Luna Park

Grevel Lindop

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781857549874
• eBook ISBN: 9781784100490
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Grevel Lindop is a poet who has stood up to walk his poems before sitting down to write them. He knows their landscapes first of all by foot. The poems in Luna Park travel between the Staffordshire locales of Tixall, Shugborough and Cannock Chase, to Manchester, Nottingham and Oxford, venturing as far afield as Mexico and Cuba. Each is shown to be a 'landscape of fantasies', a ledger of upkeep or decline that reflects a people's values. Luna Park, the abandoned funfair of the collection's title, is also the landscape of Lindop's own poetry, a haunted theme-park of talkative ghosts, blurring the line between ritual and amusement. The moon, the collection's totem, peeks repeatedly through the lines, in the silver of two lovers' rings, in the luminous X-ray of a broken arm, in the stones resting in fields or threaded on a necklace. An air of moss, tree bark, the warm dampness of woods infuses Lindop's verse, but so too does the warmth of human intimacy, bonds between lovers and generations. The collection ends in the extended prose piece 'Hurricane Music', Lindop's memoir of a visit to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. // Care for detail, love of nature, clear eye and formal excellence. Every poem shows us more than we have seen with our own eyes.' - Elizabeth Jennings, Independent // 'One of the most complex and sophisticated British poets […] Classical tradition fused with the edginess of late modernism.' - Kevin McGrath, Harvard Review

I

Cosmos

Between Orion and Gemini, an almost-full moon.

Wrinkled tidewater tilting at the lips of Morecambe Bay.

Galaxies of cow parsley edging the valley fields.

Slow explosions of lichen on the fellside boulders.

The long-armed yew gesticulating at your window:

ancient growth-rings cupping a still more ancient hollow.

Old glass: molten tremulous lungful of human breath

spun flat, cut to rippled squares, set in the dusty casement.

Grain of the living oak, stopped dead in your tabletop.

Cobweb at the table’s corner a map of skewed co-ordinates.

Your table lamp fed by Heysham’s uranium rods,

Haverigg’s twinkling windfarm, buried cables along the Duddon Valley.

Your mobile: lit menu, notional time, no signal.

The mountain: against the black of the sky, a blacker black.

The labyrinth of your fingerprint: Chartres maze stretched to an oval.

The fieldpaths crisscrossing in the palm of your hand.

An ink-slick spreading in the pen’s furrow:

gold keel ploughing an ocean of churned Norway spruce.

All of it drawn and drawn into the pupil’s black hole,

the dark that cannot be seen, the space that is everything else.

The Maldon Hawk

he let him þa of handon leofne fleogan
hafoc wið þæs holtes, and to þære hilde stop

– ‘The Battle of Maldon’, AD 991

And so, dismissed, I rose on a wingbeat

over horses already scattering to the wood,

unwanted as men turned to their war.

Vassal set loose from his master’s service,

blameless outlaw freed to the houseless wild,

circling, I watched thickets of metal and leather

crowd the shallows of the deepening tide.

Now as I scour the air my heart divides

between longing for a man’s call and the wideness of the world

where I got honour by my endgame, pleasing nobles

in the hour when the bright dove fled the man-flung hawk.

I pivot at flight’s apex but will not return,

though my jewelled eye sees each ring on his corselet

catch sun as he merges into the mass,

death-besotted warriors on their way to darkness.

Gladly I would stoop a last time into his language

but already battle’s whirlpool sucks him in, his face downward,

nameless and eyeless among the iron helmets.

I am a word forgotten from his story.

He is a landmark fading from my sight.

Men had seemed to have some special knowledge:

now the sea-wind tastes of death, they rush towards it –

whether to sing with saints or feast with battle-fellows

or lie at a tree’s root until the world ends

they know no better than I. Never again,

child of the waste moor and the tufted woodland,

will I perch on that wrist, grasp the bone beneath.

Bed

It’s a great book. Open the covers,

soft and floppy as the hide of a giant folio,

patched and stitched. Inside are the stories

of our thousand and one nights, the radiant

conceptions of our children, dreams and memories

neither time nor water will wash out

nor the wringing of hands.

Written in those sheets are tears, arguments

with the absurd logic of marriage, the justifications

of ageing, and over them the crushed

roses of what we hoped for, still fragrant

when you turn the cover or fall asleep reading

late at night.

And it’s a boat,

wooden raft that tilts on the tides of sleep

riding the diurnal hurricanes

of light and dark that sweep across the planet

changing the shape of our room,

the moon dragging trees’ fingers and clouds’ hair

like colossal seaweed and shadowed shoals

over our tumbled bodies. No craft has sailed

on stranger voyages,

not the hollow ship of Odysseus when he woke

to find himself Sinbad. In its square hold

we’ve travelled out of our world

to talk with the dead, make love to strangers,

remember how to fly.

Also (forgive me, love)

it’s a grave, the narrow space where each day’s laid

to rest in almost peace,

where bodies, humped and shrouded, wrapped in cotton

or linen – those fibres briefly removed

from the earth they grew in – nightly await

the morning’s provisional resurrection

that one day will not come: book, boat, grave, world

closed, floated, lost, vanished away

and us with them, into what other dream

who knows, into what other waking,

into what perhaps, int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• Copyright