Raptors

Toon Tellegen, Judith Wilkinson

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781847770837
• eBook ISBN: 9781847778550
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

With the economy of proverbs and the psychological insight of a novel, Toon Tellegen's acclaimed sequence Raptors depicts the dynamics of a family held hostage by the mood-swings and histrionics of a father, a figure both comic and terrifying, grotesque and pathetic. Tellegen's mercurial imagination evokes the dark archetypes of European folklore and reanimates them with a sophisticated sense of the endless fluidity of relationships, the instability of interpretation. An improvisation on a theme, 'circling back to my father' at the start of each poem, Raptors builds to a story without narrative, its extravagant imaginative leaps into absurdity held within a framework of tender observation. Toon Tellegen's translator Judith Wilkinson has worked closely with the poet to create English poems that capture the startling clarity and inventiveness of the original Dutch. Raptors has the rewarding intensity of a modern classic.

III

My father and then for hours, days

My father

and then for hours, days

nothing

and then my mother, trudging along, lugging his suffering,

spilling some of it now and then

(but with such gentle eyes, she)

and then my brothers, angry,

steaming mad,

dense clouds came off them,

and then nothing again

for months, years

and then my father again

– ‘where are you all?’ –

old and hurried,

nobody beside him,

behind him,

nobody any more.

My father fished for answers,

My father

fished for answers,

found none,

but he sang

real fishermen float in silence, crowned with glory,

with their bellies up, like chairmen of boards

drifting out to sea

my father sang about patient endurance

and about hunger that gnawed at him,

wanted something of him,

refused to tell him what it was

grinding his teeth while he sang softly

and my mother heard him

and took him with her –

didn’t tell him where –

pushed him gently backwards on a bed,

nestled herself on top of him

and they became entangled

in the space that stretched beyond the furthest stars

and induced the deepest sleep,

the great slovenly unknown.

My father was everywhere,

My father

was everywhere,

but not where everyone thought

they had found him at last

‘there! there he is!’

the world buzzed,

everyone pointed at him,

recognised him, overwhelmed him, wrapped arms round him

my brothers glowed and nodded:

‘yes, that’s him… that is him…’

my mother closed her eyes,

felt his peculiar messy nearness,

his half-hearted fingers,

his misplaced lips,

whispered his name:

– my father was everywhere, always,

but not there, not then, that time, that one time –

‘my dearest love.’

My father slept through headaches, hazards and uncontrollable

My father

slept through headaches, hazards and uncontrollable

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Preface
• I
• II
• III
• About the Author
• Copyright