Otherwise Unchanged

Owen Lowery

• Publisher: Northern House
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781847772008
• eBook ISBN: 9781847777515
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Combining poems of historical depth, human fascination, and personal sensitivity with a willingness to explore the possibilities of poetic form and technique, this compilation produces diverse formal arrangements from Arabic, English, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, and Welsh poetry. As it aims to assimilate aspects of these traditions with the poet's own voice, this collection pays homage to the lives and works of Primo Levi, Paul Celan, Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, and Edward Thomas. Intimate and personal subjects are also gracefully explored, including a traumatic experience of spinal injury and disability.

I

Now I’m thinking about it

You must promise me one thing: to return

touched by the things you’ve seen, but otherwise

unchanged. When you bring me that other place,

that world removed, and I come to learning

the first colour you saw the sun hover

into, it must be you I’m learning through.

And when you show me the grass turning

one of the herds on the point of its hoof,

let it be the way it appeared to you,

let it come to me as the same moment,

the same instinct. Touched but unchanged, a room

the memories flicker in, but then undo

themselves from as fast when we home in

on just us again. Or will that seem new

to you as well? Perhaps I’ll be the views

you first woke, the ones you’ll be showing me.

Possible first impressions

So it is, it really is, Africa.

You’ll be flying from this morning inside

the passport office, the Mersey’s long tide

in the yellow metal of a ticklish

sun. Your winter dreams will be colliding

with the hum and the sheen, the conviction

of a world unleashed from the restrictions

of internet photographs. As the skies

lighten and then darken again you’ll feel

it tugging at you, the moment slipping

into a wall of heat, and the stars kept

waiting for your first impression, white steel

held there in the act of being chipped at

by the first blow-torch. It’s then you’ll unpeel

your wanting to be there, the movie-reel

taking me there as the seat-belt unclips.

Meanwhile, back at the Chop House

There’ll be an angle from which we’re changed

in the jade of the Victorian tiles

every time our talking it over

finds a way between us. At that range

our thoughts lose themselves, become the smiles

the dead fill their own with. A camera

spears a moment through the evening droves

to make its own. Its wincing hammers

another into the black and white

ranks of faces we’ve seen, or we’ve heard,

or a part of us feels we should know

the difference in. In a certain light

a radio voice leaning on the words

buzzing towards us from the table

next along, could be seeing his ghost

in a mirror. His lines, made stable

for us, seem to fascinate themselves

with the prospect he’s been moving from

ever since the lens came down. There’s one

your son went to see with school solving

some of those enormous ifs, aloof

from the rest, more known, or more recent,

ergo larger. Their naming goes on

for several life-times in the friezes

behind the menu, with each dated

not at birt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• I
• II
• III
• About the Author
• Copyright