FURY

David Morley

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781784109905
• eBook ISBN:
  9781800170476
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Poetry Book Society Autumn 2020 Choice Shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection FURY sees the Ted Hughes Award winner David Morley once more seeking to give imaginative voice to the natural world and to those silenced or overlooked in modern society, ranging from the Romany communities of past and present Britain, to Tyson Fury and Towfiq Bihani, one of the forgotten inmates of the Guantanamo bay detention centre. In poems that bristle with linguistic energy and that celebrate poetry's power to give arresting voice to the unspoken and the untold, in ourselves and our societies, FURY is David Morley's most powerfully political work. It is a passionate testament to poetry's capacity to speak to, and for, us and our place in the world - its power to be an outreached hand, like the 'trembling hands' of the magician in 'The Thrown Voice' or the 'living hand' of the poets celebrated in 'Translations of a Stammerer'.

47

THE CARAVANS OF TARSHISH

Silver spread into plates is brought from Tarshish,
and gold from Uphaz, the work of the workman,
and of the hands of the founder: blue and purple
is their clothing: they are all the work of cunning men.

– Jeremiah 10: 9

‘The funeral of “The Prince of Gypsies, Wisdom Smith,” aged 76, took place at Essendine, in Rutland, on the 4^th inst. About one hundred of the wandering tribe were present at the ceremony, and a large concourse of peasantry from the adjacent villages also joined the burial train. The dark faced outcasts, in projecting this spectacle, were wiser in their generation than the simple rustics among whom they had pitched their tents; they secured a “comfortable coffin” for their patriarch by assuring the joiner that the “Prince’s son was worth thousands” and that he would come from the north to take the place of chief mourner in the obsequies. They also duped other small tradesmen by assuring them that the wealthy heir to the vacant diadem of their … people would pay for everything in a most princely manner! Every man, woman, and child of the crafty race, however, had disappeared like a mist before the morning succeeding the ceremony, and the tradesmen are unpaid.’

Lincolnshire Mercury, Saturday 27 April 1839

Christian names and tribal surnames of the Roma in the caravans were current at the time the story is set; as are the English titles for professions and occupations.

48

1^st caravan

Laverock All Alone of all the Crafters

Northward and Sherebiah of the Nails

Wainwright and Saffron of the Wheelers

Queenie Rose and Darkle of the Carterleays

Evergreen and Loolodì of the Burrs

Innocence and Diaphaney of the Stanleys

Studivares and Paradise of the Applebys

Archippus and Angelis of the Lavenders

Trafalgar and Fidelity of the Raffertys

and of the true Lees no word

49

His word,

his hòrata gallops to his son at Kirkby Stephen:

the Prince has fallen into the phoov of mourning.

The Prince’s son ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• First Lyrebird
• The Thrown Voice
• Romany Wounds Me
• Fury
• Second Lyrebird
• What Will you Give for the Moon?
• The Key Harvest
• After the Burial of the Gypsy Matriarch
• The Stuttering Butcher and the Sugarbeet King
• Third Lyrebird
• Wingbeats of a Romany Noun
• Starling Roost in Swansea
• ‘Like Wind through Woods in Riot’
• ‘She is Leaf-like and Bird-like’
• Orphans of Orphans
• Fourth Lyrebird
• Honour
• When I Heard the Calling of Birds
• Cockade
• Rafter
• Fifth Lyrebird
• Gamekeeper’s Ghost
• Significance at Innominate Tarn
• The Apostle Birds
• I Dropt Down on the Thymy Molehill
• Sixth Lyrebird
• The Caravans of Tarshish
• Kop Kop to His Horses He Sings and No More
• Cherry Pickers
• Our Home is a Hunger
• Gypsies
• Seventh Lyrebird
• Translations from a Stammerer
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Also by David Morley, from Carcanet
• Copyright