Over

Jane Draycott

• Publisher: Oxford Poets
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781903039922
• eBook ISBN: 9781847779373
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Over, Jane Draycott's third book, takes its title from a sequence of twenty-six poems based on the international phonetic alphabet: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta... In these and other pieces Draycott creates a world of echoing voices and reflections. She evokes the mirrors and doorways, dreams and night-time journeys that transform the familiar: entrances into a different reality. Over explores liminal places where ocean meets land, land drops to ravine, lives intersect in piazzas. The poems cross thresholds between what is finished and what is 'not over yet', between present and past and, in an extract from her new translation of the medieval dream-vision Pearl, between a sunlit garden and the mysterious landscape of the world to come.

Over

Alpha

End of summer in the apartments.

On their rope-walks across the city

the dry months tauten to quiet.

At night, the ear gondolas through

the narrow echoing hours, the heart

slap-slapping under bridges

of sometimes only a single word.

Through the caverns of brickwork

we listen for vital signs – the man

below echo-finding on his radio,

a piano trickling with water,

winter with its chloroform mornings

pulsing hundreds of miles offshore:

begin, begin, begin.

Bravo

i.m. JP

Down the middle of our street’s a table

where odds and evens might meet

and its cloth is the skirt of the night-duty nurse

or an altar prepared for a feast.

It’s midnight but it’s not that scary

when you’ve been in the woods

as often as we have, and it’s tranquil.

This is not the darkness you think it is –

see how vision deepens: dashboard dials,

rain on a kerbstone, the blurred heart

of a bird in flight, icebergs everywhere.

On the night-table, sugar in infinite detail,

sweetmeats, silver in the shape of a prayer,

something from every house in the road.

Fear nothing. It is not over yet.

Soon we will have a whole city of light.

Charlie

Now here you are at the airport

speaking five different languages at least

with ease, five unbelievable necklaces

one of which might just be

the song of a blackbird

as you precision-skate the runway,

conquistador three days without sleep,

to now take flight, carrying

everything you know up the mountain.

Above the snowline even your hair sings.

You turn again to almost perfect crystal,

you are beyond the shadow of a doubt.

And from the peak you see it, one glimpse

before it’s smothered by a cloud-filled sky.

Bye-bye blackbird, bye-bye.

Delta

And so your hard-won boat

ends up here, disintegrating

after the long trip down

toward these seven channels of light,

high summer fanning out ahead:

papyrus, lily flowers, their bell-mouthed ah.

You have become a house with corridors

open to the sky, your triangular heart

a sail or garden, fertile ground

for those you know to come

and live in, in a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Sky man
• The Square
• The Girls’ Book of Model-Making
• In the same way
• Pass
• We would like you to listen
• Concourse
• The Longest Day
• Ashburnham House
• Turquoise
• After the Meal
• All this was fields
• Night Museum
• The Fair Miles
• Mass Observation
• Quay Street
• Island
• Opera Express
• Eldorado
• The Funeral of Queen Victoria
• Lookout Mountain
• All that we have
• from Pearl
• Return to Relleu
• Picnic
• Technique
• Door
• Wayzgoose
• The Hired Boat
• Over
• About the Author
• Also by Jane Draycott from Carcanet Press / OxfordPoets
• Copyright