The man to pin us to our couches,
And end the forty years of hurt
That comes with every England shirt.
And yet there can be few supporters
Who really are in any doubt
About the way this will turn out;
By now experience has taught us
That hope’s a dangerous burden, which
Has no place on a football pitch.

The wrong side of the years of plenty,
We make the best of what remains.
With luck, for me, another twenty -
At least five more World Cup campaigns!
Although I don’t think for one minute
That’s long enough for us to win it,
I’ve long learned how to live in hope
(How else could I have learned to cope
With Englishness?) The generation
That still remembers Moore and Hurst,
Who’ve grown up to expect the worst
Can sometimes fall for the temptation
To mistake England for the fans
Whose tabloid colours deck their vans.

For those who landed on the planet
In ‘56, we chose a time
In which, no matter how you scan it
A word like Victory just won’t rhyme.
Five decades of imperial slaughter
Is quite enough for this supporter;
From Suez Crisis to Iraq
Old England’s never lost the knack
Of picking fights with Third World nations.
A grisly time in which to spend
One’s time on earth. I can’t pretend
That there are many consolations -
At least as far as I can tell -
Except that you were here as well.

I’m probably suffering from depression,
Brought on by turning one more page
In life’s thin book, but my impression
Is that my friends don’t seem to age.
My oldest mates are always youthful -
No, please don’t laugh - I’m being truthful!
Still hanging round in student pubs,
In parties, staff-rooms, classes, Cubs,
In Sunday-school and Party meeting,
On five-a-side courts, clapped-out cars,
In prison, readings, Russian bars -
Though art is long and life is fleeting,
There’s few things that can measure us
The way that friendship’s time-piece does.

I’m glad that you’ve been here to share it.
Without such friends, it would have been
Impossible sometimes to bear it.
A half a century lived between
High expectation and disaster
Is more than any one can master.
The years spent watching England play
And all we’ve won is sweet F.A.
And yet within this summer garden
There is another England here,
Defined by comradeship and beer;
My country’s here, not Baden-Baden,
With you, the friends who’ll cheer me up -
When England exit the World Cup.

June 2006

Song of the Banya

‘Not enough bathhouses, not enough soap.’
(Vladimir Mayakovsky)

In this city of well-dressed ambition
It is hard to peel off from the dance,
But here in the Banya, we say do svidanya
To all of that hustle and hassle and bustle -
For once in the Banya,
You’ve nothing to lose but your pants. Hey!

Hit me with your venik stick,
Hit me! Hit me!

As long as you’re stark bollock naked
You can stay in the Banya all day,
The fat and the skinny, the max and the mini,
The lean and the gristly, the clean and the bristly,
We sit in the Banya
And sweat all our troubles away. Hey!

Hit me with your venik stick,
Hit me! Hit me!

The Banya asks nobody questions,
The Banya tells nobody lies,
You jump in the water, your manhood gets shorter,
You walk in a mobster and crawl out a lobster,
The god of the Banya
Cuts every man right down to size. Hey!

Hit me with your venik stick,
Hit me! Hit me!

There’s only one rule in the Banya,
Enlightened self-interest’s our cause,
You may be quite podgy, you may look right dodgy
Be sick and unhealthy, or virile and wealthy,
But here in the Banya -
If you scrub my back, I’ll scrub yours. Hey!

Hit me with your venik stick,
Hit me! Hit me!

The Banya treats all men as brothers,
The wise man, the fool and the knave,
No matter how ruthful or truthful you may be,
No matter how youthful you were as a baby,
Outside of the Banya
The next place we’re equal’s the grave. Hey!

Hit me with your venik stick,
Hit me! Hit me!

One member one soap is our slogan,
Uniting the whole human race,
Once step through the door you can’t tell the dirt poor
From the man with the itch to become stinking rich -
If the world was a Banya
It wouldn’t be such a foul place. Hey!

Hit me with your venik stick,
Hit me! Hit me!

Metronomic

‘In the morning I go down in the Metro
There my underground life runs away.’
(Valery Syutkin)

Three hundred feet below the ground,
The Circle Line goes round and round,
De-clunk de-da, de-clunk de-da,
Four syllables to every bar.
‘Dear Passengers,’ the tannoy says,
Uncomradely, though polished phrase
In regular paeonic feet
That fits the Metro rush-hour beat
Of workers paid to feed machines.
The male voice on the tannoy means
We’re ticking clockwise round the stain
Of Stalin’s coffee cup again;
An urgent metre, keeping time,
To which we nod our heads in rhyme
And mark the stress for emphasis,
Rabotniks from Metropolis,
Or clockwork soldiers on parade;
A rhythm made to be obeyed
By veterans with medalled chests,
And Moscow girls with perfect breasts,
And Moscow girls with almond eyes,
And businessmen in suits and ties,
And college kids who text and text
Between one station and the next:
I’m on the train, I’m on the train
I’m on the train, I’m on the train…

Linda's poems

2009-01-13T10:51:00.003Z

North and South

Back in 1962 the world was
A foreign place I was just beginning
To feel at home in. I’d mouth and tongue sounds
My ears heard – Mam’s clipped consonants, big sisters’
Sing-song vowels. And people understood.

Then one night was a dream of a red room
With wheels that kept me awake, stars spelling
South. South. South, where it never snowed and we
Would live in a nice new house and I would
Go to a nice new school.
No one warned me.

Hamworthy Primary was full of kids
With straw between their teeth that made them sound
Like lazy cows. Where I came from the talk
Was quick as flocking birds. We laughed out loud –
No sneering behind hands, with rolling eyes.
Who’s her? I cried inarticulate tears.

To survive, I had no choice but to try
To make my mouth echo back their fat ain’ts,
Become a chewing cow; or at least pretend.
I parroted their slow accents, even
Though the long feathers never really fit.
I plucked them out, the first chance I got;
But discovered I’d also lost, mid-flight,
My native accent I thought was bone.

In its place was this anonymous voice,
That sounds, to me, as if it belongs to
Someone else; feels two or three sizes too large.
The words and the spaces between the words
Ring with false echoes, false compass points.

*

Elementary
for Rufus

I ask my son what he knows of earth,
of properties of metal,
the rings in the heart of wood,
what shapes he can trace in air,
how deep is the blue of water;
remind him to take care with fire.

He has a dangerous fondness for fire,
my son, learning the lessons of earth;
knows magnets are science, metal,
observes their attraction through water.
He’s aware that a kite, and he, needs air,
the paper he’s miss so much is wood.

We scramble hand in hand through the wood
near our house, feeling the damp earth
spring under our feet, the lapping of water
in the silence. The cold air
makes him cough so we go home to the fire,
welcomed by kettle’s singing metal.

His toys are plastic; mine were metal,
with sharp corners. They rusted in water.
Now the fashion’s back for wood,
carved and painted trains, trucks and fire-
engines. Things have changed. This earth
I thought I knew, and love, is mutable as air.

My son was four the year the air
blew from the east, poisoned by fire,
a fire kindled with no wood.
The smell of my sweat was metal.
We couldn’t trust rain, milk or earth,
were afraid to drink the water.

He loves to play in water
and I to watch him, in the tenuous air
of summers. I lean against knotted wood,
by the river glinting metal.
As certain as flames in fire
we’re held in the breath of earth.

I pray to the gods of air, goddesses of wood
and water, that he’ll be saved from fire,
and save, like precious metal, all he knows of earth.

*

The Lady’s Mantle Letter

She will write him a letter to tell him
how cool and wet her garden is this July,
how beautiful the alchemilla is,
a strange citrus, petal-less froth above
the green nearly-circles of the fanned leaves.

They are the shape of its other name –
Lady’s Mantle – an outspread cloak, pleats
stitched with pearls of dew, scallop-edged;
designed for wrapping and unwrapping,
a honey-scented aphrodisiac.

‘Alchemilla’ is after ‘alchemy’ –
the magic water breathes through its leaves
part of the ancient recipe for melting
metals into gold. She will tell him
what waiting is and what it isn’t.

She will write him a letter to tell him
these things because she’s feeling inside out
and he’s not there to unwrap her, wrap her
in his pashmina arms; and because
it’s him she’s thinking about when, by chance,

she places three stems of purple crane’s bill
in the same vase and catches the shock
of both flowers growing more alive,
their colours spilling into something new.
She will tell him how soft the rain is.

*

The House With No Doors

If this were a dream, you’d understand it
better – if you’d come home from a hot place,

your skin rare and fragile as burnt coral,
to a house with no doors, an Escher sketch,

somebody’s idea of a joke; to Janus
squatting on every threshold, sticking out

his two tongues, the mad arrows of his eyes –
all his gate-keeper’s laws of in and out

broken, no rhetoric to match this brazen
free-fall yawn. Every room melted into

one room, even the stairs are going nowhere,
open-plan. The pitch of it isn’t cricket –

nothing to whisper behind, to cover
your lies, your nakedness. No brass apples

to cider your palm. No click behind you
like the silence around the sound of your name.

All the colours collide and crash. All your screws
are loose. Packets and cans fly off the shelves

in the pantry onto your bed. The bath
is full of aspidistra and clockwork clowns.

Even the dog loses her nose for smells
spilling out beyond their compass – woodsmoke

and rose, garlic and toothpaste. Your house
is half-finished, undone, no longer home.

The wind has sucked away all it sweetness.
You can’t translate this word you know is empty

but see it in the ghosts of children’s shoes,
the blunt morse code of the droppings of mice.

When is a door not a door? When it’s a jar
of air, unhinged and gaping, a keening mouth.

Or the cave of your body, the trembling
ventricles of your inconsolable heart.

See how you’ve grown so used to this is this
and that is that, you can’t live with just so,

the implacable flow of the one
and the same. Enough. Let all the doors

which aren’t there be open. Let the key be
your breath as you watch it furnish your only room.

*

Bodhisattva

See how her eyes are like gulls, gliding
across the white mist of her face.
Or whales swimming in the deep of it.
So liquid is her skin, her hair hesitates
to begin. Her nose studies the curled petals
of her tiny lips and decides to name
everything lotus and lily and open.

What can you do with a woman like that
but lay your head in her lap and breathe
the heat from her belly, the in, the out of it?
Bring her the courage of your sadness
because that’s all you have left and let
the calm weight of her hand soothe you,
her total absence of drama and façade.

The map around your sternum you try to keep fixed
she melts, matching you breath for breath.
You are molten gold, older than angel hair.
You’ve lost all your edges. Which one
of you lifts up her head? Borrow her crown,
those flames. Your neck will be a column of air.
Wish all the people wisdom, wish them well.

*

The Goose and the Bottle

There is a goose inside a bottle.
There is a bottle with a goose inside.
How does the goose get out of the bottle?
How does the goose stay alive?
How does the bottle stay unbroken?
Where is the goose? Where is the bottle?
You are the goose. You are the bottle.
You are the goose inside the bottle.
Close your eyes: the goose is inside the bottle.
Say it: the goose is out of the bottle.
Believe it: the bottle is not broken, the goose alive.
Open your eyes: the goose is out of the bottle.
There is the goose. There is the bottle.
You have become the goose out of the bottle.
You are not broken. You are alive.

*

The Break

If you’re lucky there will always be
a white horse called Pandora who’ll rear
and throw you so you can’t get up and walk

away. Where did you think you were going?
That circus trick of not covering your eyes
when Pandora cries Look! Can’t you see

you’re in danger? Still you try, studying
so hard how to mend one thing, no inkling
of what else might be broken. You carry

your fractures around like a bad smell
you imagine is coming from the rooms
you walk through, the people you talk to.

Everything tastes sour on your tongue,
and you lose your appetite. Easy
to fall from there to where all of you

is aching. Until you crack open
like an egg, spilling the gold you must lay out
and count, your wound’s treasure. Only here,

your shell smashed, can the healing start;
like a myth about horses, the print
of hooves in sand. And you see nothing

is what you think it is; nothing to do
with you and what you know. It hurts
and will always hurt; and you’re utterly changed

by it. And it’s all this: steady,
as the breath that breathes you, that only needs
you to be there, tall in the saddle.

*

Moonshine

Even in the middle of saying it
I know the argument my lips
are trying to convince themselves of –
and you, of course – is fragile
as a web strung with dew,
jewel for just one morning,
air’s own fibres made visible.

Not to mention the autopsy
of words and sentences – laying
them out on the slab of my head,
picking them over for evidence
of violence, pretence, some weakness
I take out of the dark to make
sure I’m not sure about.

The brightest knowing happens
in silence, alone, those empty
spaces where I can notice how
things begin and bring their own
ending: the same way I watch
the coming and going of the moon,
enchanted by borrowed light.

*

Bowl

Heavy, cold, dark – what the earth
knows of itself – I sweeten with water,

watch it soften, cohere, lean into
a new smoothness, the deep courage

of form. Whose hand is coaxing,
easing clod into circle, hand

answering hand? Together we are
making a hemisphere, a map of the sky,

known and unknown caught in the lip
of what fire will teach me to call

bowl, a vessel that will crack
and be mended, crack and be mended,

always empty, even when I fill it full
of whatever light there is, shadowfall.

*

Your Hands and the House Martin

A ruffle of feather summons you to the top
of the stairs, fingers sweeping over cold
painted plaster, that scar where the banister
used to be. The bathroom’s a cage for
a curious house martin, diving against glass.

Your hands might be wings, snatching at air,
scattering dust until they find the bird and make
a nest for its oily velvet, its panicked breath.
You fill your braided fingers with fearlessness
and, out in the garden, unlock them, let them fly.

Markov wins medal!

2009-01-13T10:45:00.003Z

From Mark:

Have you heard this news?

poetryeurope

'The first winner of the Medal of the European Academy of Poetry has been awarded to the Bulgarian poet Toma Markov. The medal is awarded once a year to a poet under the age of 40, selected by the Academy for the excellence and promise of the work. Markov was born in Bulgaria in 1972, has won the Bulgarian National Prize for Poetry and has published several collections of his work.

The medal will be presented to Toma Markov in Luxembourg at the Academy's events on 24th and 25th April 2009, when Markov will read from his work.'

From Bill:

Go Toma! (Or, as we used to say, 'Turn up, Toma!')

No Gas Worries!

2009-01-13T08:02:00.002Z

Just to announce, that "Velina"-hotel is independent from the Russian gas, since the heating system there uses hot water and mazut:)
So, it means that we're going to enter a kind of "Dekameron"-experince, while the whole country is freezing...
Feel Chosen!

Mark divvn't knaa

2009-01-12T11:56:00.001Z

Here are the ten poems I've chosen for translation. They include a number from a sequence called The Dunno Elegies, which has within its title a pun on Rilke's Duino Elegies (from which some of the images stem) and the shoulder-shrugging way of saying 'Don't Know'. I'll be interested to see what our translators make of that! It is all work from an as yet unpublished book, though some of the other poems have been anthologised. One is Bulgaria-related.

The Dunno Elegies: One

Angel of the North, Gateshead
for Mick Henry

What use are angels when the wind blows back
our sighs with the sand? What use this song, nosing
through undergrowth like a dog roots out smells,
tired of its own hot-blooded clichés, bored
with knowing how lost and forgetful we are
here in this reciphered, recycled world.
If we knew how terrible it would feel
to be reminded that beauty exists
just a fleet moment from the walkers’ path,
in mould on a leaf or mud in a footprint,
what would we do, would breath catch or guilt grip?

No, if I were to shout, now, on this hill
above the Team Valley Business Park,
how many angels would hear it? How many
would care that my grief had blown their cover?
The change in my pocket occupies me
for a cold minute or two. The sobbing dark
chokes on my whistling, a tune that visits
and then forgets to leave. Forgive me.
I only mean to console myself.
This is a song for my mother, the past,
an echo I hear of a better world,
a trail worn out of knotted grass, folly
that pushes you on into the woods,
a place torn down that started again,
dark native mud still on its boots,
unilluminated wings stretched out.
Magpies croon and croak and try to catch it,
trees sway bare and brown, wind-blown hedges mime
the river rushing seawards holding its breath
while it takes in this hopeful new song.

The angel rusts a welcome to its brothers,
its wings embrace prayers, its sore heart escapes
the buried pithead in a gasp of song,
over the seasoned museum of the land
where the worm is king, turning like a screw
in a rawlplug, a braddle into wet bark.
The keening rises on the valley’s thermals,
rolling and tumbling into low hinterland.

But there are shadows left even by angels,
where the coal sleeps soundly, silent miles down.
The wild coast between here, there, now and then
is not so solid as it used to be.
This song was only meant to warm the air.
If it could do more it would be unbearable.
There are things only angels can forgive

The Dunno Elegies: Three

On Hadrian’s Wall
for Linda Tuttiett

The rain is running late, eighteen words for it
loose on a hillside, different tongues
boiling down what it means to be English
by clambering over some ancient stones.
The morning has blown in through a dank blur,
as if covered in moss, a hangover
worming its sorry way home to sleep.

This is bleak, a line scratched into the earth
to show the angels just who’s in charge,
a long wall walked in early morning mist,
catching shadows as they take human form
and try to be like us. The fields suck light
out of the sky and turn it into mud.
Shoulder to shoulder the hills form circles,
block out the countries we’d otherwise see.
All the angels here have swords and curses
they teach each other in the early hours.
They left few descendants to freeze here
in the grim far North, but never went home.
They dream of desert sun and of water.
All they have is rain, the endless sound of it.

What letters do they write home in their heads?
What bitter visions do they describe
from their short foreign days in the wind?
They didn’t know that they were building
a heritage for a fortress empire.
They were doing what they were told, but now
they are angelic, whatever their tribe,
and they walk amongst foolhardy tourists
in their fleece-lined jackets and woolly hats,
whisper in the ears of bright young women
those eighteen words for rain, and more for love,
love that would warm the bones, the aching bones.

Is that what survives the never-ending wind,
what divides us into those on the list
and those waiting outside for a friend with clout?
Nothing else is happening here: just sheep
counting themselves to sleep, demonstrating
the random nature of migration,
as a chain-smoking Italian teenager
brings down a bird with a flick of the wrist
and an unbecoming stone’s swift flight.

The Dunno Elegies: Nine

Teesport, Redcar

Rolling picture of the utterly here,
land still in turmoil as markets crash,
morphing and merging in hostile arrangements
when old certainties just evaporate
like red steam leaking from pressured globes
at the heart of networks of private roads.
All the power that once was here changed.
Iron made a place appear overnight,
now it is rusting the water ochre.
Ore in these dark hills, a dance in the pipe-work.
An endless mess of goods trains shuffles
through imitations of illuminations,
past stone-tongued fire-eaters and fireworks
burning messages into the heavens.
Our children wheeze, and tiny angels
keep them company in their fragile games.
This is a blank land of grey-faced fences,
barbed wire barriers and strengthened steel.
It scrubs its face raw because it is proud,
and it wants the world to be orderly.
Though the angels on the backs of trains
think it looks so shiningly chaotic
something good must come from its blissful rush,
the wind tastes bitter, chemical, beaten.
You can see its shape from Redcar beach,
nourish a warm dream of Holy Island,
so far to the North the light is different.
There is quiet there, and cleaner daylight,
permanent beside the gulls’ plainsong.

But here, gates are locked, one by one
companies become simple history.
Too many to list, those that are gone.
Molten, the angels that record their names.

The Dunno Elegies: Ten

Fitness First, Eaglescliffe

I am no good at thinking. I am only good
at noting things down and putting one foot
in front of another for a long time.
That’s what this gym is for, energy
passing from my legs into the treadmill
into the cold earth, the brownfield site
that lies beneath the car park and our feet.
Staring down the mirrored middle-distance
pains put to one side, and death just a myth,
this joyous suffering seeks a resting place.
I put grief aside, can think of the lost
without tears so long as I keep moving.
I think I am somehow making the earth turn.
If I do it quickly enough better words will come,
these sudden gusts of grief and remembrance
will be as welcome as wind on a beach.

Except our feet do not touch the ground,
our feet float somewhere just above the dirt.
I can hear voices, I can hear voices
in my head as I count the steps I make,
as I check off left then right then left again
then again then again then again until,
I look up at the wall of mirrors ahead
and see the angels walking the aisles
between the machines, shaking their heads.

These factory boys cannot believe us.
A room full of heat, lines of effort and hope,
calm self-deception, wild reassessment –
panting none can hear through our headphones,
or over machines’ arrhythmic heartbeat
filling the eaves like a kind of song.
Glances cross in the mirror, sizing up
an undertow of exposure, openness
to anything but a conversation.
Brows dip under the weight of sweat,
heads nod, shoulders rock, into a body
of lone people not communicating.
The crescendo we do not hear gets worse.

The women angels me-mo across the rows,
lips and eyes exaggerate the clarity
of their conclusions, their bemused anger,
no more than a whisper in the room
but a metallic scream in the glass.
Endurance wasn’t built in a day, it says
on the wall. They are killing themselves laughing.
They run their hands over the rails and the seats
looking for the joins, for how things are made.

My legs are moving only out of habit,
my brain frozen. A voice in my headphones speaks.

It’s not the absence of what we’ve lost
that redefines us, but the echo,
not a betrayal, but a warm embrace,
wings and chest calming the song to silence.
What is here overwhelms. So stop running.

My Name is Mark and
after Charles Bernstein

I am a northern poet, a northwestern poet,
a northeastern poet, a Stockton poet,
a Preston poet, a Teesside poet,
a domestic poet, a political poet,
an evasive poet, a formal poet, an ex-
perimental poet, a reflective poet, a strategic poet,
a part-time poet, an evenings and weekends poet,
a 24 hour party poet, a performance poet,
a preschool poet, a streetwise poet,
a smart arse poet, a wry poet,
a real poet, a male poet, people’s poet,
a blue poet, a red poet, a green poet,
a black-white-and-read-all-over poet,
a ready made poet, a donkey of a poet,
I am a love poet in the morning,
a darkly comic poet over lunch,
a post-prandial second language poet,
a crispy edge of the lasagne poet at teatime,
a pop poet watching the telly,
and an interrogative poet in the sack,
I am a creative poet, a restricted poet,
a poet making the most of slender means,
a listed poet, a candidate poet,
a could-have-been-a-contender poet,
a difficult decision making poet,
a young poet, a poet with a maturing voice,
a gritty poet, a can-I-take-it-to the-bridge-
yeah-go-on-take-it-to-the-bridge poet,
an anti-poet, a poet who hates beauty
for its own sake and its own good,
a poet after Auschwitz and the poet who
put the ram in the ramalamadingdong,
I am a vernacular poet, a poet
of exquisite juxtapositions,
a poet inhabited by inhibition,
I am a poet with a mission,
a missionary poet with a million positions,
a beat poet, jazz poet, spoken word poet,
I am an ironic poet, a post-punk poet,
a just-add-boiling-water poet,
a poet with attitude, a fraudulent poet,
a situationist poet, a dead poet,
a situation-communist poet,
I am an accessible poet, I am a poet
banging a tambourine, I am a poet with a headache.
backache and an indefinable langour,
a terminal case of ennui,
I am a discursive poet, a generative poet,
an imagist who scorns the sketch,
a poet driven by the need for results,
a leaving poems poet, a birth of your child poet
a research poet, a poet ever puzzled,
a product poet, a process poet,
an executive Top Management Poet,
I am a terraced house poet, a pacifist
terrorist poet with a pillowful of feathers,
an erotic poet, a dream poet, a dream-song-sung-blue poet,
a poet without a home, a poet in his place,
a poet crying for mother and apple pie,
a stir-fried tofu poet, a white bread black pudding poet,
I am a poet in the field, a poet at large,
a systems poet, a computer generated poet,
a small press poet, a hard pressed poet,
a depressed poet, a suppressed poet,
a poet reeling with surprise and delight,
a husband poet, son poet, brother poet,
dad poet, a dadaist poet, a sudden movement poet,
a martian poet, a poet behaving badly,
a talkin-‘bout-my-generation poet,
a post-post-post-post-post poet,
a modernist poet in the market place,
a gnomic poet on the street corner,
a never-going-to-be-on-the-South-Bank-Show poet,
a tea-time local news poet, a tense poet,
a speak my weight poet, an eat my words poet,
an educated poet, a philistine poet,
an aesthetic principles don’t butter the bread poet,
a poetry boom revival poet, a dusty corner poet,
a shabbier the better poet, an alphabetical order poet,
a dictionary poet, a tip of the tongue poet,
a poet in a mess, a you-hum-it-I’ll-play-it poet,
a stop-this-poem-I-want-to-get-off poet.

How I learned to sing

The day spins like a plate on a pole,
sunlight streaming down and around us,
carving shadows out of the beach.
A snag of mishaps has shaped mum’s face
into a taut parody of itself.
We are sent to find crabs, in pools
where we have not seen a crab for years.
The sea is a vein in the estuary,
the tide coming in a race memory,
and stranded pools dot the sand
with water still so cold it cramps
our calves before we can fight.
Then my sister is suddenly dancing,
splashing towards me with her discovery,
a small pink starfish she waves
in my dumbstruck face.
Though she is smaller, I can’t reach it,
she ducks and swerves away
like the memory of it now.
I can’t reach her, mum and dad
are too far back to help, but
I want that starfish, want to run
my fingers over its serrations,
pop it in my pocket to frighten
my mum with as we wipe sand
from between our toes later.
I start to scream at my sister,
first words and then just noises,
and the gulls turn from pencil flicks
to real birds with real blood
rushing beneath sharp feathers,
claws asking my shirt whether
it will rip or be carried off,
and now my voice has gone soft
and crying for what I can’t get
I feel my wings rise and set,
the gulls craws and my own throat
harmonise as I pale and float
up and over the docile waves,
not worrying, or wanting to be saved,
looking down on the strip of beach
at the family I could not reach,
and singing back back back.

Where Thinking Got Me

It was ideas cut my chest tight.
The dusk sang me ragged,
wrang me dry as salt.

Hollow backed with hunger
I held the face in the mirror
steady, simple as a toy box,

while I sweat myself some air.
Three deep sweet breaths
made my young neck flush

when some sudden consolation
wrapped me in papier maché,
delivered me into stereo,

then made me run everything
I’d ever done again, backwards,
all the way home.

Poem (On Realising I am English)

‘The important thing is to adapt your dish of spaghetti
to circumstances and your state of mind.’
Guiseppe Marotta

In the parallel universe where wizened Corsicans
rave over suet dumplings and rapturously murmur
improvised sonnets in praise of stotty,
barm cake, bloomer, cob, scone (to rhyme with gone)

no one would criticise me for never mentioning
the real grievance at the heart of this poem.
I’d be lauded for the tightness of my lip,
for the way you feel my teeth grit and grind,

for how I shrug off questions with a joke
about the endless spouting of emotion
I waded through to get here.

I think this as the glaze of a first pressing
spreads its lucent green over the frying pan,
ready to spit at the very suggestion of an onion.

Going

I recall it now as it will be then:
stillness suddenly present overhead
and the earth twitching madly beneath my feet,
a Thursday beaten with sticks and sickly sweet.

I will leave behind a half hummable tune,
and messages etched in the soles of my shoes.
Brickwork kicked into chunks by the gate
suggest what happened happened too late.

A Thursday when dark fades in before three,
still years from a breath of the weekend,
I will go, eyes open, not awash with pain,
but wanting them to wish I crop up again.

It will rain as they wake to how I'm not there,
as train-rattle piles through the evening air
that holds my silence and stills my tongue
as our garden fills and swells with its song.

Return

'It is better to be in love with your wife
than to be in love with your poetry'
- Toma Markov

1.
air like a lump in the throat
in this dark haired city
if a horse could lay pumpkins
they'd be like those piled high
on market stalls at Sitnyakovo
and I'd be full of ginger carrying
my swollen heart home to bake

2.
This is a long fever, secret like a wish,
pale as you and flowers in its miracle heat.
It is close to mute, and lies snug in our palms in the dark.

So quietly new is it even now a breath might break
to talk of heart, hope, and then hold still
while our blood runs hot again,

guessing how every dry afternoon would feel
if this flush didn't warm the air,
didn't catch us falling into balance.

3.
Of many parallel worlds
I choose this one.

The Sheep's Intestine and the Human Sestina

2009-01-10T12:46:00.006Z

Linda, Mark, Andy and I met on Friday morning and discussed which poems to send, when to do the reading, and how to get through the work.

We'll be sending the poems over the weekend -- each of us sending 10 to everyone. But we'll bring books too, in case other pieces suggest themselves as better options. We discussed how this book could be a conscious reflection of A Balkan Exchange, with us providing mini-selecteds that were both indicative of recent work, and snapshots of the way writers from the NE exemplify certain aspects of poetry in the UK.

What exactly those aspects are will no doubt become clearer when I post the selections on here -- or at least will become debatable.

We agreed with Nadya's most recent email that the reading should come at the end, on the 24th, in Sofia -- that way it can be a celebration of work done, rather than an anticipation of work to be attempted. We noted with badly-concealed snickers that it would be in a bar called The Sheep, hence fulfilling the requirement of being a sort of Burns Supper, since much of that is concerned with the innards of the ovine.

(Now I feel obliged to put in my most recent Burns poem from the Polygon book for our friends to strachil with my Scots...)

We also had a discussion about how to work, given Georgi is only present by email/chat. We wondered whether anyone else would be there, as Boris was in Newcastle? If not, we wondered about trying one to one, a la Poet to Poet's translating sessions, with the 'spare' UK poet sitting in on sessions throughout the day, and everyone coming together to discuss progress in the evening.

Georgi could 'sit in' on sessions via chat, and receive working drafts at the evening session to feed back to us all on. We'd alternate who was the spare UK poet on a daily basis, and also who was working one to one with whom.

Nadya replied last night as follows:

'I agree with the idea of working in two-s, not in four-s. Just I have a suggestion to change couples every half a day. For example: in the morning session (10-13) Kristin and Andy, Vassil and Linda, me and you, Mark-free; in the afternoon session (14-17) Kristin and Mark, Vassil and you, me and Linda, Andy-free; in the evening session (17.30-19) - general discussion. Since we have five days for work, it means that each of the British poets will have approximately 8 sessions, which might cover most of the work that has to be done...'

I thought we could make pattern out of this almost like a human sestina:

eg Day 1

Kristin/Andy, Vassil/Linda, Nadya/Bill, Mark,
Kristin/Mark, Vassil/Andy, Nadya/Linda, Bill.

and so on...

Balneology for Bongo

2009-01-07T11:03:00.003Z

Despite my previous remarks about skiing, it would appear we are heading to a leading centre of balneology. We shall see whether translation can be done whilst in a Laconium, though this may be dependent on whether Russia restores the gas supply.

(Whilst I was in Guangzhou a couple of years ago, I visited a kind of spa playpark, where there were hot water pools flavoured or more properly infused with wine, ginger, tea, coffee, ginseng, lemonade (perhaps I misremember). It was an open air experience where the upper part of my shrivelling body, ie the bit not immersed in tepid water that smelled mildly of Chinese medicines, was feasted upon by mosquitoes interested only in Billneology.)

Unfortunately, Georgi is still in Berlin, and will only be sitting in the virtual jacuzzi -- assuming there's a stable enough internet connection.

Archive Moment 1

2009-01-06T10:34:00.004Z

(As we kick off the newest phase of the interchange, I thought it might be salutary to glance back at the first. Here's the little piece I did for the British Council on our first trip. The original page, complete with my rubbish photos, is available here.)

An indefinite grasp of the Cyrillic alphabet and a marked reluctance to leave the same few north-east streets is not the best qualification for travelling to Bulgaria. So the British Council representative in Sofia, Leah Davcheva, could hardly have been impressed when, after meeting the distinguished British–Jordanian novelist Fadia Faquir and the poet, editor and Arts Council bigwig Mark Robinson, she was introduced to what could only be described as Intimidated Chimp Boy (me). Especially as this trio needed to work with six Bulgarian writers and two musicians (the wonderfully-named Bluba Lu) to put together a series of unique events in a matter of days.

However, a swift drive through the city, past decaying apartment blocks, loud new billboards, and what seemed a very large statue holding aloft a submachine-gun, began to work its usual reviving magic. All I need to know is how the shambolic intricacies of life go on in each new place, and I become wedded to it as My Next Home. Here it took the sight of a black-clad art student turning her back on the national football stadium to draw that giant submachine-gun as it rose over some shopping booths and straggly autumn trees, and I had bonded. That and the very large guard-dogs who were terrifying another British Council administrator as we pulled up the drive to the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency in the nearby village of Boyana.

The BTA was a timelocked 1970s paradise of lukewarm showers, bare chalet rooms, and the statutory superfluous East European lightswitch which appears to trigger nothing in the vicinity, but which may be sending the guard-dogs into attack mode elsewhere in the complex. What I assumed were owls hooting through the evening trees turned out to be wolves (hence the dogs). In a way that seemed pretty British, it was homely rather than hospitable, and I found it comforting rather than comfortable. The staff appeared astonished that we needed to play loud music after 7.00 p.m. for anything other than our own amusement, and objected on behalf of non-existent other guests when this clashed with the Chelski–Lazio game. But then they provided an endless stream of excellent three-course meals which introduced us to the particular pleasures of Bulgarian food: yoghurt and aubergine salads, roasted red peppers, numerous rissoles and very good coffee (and beer), which kept the creative turbines buzzing.

We had flown in on Air France, and rapidly found we had to continue our aesthetic odyssey by Air Pants (as in ‘flying by the seat of your’). Our plans for exercise-based writing workshops (to induce artistic dialogue) fizzled out in the face of the Bulgarian writers’ unfamiliarity with this standard Brit-poet work method. Our assumption that we were producing a single ‘show’ which could be replicated in the different venues gave a sad pop and collapsed when the musicians explained that the acoustics of a large university foyer and an open market place would oblige them to come up with very different musical strategies (cathedral-ambient and techno-industrial to be precise), and we would all have to adjust our sets to fit. Then there was the breaking down into compatible trios for the bookshops and gallery events (who? where?), and the over-riding question: what were we going to do in the prison? In the heart of Sofia Prison, to be precise, possibly without music, possibly without mikes, certainly with a couple of hundred ‘repeat offenders’ as they were euphemistically known. Air Pants was experiencing mild turbulence.

In the event, all the events went splendidly, and the dialogue we assumed we’d have to manufacture was achieved in the heat of twelve-hour days of rehearsals and one-hour ‘just go for it’ performances. The blue billiard table, with no tip on the cue and one ball missing, taught us all the ice-breaking esperanto of ‘billiardski’ – especially when we realised we were playing by two completely different sets of rules. The trio events meant we were engaged in close readings of at least two others’ work – worked with Georgi Gospodinov and Nadezhda Radoulova on a themed reading which ended with me reciting something rude but lyrical in Bulgarian while they made a far far better job of my Scots. And the group readings produced some star performances: Toma Markov’s rap that had all the prisoners stomping and clapping to the beat; Plamen Doynov’s wry greeting to the black marketeers at Sitnyakovo Market; the decidedly cool Momcil Nikolov’s extremely wierd stories (for a man who’d never read in public before, he certainly knew how to relate a nude scene with fork). Then there were VBV’s leather trousers...

But before that we had the statutary number of ‘visiting writers’ moments’: Fadia and I in the sixteenth-century Banya Bashi mosque bumping into a bloke from Luton; Mark and I straining our necks in the tiny Boyana church filled with stunning mosaics – and a guide who couldn’t stop talking; the exceedingly laid-back drummer in that traditional restaurant who bore a curious resemblance to Momcil; the photo of Plamen eating which, in the fearless search for the worst pun of the week, we entitled ‘Plamen’s Lunch’; the little man with a teapot sitting on the back of St George’s horse in the icon room beneath the Nevski Cathedral...and that late-night moment in the last rehearsal when the musicians said they were going to improvise the gig at the Back Stage Club. Erk.

This should have been fine: Dimitar Paskalev and Konstantin Katsarski are extraordinarily supple and inventive players. It was just that we didn’t have texts of similar dexterity: if they were playing a fast blues and you were due to read a slow moody narrative, what happens next? A short informative debate followed on the universal language of music and the static-ness of text (and our inability to yell ‘Spooky Celtic but not Clannad’ in Bulgarian). We fastened our Air Pants seatbelts and pressed on. In the end the hidden rock stars in each of us manifested for a spontaneous wig-out fuelled by quantities of Zagorka beer and the evident delight of the 150 strong audience who’d packed into the tiny club. And VBV’s leather trousers.

The next day, Mark, Fadia and I wandered past a building designed by Dimitar (yes, he’s a top architect as well as a great musician; no, I’m not envious, much) on route to Bluba Lu’s studio, where we laid down the vocals for what we expect to be a Christmas smash-hit double concept album. We then climbed into a taxi for the airport, having filled every available waking hour with what we all love best: words at their most passionate and boundary-bashing. Soon these writers and musicians will visit us: I hope they recognise something of the bustling chaotic brilliance of their home in the north-east of England.

Short-termism for beginners

2009-01-06T10:18:00.005Z

Post New Year ruminations have suddenly begun on the forthcoming trip to Velingrad. We were all so busy before Christmas that we failed to or forgot to meet. Welcome to my wha?

Tickets are as yet unbought, the schedule is sketchy, but the barking Brits are willing. We're about to meet to discuss travel arrangements and the texts. It would appear the lure of guaranteed skiing may come to our aid in the form of cheapish tourist flights from Newcastle to Sofia.

I'm assuming we'll need to take what our Bulgarian colleagues brought -- about 10 pieces of varying lengths. We'll also need to decide amongst ourselves whether these are self-standing selections from our work, self-standing selections of new and recent work, or work which possesses some principle of cohesion as a whole.

I'm posting this so that we begin to keep a record of our editorial deliberations for this next stage of the process.

Burns Night in Bulgaria!

2008-07-02T11:11:00.002+01:00

After long negotiation we have new news (discard that crappy old news) of the next stage in the collaboration. Instead of sunning ourselves in Sozopol (and the near-homonym with 'sozzled Pole' implies where all the work that week would go), we are now meeting in Velingrad in stringent January 09, skis at the ready, schedule as follows:

Week of 19th - 25th January: Meeting in Velingrad and work on translations.
Feb-May - work on and complete manuscript.
Book published in June/July
Events to promote book at Apollonia in September 2009

So we do get to have a sozzled loll in Sozopol, but only when the Work is Done.

This opens up the possibility that we will celebrate the birth of Scotland's greatest poet, Robert Burns, on January 25th (most likely we'll be heading back home, but surely something disreputable can be arranged). The Burns Supper (or brunch or even breakfast) consists of course of a course of haggis washed down with whisky, complete with the address to the haggis, toasts to the bard bored barred and assorted lads and lasses.

Raki may be substituted for whisky, but I'm not sure about Kristin's suggestion, below:

'I'd rather have an "OLD MAN FROM BANSKO IN VEIL", at least this was the translation in a restaurant menu. ("Staretz = old man" is a kind of sausage from Bansko; "in veil" is a way of cooking, it means that the meat is wrapped in something else in order to get more tender.)'

Sounds (once the aura of vulgarity is overlooked)a little like a clootie dumpling? But I'm still having difficulty with that aura.

Let our watchword be: 'no indulgence only hard work, pleasure, and the unexpected'

2008-05-09T12:33:00.003+01:00

I forgot I hadn't posted this extract from a review by David Hart on the Stride Website:

'When poets from Bulgaria (Sofia) and the N.E.of England visited each other as a group, opening themselves to the Balkan Exchange, there was more likely to be found an alertness, a discovering and not merely a knowingness. The eight poets spent in forays four years at it. The Bulgarian poems are here unreadable without knowledge of that script, but happily readable here in translation; and original poems by the English poets are here, and passport-type photos and biographical notes and an introduction, no indulgence only hard work, pleasure, and the unexpected.'

Review from Envoi

2008-05-08T15:13:00.002+01:00

Balkan Exchange: Eight Poets From Bulgaria & Britain
(Arc Publications)

This anthology of four poets from the North East of England and four poets from Bulgaria emerged from a four year collaboration and translation project in which the poets visited each other’s country, sampled each other’s traditions and evolving cultures, shared ideas, worked on one another’s new writing and performed together. As such it is more exploratory than an arbitrary collection of individual voices that we find in too many anthologies. It marks a cross cultural working relationship. The poems criss cross with intertextual references and tentative attempts to comprehend each other’s perceptions and motivations, as well as engaging with the shifts in historical imagination and investigating the role of aesthetic documentation of our changing social realities.

Each of the British poets, Andy Croft, Linda France, Mark Robinson and W.N. Herbert, introduces the work of one of the Bulgarians: Kristina Dimitrova, Georgi Gospodinov, Nadya Radulova and VBV. As an introduction to a new generation of Bulgarian poets exploring and articulating post communist identity and the cultural ensions between Eastern and Western literary traditions it is an important and fascinating collection. As Andy Croft observes of this new generation of Bulgarian poets, as opposed to the immediate Post-Communist generation, ‘Their approach (to politics) is more oblique, less urgent, qualified by the disappointments of the last fifteen years. And the poetry seems all the more sophisticated and intriguing for this considered distance.’

We were told
there were two worlds at war
when there was really only one.
We were
the other.

Kristen Dimitrova (Cold War Memories)

...how ‘Confused’ our physical Geography seems
when you look South from Moldova: our country has no shape (we are slightly to the West).

VBV (Strange Vista)

...I felt like a kind of linguistic Columbus ‐ ‘our tongue’ meant this peculiar mishmash of Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, Turkish and Macedonian...I wondered, Gaustin, if this was the language from before Babel or some new hybrid coming out of the Balkan hullabaloo.

Georgi Gospodinov (Photograph IV)

That’s what we are doing, the women and I ‐
scraping at the burnt potato flour,
but it won’t come off, it won’t come off.

Nadya Radulova (Poste Restante)

Yet, as well as the Bulgarian poets’ efforts to rechart the shifting literary and cultural map of their world, the British poets write from within a redrawn map of Britain in which the North East is not a distant province far from the cultural centre, but a new and alternative locus of literary activity that is reaching out to international audiences and in doing so bypassing the traditional centre of London.

This anthology is one good example from a range of exciting, cross-cultural literary exchanges recently developed across the North, including Interland (Smith Doorstop Books), a collaborative writing and performance project between Yorkshire writers and writers from Ostrobothnia; and The Flesh of The Bar (Ek Zuban) a writing, translation and performance exchange between poets from The North East of England & South West Finland. Such exchanges seem to provide a viable
route of moving beyond the nation’s stereotypes of the region and engaging in a process of self discovery using T.S Eliot’s instructions as a rough guide, just as Linda France employs them as an epigram to her sequence of poems ‘East’:

In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not,
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

(East Coker)

The experimental travelogue-style poems by the British contributors, as well as providing the reader with insights into contemporary Bulgarian culture -- a rich glimpse behind the glossy sheen of holiday brochures -- equally represent efforts to find and test workable models to move beyond ones’ prescribed identity and creatively engage with the process of change.

So that it can rain Sofia turns inside out...
All that musty patience flips the city right.

Mark Robinson (1300 Monument Sofia)

...writing, in any language, is only a sign. I can choose to follow it but must remember it isn’t where I’m going... I found myself longing for mountains and a new language.. fresh as aubergines, yoghurt, garlic and dill....We will eat our fill and everything will be uncertain, everything will change.

Linda France (Stamps of Bulgaria)

Review by Bob Beagrie

Apollonia beckons

2008-02-13T10:49:00.004Z

The next stage of this project, a Bulgarian edition, is tentatively underway with Altera, possibly even leading to a launch at the Apollonia Festival in Sozopol this September, formerly home to a giant statue of Apollo by Calamis, 30 cubits high, transported to Rome by Lucullus and placed in the Capitol. (I checked, and this is no longer there.)

The book gets a mention on the Stride website, where it is described by David Hart as not only providing 'an alertness, a discovering and not merely a knowingness', but also as offering 'no indulgence only hard work, pleasure, and the unexpected'
-- words to live by, though an element of the Dionysian would not go amiss this September.

book in hands of bill

2007-09-22T09:04:00.000+01:00

Dear All,

Just to say that Rachael gave me some copies of the book last night at the Newcastle launch of the Northern Writers' Centre, and it is looking mighty fine! Linda's cover photo is striking and strong and it feels pretty good to lift and sift through. Hurrah.

(There will however have to be a special award for those who can discover My Embarrassing Typo...)

proofs in, title decided

2007-07-06T15:04:00.000+01:00

I spoke to Tony this morning, and I've just sent him the last of the proofs that I'd received or been involved with, so Arc will be moving into production now.

The title was resolved as A Balkan Exchange: Eight Poets from Bulgaria and Britain. This would seem the most practical compromise, so I hope everyone's happy(ish/esque) with that.

I think it's a wonderful book, and it sounds like Rachel's done a great job getting us launch readings, so I'm really looking forward to seeing everyone (and it!) in the autumn.

name of the book, part 3

2007-07-05T10:00:00.000+01:00

Most recent thoughts, as they came in:

Linda

Hello everyone...we are in a pickle, aren't we?

I'm not very keen on any of the suggestions – it feels like we're going round in ever-decreasing circles.

I've just had another look at the manuscript and wondered about another of Vassil's titles, made plural, - Strange Vistas. (with whatever subheading we go for) It seems to catch some of the oddity, and bulgarity, of this project.

Anyway, just another one for the pot...

Have we got a deadline for these ruminations?

*

Mark

I agree about the ever-decreasing circles - we seem to have reached the point where everything has an echo and sounds odd. I won't add to that by saying what Strange Vistas first made me think, because it's not important. This would seem to work and I could go with it.

However, there is the small matter of the publisher who may already be pretty committed to A Balkan Exchange. Apparently some of the tour publicity already uses that. Personally I certainly don't think that's much worse than anything else we've suggested. It seems to be the Neareast reference which took us away from that, so why don;t we make the subtitle very plain: something like

8 poets from Bulgaria and North East England or 8 Bulgarian and British Poets.

A Balkan Exchange does sound a bit 'European Union', I'll grant you, but also has conversation in it too.

Happy to go with pretty much anything other than Bulgarity by this point!

*

Nadya

I like the idea of 8 poets... as a subtitle. As well as "Strange Vistas" as a title. Perhaps all of us should send our last choices, and then we can count...

*

VBV

Yes. Counting sometimes is better than thinking. At least at the end.
No, really - is it time to make a list and vote? Do we include all suggestions up to now?

*

Rachel Ogdon (Arts Council)

Hello all

Sorry to barge in on the debate - I was under the impression from Arc that the title had been decided upon as A Balkan Exchange. Obviously this is not the case. A Balkan Exchange is the title of the tour and an image of the book cover (with 'A Balkan Exchange' on it) may have already been used on some of the festivals' publicity material.

This isn't the end of the world if you decide to change the title, but just wanted to make you aware. Perhaps it's just a matter of getting the sub-title right?

It's a bit like 8 people all trying to name a child!

*

VBV

Yes, it seems that we are discussing something which is already half-decided.
Thats why I asked "What is the idea of the title?" I will repeat my questions:

- Is it because "A Balkan Exchange" will sell better?
- Or is it because it represents the contents of the book in a better way?
- Or it sounds better?

If we cannot change it, its not a problem at all. But its clear, I think, that is sounds as a Social European Project. And I think because of that it can function as a project title or subtitle (8 poets in A Balkan Exchange). It can be much more effective if it is informative and not as is stands now (because now A Balkan Exchange is semi-informative - its not clear what is says exactly).

*

Nadya

I hope Tony will understand our concerns about this "Balkan exchange" title. Eventually, isn't it possible "A Balkan Exchange" to be the title just of the tour, not of the book? If we need it as a title in this project...

Otherwise, I vote for "Strange Vistas: 8 Bulgarian and British Poets"

*

Bill

Linda and I were meeting with Claire Malcolm today and discussed this -- she has to get in touch with Tony at Arc > about other matters, so promised to ask how much flexibility we still had about the title issue.

However, I think if we aim independently for a decision by this Friday, that will deal with our impression that we're disappearing down a sink.

To recap: most of us think changing the subtitle to '8 Bulgarian and British Poets' sorts out a lot of the confusion.

Some of us are drawn to 'Strange Vistas' (aren't we just!), and 'Stamps of Bulgaria' still seems to be in the frame, but we acknowledge that 'A Balkan Exchange' may have to stay.

*

Georgi

If things are already advanced in the publishing house with "Balkan Exchange", then o.k. Maybe they have their reasons. Let us insist on the subtitle '8 Bulgarian and British Poets'.

Briefly, I agree with Bill.

*

Kristin (in response to Mark's email, above)

I like that. A Balkan Exchange is good enough for me.

more thoughts on entitlement

2007-07-01T12:11:00.000+01:00

And the responses...

VBV

Ah, Sofia-upon-Tyne... I have forgotten it.
But is it undestandable as a book title?

*

Andy

Bulgarity - what a great title ! My new first choice.

*

Bill

I sent Andy something I can't find quoting Oscar's 'Vulgarity is simply the conduct of others' and asking what does that make Bulgarity?

I quite like GB/BG (Kristin's suggestion) because it reminds me of CBGBs, the New York punk venue. But that may not be the correct criterion in this matter.

In response to Vassil's questions: I don't know why the title was changed. Perhaps it was to expand upon and therefore clarify the original. I think we probably need an evocative main title and an explanatory subtitle. Most of the titles we have are in the evocative category, so perhaps we should imagine them with some helpful subtitle appended.

To recap, here are the ones any enthusiasm has been expressed for:

Bulgarity
Bulgar Blues
Sofia-upon-Tyne
Homespun Alchemies
Stamps of Bulgaria
Gigantic Memories
GB/BG

Here are the ones we feel ambiguous about

A Balkan Exchange
Neareast Northeast

Here are the ones we've suggested but no-one has commented on

Twin (OR) Exchanging Monuments
Bridges and Pages

I suggest that we all think what we'd like to see, comment/suggest one last time, then go with the majority.

replies so far

2007-06-29T10:54:00.000+01:00

Here's everybody's initial responses as they came in:

Linda

Oh dear – how difficult this is...

My favourites (which means not very) are

A Balkan Exchange
Homespun Alchemy

With Poetry from Bulgaria & Britain as the subheading?

I do think Neareast needs to go because Nadya and Georgi are so agin it.

If I have any other ideas I’ll be in touch.

*

Mark

How about Near East North East with the subtitle a Balkan Exchange?

Not keen on any of the new titles, to be honest. And happy to go with either original or current one.

How about Monuments or some variant, given Sofia and Newcastle both have them. Twin Monuments? Exchanging Monuments? Hmm, not convinced. Would still need a subtitle.

*

Andy

My preferences are :

1 Neareast
2 A Balkan Exchange
3 Bulgar Blues

*

VBV

Sorry, I have a pragmatic question. What is the idea of the title?I mean - why the publisher decided to change it?- Is it because "A Balkan Exchange: Near East - North East" will sell better?- Or is it because it represents the contents of the book in a better way?- Or it sounds better? I am asking this, because for me it is not clear in what direction I have to think about.

"my last skin, literature" is quite different from "A BalkanExchange". If we have to think about the title that represents the 8 of us -it is one thing. If we are going to stress on the "bulgarity" - it is a different approach. Or maybe we have to think about the common bridges...Which of these is better.

Before answering my questions, I will try to help by thinking out loud

1. Neareast -- it sounds OK. For some British we are Neareast. But for many Bulgarians you are Farwest :)

2. gigantic memories -- I like it, but is it representative?

3. British Bulgarity -- Just a thought, came out from nowhere

*

Nadya

What about VBV's title or subtitle "Sofia-upon-Tyne"? Or something like "Bridge page" or "Bridges and pages: Sofia-upon-Tyne"...
"Neareast" still sounds problematic for me...

*

Kristin

Hello dear everybody!

I rather like the geographic ideas like Near East North East: A Balkan Exchange. However we seem to have a problem with Near East. I personally don't have any but if the anthology is going to have a Bulgarian title as well, there will be a problem. What we call in Bulgaria Near East is the territory that is referred to in England as the Middle East.

How about GB/BG: A Balkan Exchange?

*
Georgi

Dear all,

I am a bit late in the discussion because I broke my ankle in a writers' football game in Finland and I am slow in getting to the computer:)

I like "Stamps from Bulgaria".
"Balkan exchange" sounds like EU projects slang.
"Neareast" suggests another geography - Israel,Lebanon, etc. (at least for us).

titular debate

2007-06-28T18:24:00.001+01:00

Dear All,

Bearing in mind that a few people have expressed discomfort with the title, I've been through the book looking for phrases that might work, and have picked out the following:

homespun alchemy
a hard forgetting
you speak our tongue?
bulgar blues
my last skin, literature
stamps of bulgaria
gigantic memories

These are just to get some debate going, so if you can suggest something else, please do. Or if you think the present title should stand, please say. I also wondered about 'Language is Ecstasy'?

For the record, the original title was

neareast: Bulgarian and British Poets

The current one is

A Balkan Exchange: Near East - North East

All best,

Bill

News on the new anthology

2007-03-23T11:50:00.000Z

The anthology this blog has been discussing, rehearsing and editing will appear soon from Arc Publications. It will be called neareast. More details soon.

(If anyone has a copy of the cover photo they could post here or send to me to post, that would be great.)

Is this a later draft?

2006-02-14T10:06:00.000Z

NADYA

Russian Monument

For Nadya and her aunts

she has hidden proust’s madelaines away
and the cherries, chekhov’s cherries
and the dark chocolate biscuits
in dr. lahnevich’s sunday morning bed

her tailored blue suit too
with that silk-buttoned chemise
all those kisses foiled in snow
ebbing back and forth and back

somewhere central sofia for sale
for sale behind ministry of agriculture
take northern staircase prussian vaulting[1]
third floor apartment private entrance on left

three eastward facing chambers
a few broken ribs
innate valvular disease
and tuberoses in both lungs

A monument, unforged, I for myself erected[2]

but otherwise she’s been hiding

otherwise it is for sale for sale

but also they keep ebbing back and forth and back

Fairy Lights

For Leonid

This is a poem to stand at the end of a book, like a Christmas tree in the last days of December 1882, when electric Christmas lights were invented.

my sweetheart
is decorating me in the middle of the room
cotton glass and electricity
cotton
glass
and electricity
then we sing
the body electric

I sing the body electric:

I am made of tiny pieces of glass
I purr prickle and buzz
and all the wiring leads
to my huge glass heart
one hundred candles bright

my sweetheart turns me on
and off and
on and
off

I purr prickle and buzz
I p-urrp-ri-ck-le-and-bu-zz
and love runs its circuits
in tiny mouthfuls

we play till midnight
all that remains is the filament
wet naked golden-hot
it twines around my sweetheart
still turning me on and off
and on and
off

until the elements [MRN1] short-circuit
then there is light

White goods for Lovers

It all starts with a few wet drops
at the back, paper bags going soft
and a supersonic cracking
in the icebox.

The broccoli gives off a faint smell
and the well chilled corpse
of the melon
lets out a suspicious sigh.

Next the jellied beef tongue
licks against the bean sprouts
who run wild
in the remains of [MRN2] [MRN2]yesterday’s salad.

The freezer compartment on the left
is heating up heating up heating
pumping up to the necessary
heart rate.

The fridge takes a final deep breath,
strains every volt and muscle,
then breaks its waters
on the unswept kitchen floor.

Food rots, love blossoms,
life, they say, came out of the water.
Our dinner for two is cancelled.
And we won’t sleep for a long time –

we are starving.[MRN3] [MRN3]

Edison

like a cat carrying her young by the scruff
the light drags me round the room
until the veins of the walls are blue
and the carpet spits out its woollen heart

there are no landlords here
only desires:

to slip out of myself
my sex
my last skin literature

the cat is a burning blackberry bush in the middle of the room
where all desires are met
without end
leaving nothing behind

later the cat sleeps under the bed
later we dance again
I pour milk into the bowl
even the milk is glowing

my friend is a maharani from a distant land

Poste Restante

Postcard: a photograph of
eight women
pulling up onions in a field.

I’ve been with them there for a month now -
the best thing
I could wish for.

The field is a scorched baking tray
and the clouds above are soft suds
which cannot shift the burnt bits.

That’s what we are doing, the women and I –
scraping at the burnt potato flour,
but it won’t come off, it won’t come off.

By noon we’ve taken out
a dozen buckets of onions –
we peel them and eat them whole
until the soap gets in our eyes
forcing
grateful tears.

We sleep in cold corridors, below stairs.

On the bed beside me lies a young Chinese woman,
her breasts like soya beans.
In a box under the bed she breeds crickets.
When the temperature falls below zero,
she takes them out and holds them under her shirt

so their voices don’t freeze.GEORGI

On Invention

It is woman who invented the troubadour
I’ll say it again:
She invented the inventor
Gaustin of Arles, 12th c.

It is time for me to invent myself,
for who else would ever invent me?
The gypsy women meant to praise me are gone -
thoughts like that make me hurry.

All you need to do is invent a woman,
the rest – the man – she’ll take care of.

So off she goes, her passion invents
my male body,
invents my two hands,
heavy and groping,
invents my lungs,
each and every alveolus,
my quickening breath,
invents my giant part
(that’s how she designs it – giant).

Such vision! Such imagination!

So here I am alive, newly created, complete,
attractive in my own way,
a good age, seductive,
before I invent the dying fall.
For endings should be sad.
And beautiful.

So I invent my own:
should I die between the fingers
of a straight A schoolgirl,
as she copies me down in a careless scrawl,
or do it on my own?
Should I even die at all,

for who would reinvent me then?
Hey Jude, 7’09”

It’s the longest slow track ever and if you can’t score with a woman in that time, you are the biggest loser in the Universe.” Gaustin, Grade VIc

It’s the longest track ever,
just that: 7’09”.
7 minutes and 9 seconds,
your hands electric
with the mohair of her jumper.
7 minutes and 9 seconds,
for your most glamorous story.
7 minutes and 9 seconds,
you are dizzy,
it’s hard to believe
but you are spinning around,
it’s hard to believe but she is spinning
around you,
yes, she is spinning around.
7 minutes and 9 seconds.

Never again,
never at all,
(though you don’t know it yet)
will you be in love
with a woman
for this long.

News

She folds the newspaper and says:
you heard the news from Iowa?
It hailed – hailstones
the size of golf balls.
Yes, I say,
they play golf all the time there,
they’ve lost so many balls
and the balls are now coming back.
Don’t you see,[n4]
He is returning all their balls,
the Great Jester.
She is not amused.
She turns to me in terror:

He never misses.

A Bee

keeps hitting the glass
the stained glass with
the finely painted lilies
it’s been an hour
and not a speck of pollen
it will kill itself
this bee of art

Suicide
(a photograph by Russel Sorgi, 1942)

This is a photo from the Forties, New York – the number of the street
escapes me. In the foreground
there’s a hotel cafe, three round tables
outside on the sidewalk, and at the fourth
the only two customers, cups in front of them,
idly smoking.
It’s deadly quiet
and if at this moment the two look up
they will see
(for us this is the centre of the photo),
between the ninth and the eighth floor,
like a fly, like a smudge on the print,
a woman
falling.

The photographer, so the story goes,
was an intern on the Buffalo Courier Express.
He just happened to be there taking a photo
of a lazy September, an empty New York street,
meaning to call it ‘Two in the afternoon’ or ‘Boredom’.
But things change,
the title has to go –
the woman is in shot, a starring role
which means nothing to her.
In the photo she is still alive
between the ninth and the eighth floor –
a cry in the throat, fear in the body –
her dress is intact, and that
shocks us all the more.

The coffee stains on the sidewalk
are still in the cups.Photograph II

Remembering our youth, dear Gaustin, and your enthusiasm for anarchism, and that broken little suitcase with the works of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Stirner – all Anarchy Editions – I dare to offer you the story of one more photograph of that October day in Sarajevo – a simple photo of no value to anyone else. It took me a whole day to find the bridge where in the summer of 1914 Gavrilo Princip, a nationalist and anarchist (a favourite combination in the Balkans), shot at point-blank range the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the person of crown prince Franz Ferdinand. Or to be more precise, in the throat.

Unwise of me to ask passers-by for directions to the bridge – they all glared at me and hurried on as if they did not understand. Eventually a man took pity on me and told me to look for the bridge with a broken plaque commemorating ‘that Serbian fucker’.

So here I am. I cross warily to the pavement on the other side of the street and nonchalantly light a cigarette, a Smyana[3] under my coat -- it’s simple but reliable, I’ve put it to the test many times. I am ready to shoot. I shiver, as if the car carrying Franz Ferdinand could whirr over the bridge any minute. Traffic goes by and a cold wind begins to blow. Right in the middle of this historic place, beside the broken plaque, an old man has laid out umbrellas for sale. Some of them are open. They add volume and movement to the photograph: the wind is rolling them away and the old man is trying to stop them by standing on their handles. I know this is it, my moment has come. I take out the Smyana and shoot. In the picture the old man has no head – either my hands shook or this place is cursed – but the concrete rail with the broken plaque is there, in focus. Just as my deadly mission was completed the Great Cloud Powers – as you would call them – interfered. Lightning wired the news around and thunder clouds voiced loud protests, forcing me to retreat. The old man was the last to withdraw, soaking wet. I stood under some nearby eaves, sodden with historic guilt. I thought back to my idiotic history books, which said ‘the bullet in Sarajevo was the spark that the dark clouds gathering over Europe were waiting for’. Well, my dear Gaustin, the clouds over Sarajevo that day were really dark. You can see how dark they were even though the photo is over-exposed. This is how big trouble comes about. Someone carelessly tosses up a few metaphors and they suddenly come true.

Yours G.

Global Autumn

I know we have no eyes and ears, nor language for the intrigue and plotting of the Great Natural Powers. We can only marvel at their harmonic anarchy.
Gaustin, Early Letters

This year I can say precisely
when and where the summer ended.
It was the 24th October,
Wednesday, 6.40 p.m., Sarajevo time.
A new Gavrilo Princip
shattered the sun point-blank.
It was all planned out, although
they say this happens every year
as a matter of principle:
cold Western fronts,
cyclones in alliances,
fragile truces, rain, depressions.
(Coming next: war reports from weathermen.)

This is how Global Autumns
begin.

Photograph IV

The key to this photo, my dear Gaustin, lies in its geography. Imagine the far northwestern corner of Greece, five hours from Thessalonica, three from Kozani, an hour from Florina. This is the area of the two Prespan lakes – where Greece, Albania and Macedonia meet. We arrive late at night and they put us up in a former school in the deserted village. Stern whitewashed walls and high ceilings. In the morning we go for a walk. It’s August, the sun is out, and we are glad to see that the place is alive. There are only old people around, but it’s alive. They stare as if they know us, the way only Balkan people do, and they come up and welcome us with words you won’t hear anywhere else. ‘Kalimera, ko praite?’[4] That’s just what they said, Gaustin, believe me. When we stared back they asked: ‘You speak our tongue?’ That’s right, ‘our tongue.’ My heart melted, I felt like a kind of linguistic Columbus -- ‘our tongue’ meant this peculiar mishmash of Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, Turkish and Macedonian… I wondered, Gaustin, if this was the language from before Babel or some new hybrid coming out of the Balkan hullabaloo. Needless to say, you can’t see this on the picture.

The place was called Antarctico, which means ‘rebellious’ in Greek, and these dear old rebels complained to us that the Albanians come across the hills nearby, desecrate their church and steal hens from their backyards.

I know you are dying to hear about the woman in the picture. Good looking, isn’t she? And obviously not from round here. Gabriela, 35, worked on Broadway. A dancer. And Austrian. She came to visit 3 years ago, liked it, and stayed, leaving her life behind. She was on her own, if you don’t count that evil-looking dog in the lower left-hand corner. She’d lived in the most amazing places in the world, Gaustin, but the four nights we spent drinking retsina on the wooden table under the Greek-Albanian-Macedonian moon, she behaved as if this most distant of distant Balkan places were the centre of the universe. Madison Square Garden, Broadway and the Vienna Statsopera all rubbed against her feet under the table like abandoned kittens, begging for her company. Have you ever had moments when the centre of the world feels like something very light and agile, like a dog that’s following a woman? I don’t even want to think about what happens to the places she has left behind. Are you sure Austria is still there?

And her dog, Gaustin, it never once growled at me!

Yours G.

Gabriela’s Dog

His father is a Serbian shepherd
his mother an Albanian greyhound
his father’s line is Bulgarian Karakachani
his mother’s pedigree Thessalonican
he is a Balkan mongrel, Gabriela jokes
(she is Austrian, her mother Hungarian)
he is not afraid of gun shots
he is a good hunter
he licks everyone’s hands
he won’t be cross if you shout at him

sometimes just sometimes
(very rarely though)
he will jump up and bite and bite…

VBV

Armenia’s Childhood

My skinny black grandmother crawled out
from behind the cupboard with a smile and on the red-brick wall
hung a map of the sea

“Light your grandad’s pipe and wrap the chains
around your legs. I will knit you a pair of socks
out of sails and make you a pair of glasses
out of old telescopes.”
“Grandma…”

My eyes are complex, my eyes are long.
I’ve poked at that brick wall since I was a child –
I stick my pencils in there, and hide my bits of paper.

I closed the cupboard so it didn’t pull down the room

and crossing the wooden floor, saw my grandmother off.
I am turning around.
The sea is flowing out of the map. Down my brick wall
-- dripping.
The Black Sea down my wall.
Dark is the sea –
dripping.
Down the wall – becks and outcrops…
through rough stucco.
The sea will overwhelm my childhood…
and so it did – my pencils rotted,
scraps of paper now floating rafts –
each with a history nailed together with consonants.
This is how grandmothers bring up children in Armenia –
they give them maps
and salt from deep waters.
The salt is so the eyes can see.

“Come, Yohannes…”

I know I can wade through the water -
I am on my grandmother’s back.
Her eyes are complex, her eyes are long,
her hands old telescopes.
By and by we leave the room;
on the door a sign made of wax:
“Houses are old grandmothers”.

Neareast

… in the morning there were loads of pineapples, there were walnuts in the juicy apples
the mulled wine was full of cinnamon
and long tobacco leaves floated in the hazelnut-and-star-anise tea.
At noon the amber honey from the oranges
oozed into softening figs
and we smoked sandalwood
with drops of thick pine-tree milk.
At dusk we placed pink grapefruits
in hot jugfuls of caramel
and lay down for the night
amongst green lemons
drinking long mouthfuls of strawberry cream
with Constantinople almonds
and syrupy tishpishtil.
Amid the scent of linseed
and fat olives
big nocturnal raisins
melted
in our mouths
like Armenian white jam
until the ginger tree awoke…

V.

The ropes I used to tie my son
are still tight and wet.
The wardrobe hides the attic door,
the hanging dresses swing.

We parade bottles of cologne,
we’re back in Sofia at last,
two careful soldiers, maybe,
tying the threads of our past.

We are leaning over the cast-iron sink
in furnished quarters neither of us own.
We stand in front of the mirror and think:
in the end we put on our make-up alone.

We’ve grown old and look like brothers –
the way it’s always been.
We are used to this. My son and I are silent:
theatrical, exhausted, smiling.
Man-to-man

Men always want.

To be the hero – to swing from the gallows
with a terrible force towards Earth.[5] That’s why
they play cards, drink spirits and tell dirty jokes.
And each has a war in his back pocket.
Infidelity in his jeans.
And a childhood full of pirates.

But there aren’t enough films to go round,
or women-directors to make them.

And so – building sites and tables
turn into silent movies.
Because whatever you say – it’s like
you never said it.
All your life, not even one [mr5] [mr4]memorable one-liner.

That’s why tired-looking men sit in stations,
waiting to be called up.
Men under the table belting out songs,
waiting to be booked for mutiny.
Men who stay there
and wait with a terrible force…

In truth there aren’t enough heroes to go round,
or film-makers who believe in themselves.

…and not even one memorable one-liner,
except the last:“That’s life…”

Strange Vista

…how ‘Confused’ our physical Geography seems
when you look south from Moldova:
our country has no shape (we are slightly to the West), ‘sweaty’ –
a Caucasian province with gigantic memories.
‘Unnoticed in the lefthand corner of sea’ – X.
(scaled high up beyond the Danube and squeezed from Above.)
How different the Grammar sounds in
the suburbs of Kishinev and Kagul
(even more so in their sup:urbs or on the lower banks
of the Dnester) and how strangely we conjugate our verbs,
worrying about History and Geology (ours),
eyes staring to the right, Yarzhidva.
(high up, so we can look beyond the Alps)
and then anthropomorphic,
we rediscover our miracled Landschaft –
like pilgrims
around the closed looking-glass of the Black Sea.
backwards. forwards.
I head south from Moldova,
but my reflections march towards Kiev –
only here do Dneper and Danube meet.

The Caucuses
(an operation)

My home against my castle.
I’ve quit.
Theatre is the oldest cunning (art). Here amongst the Ossetians
the images of history become theatre (remoteness).
The accents of objects shift. The mechanical factories
are started up by Gramophones. Every factory a song.

Azerbaijan – first song
“One cart after the other, a ship in each cart – bulging
wooden ships… Drowned people grazing. They graze and sing…”
Oh, my native land – dead buffalo and pregnant women
beneath your centrifugal fields. And at the very bottom lies
Black, copper Iran. How can I save your limbs from flight
or idolatry?
And the greatest Fear here – Earth has a Direction.

Armenia – second song
“…he is holding the Church in his palm, and inside it – human bustle.
In the same palm – Ararat. Forest and society used to be one.
Leave us alone. Leave us lonely.”
… But there are no gallows here! That means there is no Order, no hope…
History is a simple word,
preserved in a nervous stomach and the mouth.
I stand out, lost, while at home the watercolours
show the mutability of the field: it is
dangerous there, but I am a Creatress: I take my place and await
the new Modernism: God exists – and God is other people…

Georgia – third song
“To stay in my native land and lose my Georgian eyes,
and to forget, to leave behind electric posts as high as skies
and copper wiring in the ground only here, only here.
Let me be cursed then [n6] stuck-in-the-dirt.”
The Black Sea is the most mediterranean – it is an outsourced Archive.
The only way for deep byzantiums
to reach the North. Our deep sleep is a useless hole.
And the night here is a physical condition:
here matter slowly turns its womb inside out
and in the dark the Sounds sink into the body –
each Object with its own voice in the night.

…I’ve quit, but I am coming back.
To my Caucuses. And fear of an echo.

KRISTIN

Party at the Home for the Disabled

Among the incomplete figures
the singer crooned
a vast song. I warned him
that the river was right behind, but he
led me to the edge and pushed.
Clutching him I pulled us down.
As we fell towards the rocks,
I asked why he’d done it. There was still
time for me to hear his reply:
“Just to show you
nothing’s a joke.”

Love Story

They played games with each other –
he with her head,
she with his legs.
Then he gave back her head,
a little worn out,
and she – I’m not sure
what she did with his legs,
This is as much as I know.

Post Card to our brothers, the little Green Men

Celestial greetings!
Accept our
celestial greetings!
We are all fine
down here, we keep
taking our pills.

Passing On

This man
was innocent,
he had nothing to do
with life, although
that’s where he was coming from.
Give back your teeth –
a magic hand said
and smacked him in the mouth.
The man looked round
one last time, gave thanks
for the sunshine, and
as he left cried out:
It washn’t worsh the hasshle.

Times

The two of them were walking up the path,
quietly discussing the menage
of fate, the 10 o’clock news
and their own defensive strategies…

In the distance the sun dripped through the branches,
refusing to communicate. The leaves,
tucked up in frost,
counted down their days.

Who loved what?
How did we get here?

He, once so practical, is now drowning in music,
she, the artist, is just a stitch
along the silk road.

In a clearing two magi ate out of a can,
making the most of the thin light, waiting for the third,
who had disappeared into the bushes.

Changeable times. The prophets
have lost their jobs.
My friend,

bent like a willow tree branch,
who took away your name?
Why is that unpaid electricity bill
dangling from your mouth?
I see you hanging out of your window,
freshly painted by sunrise,
untouched by the sunset,
always stuck in the same day.
It’s a shame.
My friend,
strung on a wire through your heart,
who is holding the wire?
Other friends of mine,
but that is the least of my worries.

Seaside Holiday

The sizzling of sun screen.
The heat has closed over us
like a mouth made of lead –

shouting won’t break it,
beach games
won’t lift it.

We lie in various positions
trying to prove
that we still

make some choices.
In the distance a tiny boat
is hurrying towards the white edge of the sea –

no moorings, no doubts,
no life guards,
no suffocation…

“No trumps...”
It’s Almost Cozy

It’s almost cozy,
the lack of sun
on this slow morning

I hold on with both hands
to my coffee cup while you
– the mercury in my homespun

alchemy - somehow manage
to put cheese and bread
in your mouth quietly,

gaze fixed on the newspaper.
From inside their bowl
the turtles’ transparent eyes

follow how we both
vanish into stillness
and how from time to time

a hand appears
reaching for the sugar bowl,
or a mouth curves downwards

into a smile.

Cold War Memories

We were told
there were two worlds at war
when there was really only one.

We were
the other.

Examination

They were all listening,
drawn up in columns
like a Chinese terracotta army.
They stared, their bald heads
round as pterodactyls’ eggs,
waiting for a gesture
that would finally
and conclusively
discredit the candidate.
‘Er… what I was about to say…’
They listened.
‘… is that freedom is not something we are born with,
the way we are born with two hands and two legs,
if we are lucky, that is…’
Some of the heads bent towards each other, puzzled
or so the speaker suspected.
‘… E-er, I mean that
freedom is not inherent in us,
it is not a given…’
(Wasn’t that ridiculously trite?)
They sat back indignantly
and sharpened their eyebrows.
‘And then parents,
teachers, colleagues, society,
they all somehow… want you
but they don’t like you.
And I want to be liked.’
‘Aah’ – the room almost stirred.
(So I wasn’t imagining!)
‘… and then I,
who have wanted
to come here all my life
and be one of you, I understand…’
Some of the boulder heads looked at each other.
A shifting rock groaned.
‘I have always
belonged to you,
and that freedom comes
when you reject the prizes,
grab the ropes
and start cutting! cutting! cutting!...’
A clay head
rolled down.

Three Ships

There were three ships.
One was carrying silk.
The second was sailing into nothingness.
The third was coming back
from a world of enduring myths.

We waved at each other.

Three times I jumped ship
and I’m still on the same one.

The Writer

I am sure
he didn’t see himself
as a kid.
He hesitated before crossing
and then at the last moment
jumped on the bus.
I don’t know how
he managed the steps.

‘What’s your name, pet?
What’s your name?’ asked
the fussy old biddies, sensing
that something was wrong.

He didn’t reply.

His face was scrawled with
complicated shapes –
a line connected a lozenge with a dot
from one cheek to the opposite eyebrow,
striking through everything on its way.

‘His mother will be worried sick!
Yes, she will! She will be
so worried,’ the old women fretted.

It was quite possible
he could not talk yet,

but he had spent the morning writing letters
on his face, and those who
cared to, could read:

‘I have no one to be worried sick
about me.’

The doors opened to let more people on
and that’s where I lost him.
Art on Slaveikov Sq.[6]

The wind riffles through
the thin pages of poetry
crowded in the corner of the bookstall.
Some of them are losing their hair – you can see it
through the covers: hair from the right is combed to the left,
hair from the left is combed to the right.
They have raised their round heads
to demand attention one last time, from behind
the lectern in the empty auditorium. A sigh
can be heard in the microphone,
an awkward laugh,
and a line that gets repeated by everyone
goes from mouth to mouth, straight through
the back of the head, and comes out at the throat,
stitching the poets together:

‘Life proved so short a day
and once promised so much meaning.’

The young books, dishevelled, piled on top of the old ones,
shout louder, know just what to say, but are
underfed as football fans from a sink estate
after losing to the champions.

“We are the greatest team
the world has ever seen!”

The cries hit the satellite dishes
and bounce back – the next news bulletin is on.
Life is as important as it ever was. The question is
who breaks the news.

[1][1] A type of construction used in Sofia in the beginning of the 20th c.
[2][2] A quote from Pushkin’s Monument (Pamyatnik in the Russian original).
[3][3] The inexpensive Soviet camera which was ubiquitous throughout the Soviet Block.
[4][4] Greek: ‘Good morning’, ‘Good day’
[5][6] A phrase used in a poem by the 19 c. revolutionary poet Hristo Botev to describe the scene of the hanging of Vassil Levski. Levski was the mastermind behind the Bulgarian national revolutionary movement and set up a system of revolutionary committees whose goal was to overthrow the Ottoman regime throughout the Bulgarian lands. He was hanged by the Ottoman authorities in 1873. The phrase is commonly used in everyday language.
[6][7] Sofia’s large open-air book market.

Page: 2 [MRN1]Or filaments

Page: 3 [MRN2]or: what is left of

Page: 3 [MRN3]or: we are so hungry

[n4]It's hard to put this kind of remark in after 'The Great Jester' -- too formal. So we've tried it before.

[mr5]could break line here

[n6]punctuation?

Changes

2005-10-03T14:24:00.000+01:00

Just to say that bellow (on 12th july) I posted some suggestions on "Strange Vista". Are they ok? I marked them with bold.
And more - if I want to make some changes and suggestions what to do?
To post the poems again?
To edit your posts?
To send them by e-mail?

Greetings from Belgium, where I am.

Further poems

2005-09-26T16:54:00.000+01:00

These are the poems which were primarily done by Mark and Andy and then revised by us all. Apologies for tardiness in posting them up and for any remaining errors. I have, I think, incoporated people's comments. Hope all are well!

NADYA

Russian Monument

she has hidden proust’s madelaines away
and the cherries, Chekhov’s cherries,
and the dark chocolate biscuits
in dr. lahnevich’s Sunday morning bed

her tailored blue suit too
with that silk-buttoned chemise
all those kisses foiled in snow
ebbing back and forth and back

somewhere central Sofia for sale
for sale behind the ministry of agriculture
take the northern staircase prussian vaulting
third floor apartment private entrance on left

three eastwards facing chambers
a few broken ribs
innate valvular disease
and tuberoses in both lungs

A monument, unforged, I for myself erected

but otherwise she’s been hiding

otherwise it is for sale for sale

but also they keep ebbing back and forth and back

Fairy Lights

This is a poem to stand at the end of a book, like a Christmas tree in the last days of December 1882, when electric Christmas lights were invented.

my sweetheart
is decorating me in the middle of the room
cotton glass and electricity
cotton
glass
and electricity
then we sing
the body electric

I sing the body electric:

I am made of tiny pieces of glass
I purr prickle and buzz
and all the wiring leads
to my giant glass heart
one hundred candles bright

my sweetheart turns me on
and off and
on and
off

I purr, prickle and buzz
I p –urrp -ri-ck-le-and –bu- zz
and love runs its circuits
in tiny mouthfuls

we play till midnight
all that remains is the filament
wet naked golden-hot
it twines around my sweetheart
still turning me on and off
and on and
off

until the elements short-circuit
then there is light

White goods for Lovers

It all starts with a few wet drops
at the back, paper bags going soft
and a supersonic cracking
in the icebox.

The broccoli gives off a faint smell
and the well chilled corpse
of the melon
lets out a suspicious sigh.

Next the jellied beef tongue
licks against the bean sprouts
who run wild
in the remains of yesterday’s salad.

The freezer compartment on the left
is heating up heating up heating
pumping up to the necessary
heart rate.

The fridge takes a final deep breath,
Strains every volt and muscle,
then breaks its waters
on the unswept kitchen floor.

Food rots, love blossoms,
Life, they say, came out of the water.
Our dinner for two is cancelled.
and we won’t sleep for a long time –

we are starving.

Edisson

like a cat carrying her young by the scruff
the light drags me round the room
until the veins of the walls are blue
and the carpet spits out its woolen heart

there are no landlords here,
only desires:

to slip out of myself
my sex
my last skin literature

the cat is a burning blackberry bush in the middle of the room
where all desires are met,
without end,
leaving nothing behind

later the cat is sleeps under the bed
later we dance again
I pour milk into the bowl
even the milk is glowing

my friend is a maharani from a distant land

Poste Restante

Postcard: a photograph of
eight women
pulling up onions in a field.

I’ve been with them there for a month now -
the best thing
I could wish for.

The field is a scorched baking tray
and the clouds above are soft suds
which cannot shift the burnt bits.

That’s what we are doing, the women and I –
scraping at the burnt potato flour,
but it won’t come off, it won’t come off.

By noon we’ve taken out
a dozen buckets of onions –
we peel them and eat them whole
until the soap gets in our eyes
forcing
grateful tears.

We sleep in cold corridors, below stairs.

On the bed beside me lies a young Chinese woman,
her breasts like soya beans.
In a box under the bed she breeds crickets.
When the temperature falls below zero,
she takes them out and holds them under her shirt –

so their voices don’t freeze.
GEORGI

On Invention

It is woman who invented the troubadour
I’ll say it again:
She invented the inventor
Gaustin of Arles, 12th c.

It is time for me to invent myself,
for who else would ever invent me.
The gypsy women meant to praise me are gone -
such thoughts as that make me hurry.

All you need to do is to invent a woman,
the rest – the man – she’ll take care of.

So off she goes, out of her passion she invents
my male body,
invents my two hands,
groping and heavy,
invents my lungs,
each and every alveolus,
my quickening breath,
invents my giant part
(that’s how she designs it – giant).

Such vision! Such imagination!

So here I am alive, newly created, complete,
attractive in my own way,
a good age, seductive,
before I invent the dying fall.
For endings should be sad.
And beautiful.

So I invent my own ending:
Should I die between the fingers
of a straight A schoolgirl,
as she copies me down in a careless scrawl,
or do it on my own?
Should I even die at all,

for who would reinvent me then.
Hey Jude, 7’09”

It’s the longest track ever and if you can’t score with a woman in that time, you are the biggest loser in the Universe.” (Gaustin, Grade VIc)

It’s the longest track ever,
just that: 7’09”.
7 minutes and 9 seconds,
your hands electric
with the mohair of her jumper.
7 minutes and 9 seconds,
to tell her your most glamourous story.
7 minutes and 9 seconds,
you are dizzy,
it’s hard to believe
but you are spinning around,
it’s hard to believe but she is spinning
around you,
yes, she is spinning around.
7 minutes and 9 seconds.

Never again,
never at all,
(though you don’t know it yet)
will you be in love
with a woman
for this long.

News

She folds the newspaper and says:
you heard the news from Iowa?
It hailed – hailstones
the size of golf balls.
Yes, I say,
they play golf all the time there,
they’ve lost so many balls
and the balls are now coming back.
He is returning all their balls,
the Great Jester.
She is not amused:
she turns to me in terror.

He never misses.

A Bee

keeps hitting the glass
the stained glass with the finely
painted lilies
it’s been an hour
not a speck of pollen
it will kill itself
this bee of art

A Bee

keeps hitting the window
finely painted lilies
of stained glass
it’s been an hour
not a speck of pollen
it will kill itself
this artful bee

Suicide
(a photograph by Russel Sorgi, 1942)

This is a photo from 42, New York, the number of the street
escapes me, in the foreground
there’s a hotel cafe, three round tables
outside on the sidewalk, and at the fourth
the only two customers, cups in front of them,
idly smoking.
It’s deadly quite
and if at this moment the two look up,
they will see,
(for us this is the centre of the photo)
between the ninth and the eighth floor,
like a fly, like a smudge on the print,
a woman
falling.

The photographer, so the story goes,
was an intern on the Buffalo Courier Express.
He just happened to be there taking a photograph
of a lazy September, an empty New York street,
meaning to call it “Two in the afternoon” or “Boredom”.
But things change,
the title has to go,
the woman is in shot - a starring role
which means nothing to her.
But in the photo she is still alive
between the ninth and the eighth floor -
a cry in the throat, fear in the body,
her dress is intact - and that
shocks us all the more.

The coffee puddles on the sidewalk
still in the cups.
Photograph II

Remembering our youth, dear Gaustin, and your enthusiasm for anarchism, and that broken little suitcase with the works of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Stirner, all Anarchy Editions, I dare to offer you, the story of one more photograph of that October day in Sarajevo – a simple photo of no value to anyone else. It took me a whole day to find the bridge where in the summer of 1914 Gavrilo Princip, a nationalist and anarchist (a favourite combination in the Balkans), shot at point-blank range, the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the person of crown prince Franz Ferdinand, or to be more precise in his throat.
Unwise of me to ask passers-by for directions to the bridge – they all looked daggers and were quick to hurry on as if they did not understand. Eventually a man took pity on me and told me to look for the bridge with a broken plaque remembering that ‘Serbian fucker’.
So here I am. I cross warily to the pavement on the other side of the street and nonchalantly light a cigarette, a Smyana under my coat -- it’s simple but reliable, I’ve tested it many times. I am ready to shoot. I shiver, as if the car carrying Franz Ferdinand could whirr over the bridge any minute. Traffic goes by and a cold wind begins to blow. Right in the middle of this historic place, beside the broken plaque, an old man has laid out umbrellas for sale. Some of them are open. They add volume and movement to the photograph: the wind is rolling them away and the old man is trying to stop them by standing on their handles. I know this is it, my moment has come. I take out the Smyana and I shoot. In the picture the old man has no head– either my hands shook or this place is cursed – but the concrete rail with the broken plaque is there, in focus. Just as my deadly mission was completed the Great Cloud Powers – as you would call them – interfered. Lightning wired the news around and thunder clouds voiced loud protests, forcing me to retreat. Soaking wet, the old man was the last to withdraw. I stood under some nearby eaves, sodden with historic guilt. I thought back to my idiotic history books which said that ‘the bullet in Sarajevo was the spark that the dark clouds gathering over Europe were waiting for’. Well, my dear Gaustin, the clouds over Sarajevo that day were really dark. You can see how dark they were even though the photo is over exposed. This is how big trouble comes about. Someone carelessly tosses up a few metaphors and they suddenly come true.

Yours G.

Global Autumn

I know we have no eyes and ears, nor language for the intrigue and plotting of the Great Natural Powers. We can only marvel at their harmonic anarchy.
(Gaustin, Early Letters)

This year I can say precisely
when and where the summer ended.
It was the 24th October,
Wednesday, 6.40 p.m., Sarajevo time.
Some Gavrilo Princip
shattered the sun point-blank.
It was all planned out, although
they say that this happens
every year on principle:
cold Western fronts,
cyclones in alliance,
fragile truces, rain, depressions.
(Next: the war reports of weather forecasters.)

This is how Global Autumns
begin.

Photograph IV

The key to this photo, my dear Gaustin, lies in its geography. Imagine the far northwestern corner of Greece, 5 hours from Thessalonica, three from Kozani, an hour from Florina. This is the area of the two Prespan lakes – where Greece, Albania and Macedonia meet. We arrive late at night and they put us up in a former school in the deserted village. Stern whitewashed walls and high ceilings. In the morning we go for a walk. It’s August, the sun is out and we are glad to see that the place is alive. There are only old people around but it’s alive. They stare at us as if they know us, the way only Balkan people do, and
they come up to us and welcome us with words you won’t hear anywhere else. ‘Kalimera, ko praite?’ That’s just what they said, Gaustin, believe me. They saw us. When we stared back they asked: ‘You speak our tongue?’ That’s right, ‘our tongue.’ My heart melted, I felt a kind of linguistic Columbus -- ‘our tongue’ meant this peculiar mishmash of Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, Turkish and Macedonian… I wondered, Gaustin, if this was the language from before Babel or some new hybrid coming out of the Balkan Hullabaloo. Needless to say, you can’t see this on the picture.
The place was called Antarctico, which means “rebellious” in Greek, and these dear old rebels complained to us that the Albanians come across the nearby hills, desecrate their church and steal hens from their backyards.
I know you are dying to hear about the woman in the picture. Good looking, isn’t she? And obviously not from round here. Gabriela, 35, worked on Broadway. A dancer. And Austrian. She came to visit 3 years ago, liked it and stayed, leaving her life behind. She was on her own, if you don’t count that evil-looking dog in the lower left-hand corner. She’d lived in the most amazing places in the world, Gaustin, but the four nights we spent drinking ritsina on the wooden table under the Greek-Albanian-Macedonian moon, she behaved as if this most distant of distant Balkan places were the centre of the universe. Madison Square Garden, Broadway and the Vienna Statsopera all rubbed against her feet like abandoned kittens under the table, begging for her company. Have you ever had moments when the centre of the world feels like something very light and agile, like dog that’s following a woman? I don’t even want to think about what happens to the places she has left behind. Are you sure Austria is still there? And her dog, Gaustin, never once growled at me!

Yours G.

Gabriela’s Dog

His father is a Serbian shepherd
his mother an Albanian greyhound
His father’s line is Bulgarian Karakachani
His mother’s pedigree Thessalonica
He is a Balkan mongrel, Gabriela jokes
(she is Austrian, her mother Hungarian)
He is not afraid of gun shots
he is a good hunter
he licks everyone’s hands
he won’t be cross, if you shout at him

sometimes just sometimes
(very rarely though)
he will jump up and bite and bite…

VBV

Armenia’s Childhood

My skinny black grandmother crawled out
from behind the cupboard with a smile and on the red-brick wall
hung a map of the sea

“Light your grandad’s pipe and wrap the chains
around your legs. I will knit you a pair of socks
out of sails and make you a pair of glasses
out of old telescopes.”
“Grandma…”

My eyes are complex, my eyes are long.
I’ve poked at that brick wall since I was a child –
I stick my pencils in there, and hide my bits of paper.
I closed the cupboard so it didn’t pull down the room and
crossing the wooden floor saw my grandmother off.
I am turning around.
The sea is flowing out of the map. Down my brick wall
- dripping.
The Black Sea down my wall.
Dark is the sea –
dripping.
Down the wall – becks and outcrops…
through rough stucco.
The sea will overwhelm my childhood…
and so it did – my pencils rotted,
scraps of paper now floating rafts –
each with a history nailed together with consonants.
This is how grandmothers bring up their children in Armenia –
they give them maps
and salt from deep waters.
The salt is so the eyes can see.

“Come, Yohannes…”

I know I can wade through the water -
I am on my grandmother’s back.
Her eyes are complex, her eyes are long,
her hands old telescopes.
By and by we leave the room.
On the door a sign made of wax:
“Houses are old grandmothers”.

Neareast

… In the morning there were loads of pineapples, there were walnuts in the juicy apples,
the mulled wine was full of cinnamon
and long tobacco leaves floated in the hazelnut-and-star-anise tea.
At noon the amber honey from the oranges
oozed into softening figs
and we smoked sandal wood
with drops of thick pine-tree milk.
At dusk we placed pink grapefruits
in hot jugfuls of caramel
and lay down for the night
amongst green lemons
drinking long mouthfuls of strawberry cream
with Constantinople almonds
and syrupy tishpishtil.
Amid the scent of linseed
and fat olives
big nocturnal raisins
melted
in our mouths
like Armenian white jam
until the ginger tree awoke

V.

The ropes I used to tie my son
are still tight and wet.
The wardrobe hides the attic door,
The hanging dresses swing.

We drill cologne along the corners,
we’re back in Sofia at last,
two careful soldiers, maybe,
tying the threads of our past.

We are leaning over the cast-iron sink
in furnished quarters neither of us own.
We stand in front of the mirror and think:
In the end we put on our make-up alone.

We’ve grown old and look like brothers –
the way it’s always been.
We are used to this. My son and I are silent:
theatrical, exhausted, smiling.
Man-to-man

Men always want.
:
to be the hero – to swing from the gallows
with a terrible force towards Earth. That’s why
they play cards, drink spirits and tell dirty jokes.
And each has a war in his back pocket.
Infidelity in his jeans.
And a childhood full of pirates.

But there aren’t enough films to go round,
or women-directors to make them.

And so –building sites and tables
turn into silent movies.
Because whatever you say – it’s like
you never said it.
All your life, not even one memorable one-liner.

That’s why tired-looking men sit in stations,
waiting to be called up.
men under the table belting out songs,
waiting to be booked for mutiny.
Men who stay there
and wait with a terrible force…

In truth there aren’t enough heroes to go round,
or film-makers who believe in themselves.

…and not even one memorable one-liner,
except the last:“That’s life…”

Strange Vista

…how ‘Confused’ our physical Geography seems
when you look south from Moldova:
our country has no shape (we are slightly to the West), ‘sweaty’ –
a Caucasion province with gigantic memories.
‘Unnoticed in the lefthand corner of sea’ – X.
(scaled high up beyond the Danube and squeezed from Above.)
How different the Grammar sounds in
the suburbs of Kishinev and Kagul
(even more so in their ‘supurbs’ or on the lower banks
of the Dnester) and how strangely we conjugate our verbs,
worrying about History and geography (ours),
eyes staring to the right, Yarzhidva.
(high up, so we can look beyond the Alps)
and then anthropomorphic,
we rediscover our miracled landschaft –
like pilgrims
around the closed looking-glass of the Black Sea.
backwards. forwards.

I head south from Moldova,
but my reflections march towards Kiev –
only here do Dneper and Danube meet.

The Caucuses
(methodological operation)

My home against my castle.
I’ve quit.
Theatre is the oldest cunning (art). Here amongst the Ossetians
the images of history become theatre. (remoteness).
The accents of objects shift. The mechanical factories
are started up by Gramophones. And every factory is a song.

1. Azerbaijan – first song
“One cart after the other, a ship in each cart – bulging
wooden ships… Drowned people grazing. They graze and sing…”
Oh, my native land – dead buffalo and pregnant women
beneath your centrifugal fields. And at the very bottom lies
Black, copper Iran. How can I save your limbs from flight
or idolatry?
And the greatest Fear here – Earth has a Direction.

2. Armenia – second song
“…he is holding the Church in his palm, and inside it – human bustle.
In the same palm – Ararat. Forest and society used to be one.
leave us alone. leave us lonely.”
… But there are no gallows here! That means there is no Order, no hope…
History is a simple word,
preserved in a nervous stomach and the mouth.
I stand out, lost, while at home the watercolours
show the mutability of the field: it is
dangerous there, but I am a Creatress: I take my place and await
the new Modernism: God exists – and God is other people…

3. Georgia – third song
“To stay in my native land and lose my Georgian eyes,
and to forget, to leave behind electric posts as high as skies
and copper wiring in the ground only here, only here.
Let me be cursed then. I am a stuck-in-the-dirt.”
The Black Sea is the most Mediterranean – it is an outsourced Archive.
The only way for deep byzantiums
to reach the North. Our deep sleep is a useless hole.
The night here is a physical condition:
here matter slowly turns its womb inside out
and in the dark the Sounds sink into the body –
each Object with its own voice in the night.

…I’ve quit, but I am coming back.
To my Caucuses. And fear of the echo.

KRISTIN

Party at the Home for the Disabled

Among the incomplete figures
the singer crooned
a vast song. I warned him
that the river was right behind him, but he
led me to the edge and pushed.
Clutching him I pulled us down.
As we fell towards the rocks,
I asked him why he’d done it. There was still
time for me to hear his reply:
“Just to show you
it’s not a joke.”

Love Story

They played games with each other –
he with her head,
she with his legs.
Then he gave back her head,
a little worn out,
and she… – I’m not sure
what she did with his legs,
This is as much as I know.

Post Card to our brothers, the little Green Men

Celestial greetings!
Accept our
celestial greetings!
We are all fine,
down here, we keep
taking our pills.

Passing On

This man
was innocent,
he had nothing to do
with life, although
that’s where he was coming from.
Give back your teeth –
a magic hand said
and smacked him in the mouth.
The man looked round
one last time, gave thank
for the sunshine, and
as he left cried out:
“It washn’t wortsh the hasshle.”

Times

The two of them were walking up the path,
quietly discussing the common law marriage
of fate, the 10 o’clock news
and their own defensive strategies…

In the distance the sun dripped through the branches,
refusing to communicate. The leaves,
tucked up in frost,
counted down the days.

Who loved what?
How did we get here?

He, once so practical, is now drowning in music,
she, the artist, is now just a stitch
along the silk road.

In a clearing two magi ate out of a can,
making the most of the thin light, waiting for the third,
who had disappeared into the bushes.

Changeable times. The prophets
have lost their jobs.
My friend,

bent like a willow tree branch,
who took away your name?
Why is that unpaid electricity bill
dangling from your mouth?
I see you hanging out of your window,
freshly painted by the sunrise,
untouched by the sunset,
always stuck in the same day.
It’s a shame.
My friend,
strung on a wire through your heart,
who is holding the wire?
Other friends of mine are,
but this is the least of my worries.

Seaside Holiday

The sizzling of sun screen.
The heat has closed over us
like a mouth made of lead –

shouting won’t break it,
beach games
won’t lift it.

We lie in various positions
trying to prove
that we still

make some choices.
In the distance a tiny boat
is hurrying towards the white edge of the sea –

no ropes, no doubts,
no life guards,
no suffocation…

“No trumps...”
It’s Almost Cozy

It’s almost cozy,
the lack of sun
on this slow morning

I hold on with both hands
to my coffee cup while you
– the mercury in my amateur

alchemistry - somehow manage
to put cheese and bread
in your mouth, quietly

gaze fixed on the newspaper.
From inside their bowl
the turtles’ transparent eyes

see how we both
vanish into stillness
and how from time to time

a hand appears,
reaching for the sugar bowl,
or a mouth, curving downwards

into a smile.

Cold War Memories

We were told
there were two worlds at war
when there was really only one.

We were
the other.

Examination

They were all listening,
drawn up in columns
like a Chinese terracotta armies.
They stared, their bald heads
round as pterodactyls’ eggs,
waiting for a gesture that
would finally
and conclusively
discredit the candidate.
“Er… what I was about to say…”
They listened.
“… is that freedom is not something we are not born with,
the way we are born with two hands and two legs,
if we are lucky, that is…”
Some of the heads bent towards each other, puzzled
or so the speaker suspected.
“… E-er, I mean that
freedom is not inherent in us,
we do not have a right to it, it is not a given…
(Isn’t this ridiculously trite?)
They sat back indignantly
and sharpened their eyebrows.
“And then parents,
teachers, colleagues, society,
they all somehow… want you
but they do not like you.
And I want to be liked.”
“ Aah” – the room almost stirred.
(So I wasn’t imagining!)
“… and then I,
who have always wanted
to come here all my life
and to be one of you, I understand…”
Some of the boulder heads looked at each other.
A shifting rock groaned.
“that I have always
belonged to you
and that freedom comes
when you reject the prizes,
grab the ropes
and start cutting! cutting! cutting!...
A clay head
rolled down.

Three Ships

There were three ships.
One carried silk.
The second was sailing into nothingness.
The third was coming back
from a world of enduring myths.

We waved at each other.

Three times I jumped ship
And I’m still on the same one.

The Writer

I am sure
he didn’t see himself
as a kid.
He hesitated before crossing
and then at the last moment
jumped on the bus.
I don’t know how
he managed the steps.

“What’s your name, kid?
What’s your name?” – asked
the fussy old biddies, sensing
that something was wrong.

He didn’t reply.

His face was scrawled with
complicated shapes –
a line connected a lozenge with a dot
in the middle of one cheek to the opposite eyebrow,
striking through everything on its way.

“His mother will be worried sick!
Yes, she will! She will be
so worried,” the old women fretted.

It was quite possible
he could not talk yet,

but he had spent the morning writing letters
on his face, and those who
cared to, could
read:

“I have no one to be worried sick
over me.”

The doors opened to let people on
and that’s where I lost him.
Art on Slaveikov Sq.

The wind riffles through
the thin pages of poetry
crowded in the corner of the bookstall.
Some of them are losing their hair – you can see it
through the covers: hair from the right is combed to the left,
hair from the left is combed to the right.
They have raised their roundheads
to demand attention one last time, from behind
the lectern in the empty auditorium. A sigh
can be heard in the microphone,
an awkward laugh,
and a line that gets repeated by everyone
goes from mouth to mouth and straight through
the back of the head, comes out at the throat,
stitching the poets together:

“Life proved so short a day
and once promised so much meaning.”

The young books, disheveled, pile on top of the old ones,
shouting louder, they know just what to say, but they
are as underfed as a bunch of football fans from a sink estate
after losing to the champions.

“We-are-the-greatest-team-the-world-has-ever-seen!”

The cries hit the satellite dishes
and bounce back – the next news bulletin is on.
Life is as important as it ever was. The question is
who breaks the news.

Larger Lullaby

2005-09-21T10:26:00.000+01:00

Red Lullaby
(for Andy Croft)

Hush little baby, don’t feel worse,
Momma’s going to buy you a talking horse,
a talking horse that wants to fly
and never tells a single lie.
The horse’s mane is blow-torch white
to keep your crib aflame by night,
the horse’s saddle strawberry red
to match the eyelids on your head,
the horse’s hooves are made of steel
to keep your bedroom cold and real.
And if this truthful horse won’t fly,
we’ll bake its guts in humble pie;
and if this talking beast won’t speak,
we’ll dine on steak for half a week.

Bill's stuff

2005-09-21T10:15:00.000+01:00

Approaches to Sofia

So much plaster has fallen from her walls
she feels like lokum or an unpeeled lychee
with its stalk still attached but not to a bush.
Down the side of an apartment block
in yellow visiting letters it says SOFCOM.

Sitting on a stump with her black-clad back
to Vassil Levski Stadium, the art student sketches
a giant upheld submachine gun rising from
beyond the booths and bare trees. The city smells
of rain, both as it is anticipated, and as it falls.

The light switches in the agency hostel are round
like discoloured eyeballs in black sockets.
Old gloss drips across the eyes of disenchanted
journalists. Click them and they sound like big fat drops
on big fat roses, only the drops sound cold.

The Largo’s yellow bricks taste of a dust
that you suspect of being worn-out turmeric.
The space where Zhivkov’s tomb used to be
looks like the bristly disconnected jaw
of Desperate Dan, like a colossal chin.

Lokum—a gelatinous confection, variously flavoured and coloured, and coated with powdered sugar.

*

A Small Tune

The man honking enthusiastically on the creamy grey sac of skin in Eldon Square, the day before I left for Sofia – the man in the woolly hat who seemed to have a tune he was searching for without ever really being able to find it; the man everyone seemed to avoid, especially small dogs the same colour as the bag of skin – nonetheless seemed to have a small fortune lying in the coat spread out on the pavement before him.

It must be a small tune, to have so few notes in it – half a melody whistled by someone a century back as they performed a small domestic task. Not that hamstring-straining walk back up the mountain in the moonlight, back through the patchy snow, up through his breath to the farmhouse. He was silent for that, listening to the dog making difficult work of the drifts with its short legs. Not that tune full of the things he hadn’t told her in the gloom of her parents’ gate – he never wrote that down. But a small tune for the task of fetching a wooden cup, cracking the dull mirror of ice and dipping in the barrel, a few notes interrupted by the search to separate his face from the moon as the water settled.

I’m walking across a park in Sofia. It’s lunchtime and there are dogs asleep on the grass in the March sunlight. Even the sign hanging half off a bare-branched tree looks sleepy. I’m listening to another bagpipe player who’s sitting on a bench behind me and I’m looking at this huge sculpture like a gantry with tiles dropping off it, commemorating in wings and girders and cloud-gazing figures some event I can’t read. It’s surrounded by the most livid graffiti I can’t read either, and as I walk round it, the tune on the bagpipe is drowned out by music from the cafe in the corner of the park. This music too is being piped in from somewhere else.

Ghost Guests

At the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency we must not disturb
the ghosts of former journalists
who once reported on events
they had not attended, on news
that had not happened, and quoted all the dignitaries
who had not actually spoken.

These ghost guests, who do not sleep above us,
must never be woken by the improvisations
of artists from our two cities
apparently taking place right now,
not even by our clicking Esperanto na billiardski
while they do not watch Juventus.

The staff’s large dogs, which either protect us
from wolves, mafia, owl-shaped assassins, or
prevent us from leaving, lie around all day
while we, guests of a genus
unable to shower or buy Zagorka beer, falteringly
advance the dialogue of nations.

*

Rotunda of Sveti Georgi

Step down through all the fierce compacting years
into Serdica, the earliest city. It’s like
getting on your knees. Get on your knees
in that sobriety of grandmas and look up –

until the thin bricks swill like noodles round
the red inverted bowl of the Pantocrator,
and the fresco layers separate like cream,
each one partly revealed, partly destroyed.

Bulgarian angels stoop round its rim
and peer out from under Byzantine saints
like the men who squat to buy brandy
through low windows along the side streets.

This is how the holy have always got drunk –
heads mingled, immersed to their waists in feathers.

*

Victory Lights

My father threw the cigarette packet down the steep green slope of the cliff, and I watched it flutter down to where the red rock drop began.

‘Fetch,’ he commanded, but casually, as though he didn’t really mind whether he saw the packet again or not.I stared after it as it tumbled slowly from rock to rock, the breeze delaying its descent. I had good eyesight in those days and could easily read what it said:

‘Victory Lights. Cigarettes can make you feel a bit unwell or dead.’ I hadn’t noticed that the packets carried warnings before.

I tumbled down the slope, my father muttering, ‘Fetch, fetch,’ like a general ordering his dogs after a bear, but the bear is lost in the trees, its pelt an orangey red that matches the tree-bark, and you can only occasionally catch the white glint of the sunlight reflected in its eyes.

Perhaps it’s a former dancing bear, I thought, as my legs continued pumping. Perhaps it’s remembering the steps of a former dance.

I was almost horizontal now, facing the sea as it broke into white seagulls before me, but none of them had ‘Victory Lights’ written on their wings or backs. I remained so focussed I didn’t realise my shoulders had sprouted wings made out of the thinnest cigarette papers gummed together across a frame of used matchsticks made for me by a dead uncle, so I swooped down on the packet and caught it in one fierce hand before it could touch the waves, and brought it back to my father.

He looked at it a little warily and said, ‘No, I’m giving up.’

Red Lullaby
(for Andy Croft)

Hush little baby, don’t feel worse,
Momma’s going to buy you a talking horse,
a talking horse that wants to fly
and never tells a single lie.
The horse’s mane is blow-torch white
to keep your crib aflame by night,
the horse’s saddle strawberry red
to match the eyelids on your head,
the horse’s hooves are made of steel
to keep your bedroom cold and real.
And if this truthful horse won’t fly,
we’ll bake its guts in humble pie;
and if this talking beast won’t speak,we’ll dine on steak for half a week.

*

Gara Thompson

Somebody must have beat Prokopnik up
as badly as Frank Thompson and his troop
of doomed guerillas, left it face down in
the coal dust filling in its mirthless grin
of disused huts and shovellers, though the church
looked new, red-tiled beneath that tall bright ridge
of mountains showing snow through thinning birch.
We bounced across a long thin hopeful bridge
and saw the river and the railway track
entwining as they left, and then the plaque
for Gara Thompson: Communism’s small
tribute upon an empty station’s wall.
What did he leave? A crossless monument
that hoped to know the future’s whole intent.

Then drove around those high containing hills:
limestone that seemed to wall in brief towns called
Sverino still, or ‘beastly’ in his slang,
because the Turks were ambushed there, and hanged
the rebels where they caught them; shrines where monks
found mimic etymologies for all
this rock, since Cherepishki can mean ‘skull’
and ‘little prick’ – as was the fascist drunk
at Litakovo who was told to shoot
Frank with his weekly batches of haidutsi
because he was and could be seen to be a
pratenikia of solidarity.
He left a copy of Catullus, since
we cannot worship where we do not wince.

And so we drove into Lyuti Dol,
the ‘hot ferocious valley’ circled by all
those mountains, followed lumps of snow still lining
the road as through dropped from their truck, and then in
each village saw what seemed to be great torches
of unlit straw in metal baskets topping
telegraph poles: nests for still-absent storks
to bring good fortune back. Till then a slip
of red and white thread’s worn through March, for luck
that he ran out of here, a wristbone crossed
with blood, a martinitsa – string you pluck
to hear how Spring’s vibrating with the lost.
What did he leave? That faith of youth
which struggles for yet never doubts the truth.

And in another bashed-up town, the lane
that bears his name led past a breekless bairn
and up towards the unkempt bottled steps
and rambled gravel where the past is kept, a
bratska mogila by some hilltop firs,
the ‘brothers’ grave’ for partisans who now
are held remote and nameless as dead stars,
regime fall tarnishing his martyr’s crown.
And yet the silence reached that valley’s shroud
of snowcaps, till we hit the Sofia road
and passed those girls who bare their bums and bras,
since what he couldn’t see has come to pass.
He left a thumb-smear coin, since heads or tails
we always know Byzantium must fall.

Haidutsi—brigands, rebels; pratenikia—messenger, emissary; martinitsa—red and white thread worn on the wrist throughout March.

*

Svetka Petka Samardzhiiska

It’s night-time now in the elder frescos
and the saints have faithfully held their poses
while darkness clusters like granular slush.

They’ve been torn up, scrumpled, and mostly
lost their places in the comic book
that’s plastered in tatters to this strip-brick vault
by the blast of hours passing by default,
until we see their heads tilted in that gloom,
gospels like flails, their features shining
like insects
and suddenly the entire
squat chapel is the inside of the Bible beetle:
I sit in its camphor belly and stare
at what must be the negatives of its real
markings, since its back could never be
open to those snow-plugged clouds above
Sofia, half-buried in the underpass
among the glassy shops of boklutsi.

Its wingcases are opening in Heaven
with all these panels fully restored:
the saints blink once in that morning
and the bug unfurls its wings,
scaled with all their naked haloes.

Boklutsi—cheap souvenirs, tat.

Music in a Hotel Room

Closing the curtains sounds like tearing the day up.
You look for a language on the TV
you nearly understand,
but give up on game shows.

Room service always makes the bread look sad.
The partly-rehydrated porcini mushroom
dents your only gold filling
and you can’t drink beer in bed.

You listen to Gesualdo on your laptop and for him
it’s still the darkness of Good Friday.
Later, while the snow falls
on the muddy courtyard’s tracks,

you dream about the knife of light
laid on the chill of a church nave,
the dog tongue piazza outside,
and wonder how the knife feels about you,

how the knife feels about your vocal chords?
You open the curtains, and split
the darkness into dawn.
Snow clings to the rooftiles’ tips.

*

Mirror Writing

I must remember never to talk to myself in the mirror. When I do this something always goes wrong. Pep talks are particularly disastrous. I think this is because I’m not addressing me, I’m addressing my reflection. He gets tremendously confident, and goes about in the mirror world solving social problems.

Because we are joined by the thin wire of our eyesight, all this activity has a negative effect on my world and things go excruciatingly wrong. Like that remark about my nostril hairs.

There’s also the fact that he doesn’t like me. Whenever I catch sight of him in a shop window or the chrome panel of a lift he scowls at me and tries to throw me. By talking to him I’ve revealed too much of my inner world and he hates all those squishy hopes.

Because he knows my plans, he’s always there ahead of me, souring the ground, like that time I turned up at my favourite bar and Dorothy told me I was barred.

‘Why, what did I do?’

‘You know fine what you were up to last night.’

‘But I was in Edinburgh last night.’

I have the same problem with TV programmes. If I watch a football match, the team I support always loses. This is because they hear me shouting and are put off or offended. In the mirror world praise is always condemnation, and softness is always an offensive vulgarity.

I’ve just realised this is what’s wrong with my pep talks. If I’d just abuse my reflection all would go well.

I knew all this when I was a child. My grandmother’s bathroom was lined with black tiles so I could see myself going to the toilet. This meant all the reflections of all the girls at my school could see me going to the toilet too. I would sit down and never say a word.

I was much wiser then, calmer and more sensible.

*

Sofia City Blues

Eh am like thi toon whaur Eh wiz born,
meh hert is always somewhere whaur it disnae belong;
the demons of thi ages rip ma heid tae rags
and Eh cairry meh sowel in these three bags,
Eh cairry meh sowel in these three bags.

do you confuse great pop music
with being in love
well, don’t apologise

Eh’m thi less travelled, unravelled man
jist a-waitin fur a slogan in thi New Bedlam
Eh’m thi man ootwith thi language, wi thi slanguage fuhl o baggage
and Eh cairry meh sowel in these three bags,
Eh cairry meh sowel in these three bags.

do you peel your mind and find
city within city within city?
don’t make a career out of it

They tell me stoap translatin and enjoy thi kitsch
beginning wi thi wife o Doktor Lachnavitch
but anither ladybird jist appeared oan ma pad
she sez Eh cairry meh sowel in these three bags,
Eh cairry meh sowel in these three bags.

the bed is sandy
the bed is Sunday
the bed is bad lasagne

tissue remains

*

Tissue Remains

Too many hands were pressing on
my breastbone and my brow in
the great marble sandwich of the state museum.
We slid like sliced meat about the Thracian room
filled with so much gold as though
Midas had beaten up a rose garden
into this dinner service full of slurring rhyta.
The bas-relief horsemen insisted
on cornering their boars with always
one hand flung out behind them
not clutching a spear but letting the reins stream
through their casually tugging long fingers
which would only take a millennium
to rearrange themselves into
the next door icons’ serpentine blessing machines
of still more hands. But for now
all the faces were Alexander clones
so that was never where my eyes could rest
till the skull-bulb helmets drew us,
their tight-lipped spaces that hold
exact absences, to the case in which
earth-coloured armour propped on perspex shoulders
and shinbones. And the greaves,
that word that’s almost a wound,
had their own card that told us
what survives the centuries’ ceaseless fingers
is less than the step I couldn’t take away:
‘Bronze, traces of leather straps, tissue remains.’

Rhyta (plural of rhyton) – drinking cups with a hole in the point to drink from.

*

Application for the Post of a Passing Bird

Is reading better than just living?

Is writing better than just reading?

Is translating better than just writing?

Is teaching foreign literature better than just translating it?

Is it better to teach the foreign literature of a previous era than contemporary foreign literature?

Is it better not to teach the foreign literature of a previous era, just to sit alone in your unclear flat, contemplating the writers of that time in the turmoil of their distant city?

Is it better to imagine yourself still in your own city, but at that previous time, far away from the writers of that foreign literature, each facing the murderous dilemma of their lives, and just think about how impossible it would be to translate them?

Is it better to stay in the goose-eyed village where you were born, but at that distant time and not to know the language of those foreign writers, filled with the outrageous energy of despair, working away at the great works you will never read?

Is it better to stay in your unclean room in your father’s house, and imagine a language which will enable you to talk to the girl who sells your mother adulterated bread in the shop you are afraid to go in?

Is it better to write a blotchy book in this language and send it to the executed writers in their far away graves for them to translate?

Or is it better just to translate it yourself into all the languages of the dead?

(As you ponder this last question, a nondescript bird appears briefly at thewindow.

Is it better to be this bird?)

*

The Bear

We’re not long out of the blue bare dome
of the Banya Bashi mosque, empty except
for some bloke from Luton, when
we meet the bear. Everything had seemed
so familiar till the look on its face.

The Roma on the other end of the chain
plays that little fiddle that stares you down
like the Cretan lyre, and the great bear lifts
one paw as though to rest it on the skull
of one of these someones constantly

passing, each far more naked in
their negligent gaze as one foot shifts
to the beat, and I find I’m staring at
the jaunty red scarf instead of the strap
around its jaws. This bear has

another pattern to obey,
the way the painters in Boyana did,
abandoning the Byzantine style
to fill the barrel of the chapel’s chest
with a crusting flood of cruelties.

Now this flank is skewered by a painted spear
but that eye’s removed by an actual chisel;
the feast of radishes, garlic and defacements
is arranged according to local harmonics
that must mean the lovely flaking Desislava,

the doomed Sebastocrator Kaloyan,
stare at me from the bear’s matt eyeholes:
the whole Second Kingdom is jostled in there
between the Tatars and the Turks.
Clearly the bear is jerking at the end

of the same Ottoman rope as Vassil Levski,
its paw raised in that saluting fist
Frank Thompson raised before Stoyanov’s
firing squad – and then, before I get on
to the communists and their umbrellas,

the fit is past, the bear is back on all fours,
all the fizz of history drains from my brain,
and I can see from its attitude that it
hasn’t taken a step: the entire horo took place
within the singular emptiness that is

my angry skull. So the bear exits, pursued
by me and the Roma and the bearded boy
from Luton and we four sit awhile
in the old mosque reciting prayers
in a further language none of us knows at all.

Horo—dance.

Strange Vista

2005-07-12T12:42:00.000+01:00

…how ‘Confused’ our physical Geography seems
when you look south from Moldova:
our country has no shape (we are slightly to the West), ‘sweaty’ –
a Caucasian province with gigantic memories.
‘Unnoticed in the lefthand corner of sea’ – X.
(scaled high up beyond the Danube and squeezed from Above.)
How different the Grammar sounds in
the suburbs of Kishinev and Kagul
(even more so in the sup:urbs or on the lower banks
of the Dnester) and how strangely we conjugate our verbs,
worrying about (our) History and geology,
eyes staring to the right, Yarzhidva.
(high up, so we can look beyond the Alps)
and then anthropomorphic,
we rediscover our miracled Landschaft –
like pilgrims
around the looking-glass of the Black Sea.
backwards. forwards.

I head south from Moldova,
but my reflections march towards Kiev –
only here do the Dneper and the Danube meet.

-------
-------
Dear friends, this is the poem "Strange Vista". I marked my suggestions with bold.

Off to Crete

2005-07-12T09:29:00.000+01:00

Dear Folks,

I'm off to Crete on holiday this morning, hopefully to finish the next book. I'm conscious that this project is very near completion, but can't quite be sent off yet. What's need is some decisions on the changes suggested by Kristin and Vassil to the translations Andy and Mark were working on. When we have these everything can be sent to Claire and to Tony at Arc Publications. So -- one last focus?

Sorry about the indents

2005-06-24T11:27:00.000+01:00

(I just spent half an hour putting them in, but they didn't publish.)

Here's the first set with your corrections

2005-06-24T09:09:00.000+01:00

Georgi

The Hunter’s Wife

The wife of the man who hunted women
couldn’t bear it and hit the road.
The hunter lost it
let his beard grow.
and the game drifted away, bored.

* * *

God
must be happy
if He has no
God

* * *

Love

Every night
to dream of the woman
who lies next to you.

* * *

Eleven Attempts at a Definition

1

it
started somewhere
(it doesn’t remember where)
it has to get there
(it’s forgotten where)
and now it just moves

2

it
is not the It you’re thinking of
it
is the absence in the room that makes you
turn around suddenly

3

it
is so little with a little i
with soft ears and warm paws
no-one has seen it yet
and this is what proves
it exists

4

it
is the flow that makes
the leaf fall from the tree
into a bucket of water

and blurs the sky

5

it
is also the stillness
that expands
and the sky clears

between two leaves

6

there is some connection between
the black beetle and the rose
and this is
it

7

it
is in the dot of the i
or between the i and the t
or it’s the devil knows where

but the Devil doesn’t know

8

you might think it’s god
but God
has a capital letter

9

you might say it’s death
but just listen to it
Death?
I tasted it once
it was tough and sour
I was puking all night

10

it
is elusive and fragile
name it and it dies
catch it and it’s gone
melting into emptiness

11

(and the most successful attempt)

* * *

Tea with Milk

For T.S. Eliot
il miglior te

How’s it going, she asks. A gentle
English morning, I say. Reading
Eliot, listening to the Beatles. Oh,
she says, how do you mix the two?
Like milk with tea, I say.
Like tea with milk,
she corrects me, after all Eliot
really insisted
on being intense and English.
He would kill for porcelain,
for the evening papers,
for the tinkle of teaspoons. He
was the tea, he was the tea… Those
beetles just lapped up the cream.

* * *

The Love Rabbit

I’ll be back soon, she said,
and left the door open.
It was a special night for us,
a rabbit was simmering on the hob;
she’d chopped onions, sliced carrots
and crushed garlic.
She wasn’t wearing a coat,
she hadn’t put her lipstick on, and
I didn’t ask where she was going.
She’s like that.
She’s never had much sense
of time, late for everything, and that’s all
she said that night,
I’ll be back soon –
she didn’t even close the door.

Six years later
I meet her in the street,
and she seems a little alarmed,
like a woman who’s remembered
she’s left the iron on
or something…

Did you turn off the cooker? she asks.
Not yet, I say,

rabbits are tough.

* * *

Nadia

Victoria Inn

a third-class hotel on belgrave road
from a gramophone’s horn queen victoria rises
in her first communion dress

blurred by the mirror on the wall
the receptionist lowers her eyes
cashmere-blue under a cool blue light
then she gives a skipping rope to victoria
and reaches for the key to our room

night after night for the last year
£38 for the same thing
a view of the backyard
expensive moans from the rooms above
muesli and plum jam for breakfast
a change of sheets in the morning
but the same blood on the sheets the same nails

if one day we happen to come back at noon
we will find victoria
looking old in her negligee
draped on the sofa listening
to the gramophone music that rises
this time in tubercular phrases wheezing from
the same horn

if this happens you close my eyes
take me carefully down the stairs to our room
lay me on the cold double bed
and kiss my hands
these purple wrists that someone once bound
perhaps with a skipping rope

* * *

The Small Rembrandt

In the mirror
an old
long neglected
charcoal-burning stove
and a sink to the right.

On the grimy black hotplate
three potatoes
two big and one smaller.

It was many years
before the tap ran
with hot water.

My mother’s hands turn
crimson crimson
and clean

among the chill of greasy dishes.

* * *

Glass

a transparent man snapped inside her
a sliver of glass broke off
caught within
and wounded her

it was unexpected
unprotected
love with a faded label and a grubby mouth
it wasn’t fizzy enough
it wasn’t chilled enough
the knickers and bra didn’t rhyme
like those of the legendary typist
in the fire sermon

the translation of
adorno’s aesthetic theory
hadn’t been published yet
so they didn’t know their pain could also be
untotal
and non-identical

they also didn’t know
how to push through to where
shared wounds would open
no-one could close

perhaps that’s why out of ignorance
he takes the sliver out with his lips
she falls silent for a time
until the discrepancy heals over

now he is her distant butterfly
and she is his wild yarrow
separated by glass
made from small splinters

he won’t be snapping inside her anymore
she won’t be wounded
although they both bleed
every time visitors come
and read the sign

this is a safe installation
it is not love
and it’s not even art
it is not even art
it is not even art

* * *

Vinea Mea Electa

he was too young
unconfirmed
for my thirtysomething years

behind the high walls
I searched for him in the yard
but all I saw was his skin settling
and drying
untouched by the sun

spiders bees and mayflies
ritually spilled their secretions on it
the fig-tree shed deep indecent
shadows
and the low-lying creepers choked
the immaculate blossoms
of his stained-glass belly

I told his mother I wanted him

but she said
he was too young
unconfirmed
for the wine I was fermenting
among the damp dusty shameful
ferns

* * *

Kristin

The Poet with the Hole in his Middle

Death made him sick. She pushed him
to live too clearly, too
intensely. Sometimes he felt
she was watching him and so
he would preen, speak
enigmatic gibberish in interviews,
secretly puff out his chest and undo the top button of his shirt.
Then he would paint islands to let go.

At the same time she was negligent, forgot
she’d left notes in his desk drawer,
completed his drafts.
In the background to his daydreams
he would often catch her profile – only for a second
of course, and you can never be sure
what you’ve seen – through the palm trees
in the warm shallows of a lagoon,
a thin figure
(like most people, he planted palm trees
in his dreams).

Perhaps she was waving at him.
Maybe she was smiling.
Possibly to herself.
(She just wants to upset me.)

In a fury he would hurl sharp words at her –
some would blot his papers, others
would shatter in his mirror.

His big secret, the empty hole in his chest,
dilated. Alone, shirt unbuttoned,
he would examine it, tentatively tracing the edges,
squint at the unlikely horizon inside,
baffled by how to plug it.
Every lateral solution was sucked away, shrinking
into darkness.

This evening the hole
was in place. Death
poked her head through it.
‘Hi. Want to go for a coffee?’

(So she’s back again.)

‘Yes, let’s.
I take mine black.’

* * *

2002: An Odyssey

There wasn’t a single bloody shop here
and now they’re popping up all over.
The main street for make-up and skincare
is still wrinkled, but it’s got new teeth.
Two streams of people spill out
of trams converging on the Hali Market
and sweep a woman up between them.
For a moment in the scrum one of her eyebrows
points at the bagel kiosk,
the other at Sirius, if it could be seen
through the clouds.
2001 has passed
with no Odyssey,
no small step for man,
no giant leap for mankind.
The dreams of the 60s have long ago
been diluted and bottled
as extra-strength dandruff shampoo
and now we are sad,
and we are happy, because
we want our shampoo.
The shop assistant is stressed out.
‘A top with fish-net sleeves? Yes
we have knitted ones.’

‘Knitted? Don’t
you people watch MTV?’
I burrow among the clothes rails.
I don’t even like MTV
but I can’t resist the last word.

* * *

VBV

The Pregnant Officer
(a military mural)

‘Ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you angry.’
Aldous Huxley

I no longer have limbs and battles
only a weight in my belly and a thickening in my breast
my legacy is painted walls in the field:
let’s stop before the first.

First

The army ponderously, unavoidably withdraws –
abandoned in the field wounded soldiers give birth:
that’s how it is
at the end of battles.

That’s why the soldiers armed themselves beforehand
with a mixture of implements and tools:
for music, for sound, for register, for checking off.
To conduct weddings in the field.
They shouldered whole inventories and households.
And went to the front a year ago.
The soldiers, riding their fattened cows,
pricked with spears
the nervy soil and the thick manure.
Already heavy, but in the heat of battle.

40 weeks in the field they laboured, with casualties.
In the midst of battle they erected buildings – to impact the soil,
to leach the difficult clay,
to dry the field like foam.
There are so many resources – and land tucked away,
more than enough.
…
…

I no longer have limbs and battles
nothing in the belly, nothing in the breast
I own murals I don’t want.

Second

Abandoned in the field wounded soldiers give birth:
children appear and look for their fathers.
They look – but the field is enormous.
They look – and everyone is a father.
…

Then here come, very slowly,
the extended families
and the distant relatives –
to lounge around,
to play cards.
Deal out cards and fortunes.

* * *

War
(a summary of Th:is)

1. The Going to War

Going as a warmonger in eyeglasses
I pick out sacrificial altars within my cattle’s field of vision
and I steer my horse away from the enemy,
with an elaborately chased rifle with many handles
I shield and field behind my hand not my native land but myself.
My enemy is Culture.
I am cunning, heavybutdeft (no mass no movement)
I was raised with ancient skills, a charm against understanding,
against awareness.
I grab, I lob, I sing – I shake my blubber – waving wildly
broadcasting far and wide…

All’s fair in love and war –
I am that which I am not.

2. The Frames before the War

About me as a soldier: most of all I love Frames
and iron;
Keyholes depress me.
When I touch the window handle
I feel my hand as a thing, its wrinkles, even its curves.
For me, touching is deeper than seeing.
And groping for Nails, driving them home, I feel more assembled, Strong.
Look – the edges turn me on, but it’s not a sexual thing,
it’s in the rummaging and gathering:
the edges are time
the shading is place.

But when I caress substance
and seek to extend it, War arrives.
And alters sight and the Bones
with which we see.
The Frames, the frames! All because I am an iconoclast.

3. Conditions for War

From everything up to here and beyond I build my battle:
I splash out my hearing to claim Space (within surfaces
I have no skill for war).
I organise meteorological condi(c)tions instead of
circumstances:
(clipped vowels
should be heard in the middle of the field;
the longer ones further on;
the consonants near me – because every Word is area(l)blast).
I grope so the war becomes the Body of God.
And in Him
the war is simply symbiosis and substitution.
We become one.
We become 1.

4. The Battle in the War

And constant tension:
I shall be tense! Like a tree with limbs… And then
the taut muscles will harden into bone
like fired clay in the stomach of cattle
the eyeballs are bulging with the tension
and protruding they shall see all.
And grinding my teeth, their roots impale my gums…
And my temples implode;
and compress the substance inside.
And my distended skin – with swollen veins and distinct sinews.
And lashless and browless from the tension…

And after protracted strain my muscles will be toxic.
And fingernails are still organic – this really hurts.
Growth really hurts.
At that moment, at that precise moment I love you, my girl, my habit and border.
My culture.

5. Reviewing the War

There it is.
When I looked back I saw the Black Sea was solid –
Corpses: so many millions, decomposing giant
bodies, I couldn’t fit them in
the scope of my at:tension –
I strained – and my eyes widened, dilated, protruded;
my pupils stretched painfully and with a swollen eye
I per(re)ceived the bodies –
Everything is organic, this is my East.
And eyes wide, eyes glazed, I laughed out loud.
And for the first time History and Geography shared a common Denominator.
Here it is:

Reply to vbv

2005-06-22T14:29:00.000+01:00

If you can post your file, that'd be helpful -- I just strip out the formatting when I try. I've enabled you as an editor, so if you can find a way of inverting the order of posts, please do so (I've looked, and can't). Looks like it puts each new day at the top, then within the day orders consecutively.

Bill

Tishpishti

2005-06-21T11:21:00.000+01:00

"...with Constantinople almondsand syrupy tishpishtil..."
I checked and I found that correct spelling for the word "tishpishtil" is "tishpishti". I am using it in the poem "Neareast". My grandma always says "tispishtil", but if we are translating the poem we should use tishpishti.

PS
Bill, do you want me to help you with my file?

VBV

1st missive from the vampire rabbit

2005-06-20T05:41:00.000+01:00

Dear Folks,

Here's the site, and here are your comments:

*

Nadja:

I agree with the comments of the others. I'm sorry I haven't replied in time. Part of the reason for not replying was that I'm actually very glad with the translations, so I don't have serious comments. The only thing I would like to change is to remove the dedications in two of my poems (Russian Monument and Fairy Lights). Still, I have some problems with the rhythm of Georgi's "Hey,Jude", but I'm not sure we can do much in this direction. I checked Adorno's sites in the Internet and I've found that most probably words in brackets should be "untotal" and "nonidentical". I will check again all the stuff till next Friday, and I will write if I feel the urge of changing / questioning something else.

I hope this finds you well over there! Do you have any plans of when exactly four of you would like to come next year for the translation of your poems, so we can start orrganising things as early as possible?

Very best wishes,

n.

*

Andy:

Four small points.

First, Nadya's 'Russian Monument' would read better as 'the ministry of agriculture'.

Second, in Kristin's 'Arts on Slaveikov Square' 'dishevelled' should be 'disheveled'.

Third, what's with the square brackets in Nadya's 'Glass' ?

Fourth, I suggest we put the source of Georgi's faux-epigraphs (Gaustin) in
brackets, so that this information is separated from both epigraph and
poem.

*

Kristin:

I was wondering - if it's not too late to ask - whether one would know that the "magi" and the "prophets" in the poem "Times", Andymark p. 20, are the same people. In Bulgarian it is the almost same thing. If this is not obvious in English, may I suggest instead of "prophets", the
"seers", or "wise men"? And there is an interval on p. 20, between "I take mine black" and "2002: An Odyssey". I am saying it just in case the computer guy is as wise as ours and suddenly decides that both lines are the same.

*

Vassil (first paragraph refers to the file, which I'll attach as soon as I've worked out how):

I've made some corrections - my suggestions are marked with [red, bold, underline] all together. And my comments are in the balloons... I changed line-brakes and indents in The Caucuses as they are in Bulgarian original. I am not quite sure that "The Caucuses"
sounds in English as it is in Bulgarian. I think it's the most difficult one and I am really
not sure what feeling it produces. But maybe we can leave it like that. You should say that.

I have one question:

Is it possible to add poem "A.". I brought it to Newcastle but we didn`t have enough time to check it. It is short and up to now I have 9 pages. Besides that I think (if we are going to use "A."): it would be clearer that the other poem "V." corresponds with "A." (I have several poems
with alphabet titles). "A." can be at the beginning. And "V." at the end... For example... The real problem is that Boris didn`t translate this poem (though he saw it), and we didn`t work on
it. But if it is ok, I will be glad.

*