The Culture of My Stuff

Adam Crothers

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781784109516
• eBook ISBN: 9781784109523
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

The Culture of My Stuff is a collection of sonnets, prose, and political nonsense rhymes. Light-footed and light-fingered, the poems piece the stuff of their culture into surreal polemic and elegy, compressing and exploding their 'various vocabularies.' Brexit, Trump, Northern Ireland, Komodo dragons, the male gaze, Leonard Cohen, lapsed Protestantism, David Bowie, horror cinema, and typos are considered from a distance that's swiftly diminished by complicity, sorrow, and self-critique. Unable to transcend the consumerist violence of the world they confront and embrace, the poems nonetheless strive for emotional accuracy and lyric depth, giving form to a voice that revels in contradiction, excess, mischief, and music.

III
FUTURES

SCENES FROM THE PARISH

I

The spectacle’s lenses regrind themselves.

In disco sunlight, quail shadow the fields,

manifold, defiant. See their long swarm

blow shapes from rain and the charlatan earth.

Soon. Dry harvest moon. Its virtue furnace.

Rodents, darting wide of timber chambers,

refine a deafening reel. Ah! Uproar.

The gentleman had wanted for music.

Lyric I padlocks Jesterface to mud,

that he might force roots and raise a forest

in this briefest of all longevities,

while in gardens shudder little children,

caught in their knots, cooped in their cubicles.

Such lines seem an intelligent sickness.

II

Inadequate salt. Crude surfeit of wolves.

An observer gasps, can henceforth relax:

the college green, bracketed by gutters,

shows tedious dramas nearing a close.

The sweet proposal becomes a habit

in office life. Ask any immune aunt,

or show a smashed diplomat the fountain.

Distant fires offset the surly cobbles.

We plunge so nobly for bland compassion,

quips Jesterface; I doesn’t get it up.

Crabs harass dentists in windows. Embox

soft Katherine, who must not witness funds

removed from knotholes be applied slapdash

to barristers, to terminals, to joys.

III

Eli, ho-hum, clamours for calamine,

blunt as an England fan. It is inferred

he has confused a stained colonial

tract and his school’s savage dormitory.

Lean rather hard with your clean consensus

and phage from page might be for good unrhymed.

Damp fur dresses intricate wardrobe walls,

donning moth-thought and projection, whereas

a crow flattens to a drafted quaver

in the signifyin’ cataract. Ouch.

Come in, Arlene, from the tempest and thyme,

for night is dawning: guts and black cotton.

Quite tender noise slinks yet from the wormhole.

I’s in the red. Jesterface in the cloud.

PEDAL STEEL

for John Clegg

The liquidy slide scrolls through a timeline.

A birth and some stuff and a death ago

across Searle Street, Veronica Forrest-Thomson

is buffering On the Periphery

presumably via looking at it straight on.

You do what you must do. Satan,

your kingdom must come down.

I must spend my days doing something.

Which must be like looping a dolly-zoom

shot of a train unmoved in a station.

It crosses into the room, it seems.

This feels like a bad naturalisation,

but how could you not think about hands,

fingers, feet, the thereness of your knees?

Doesn’t a studied extension beyond

the artwork shade back into artifice,

emotion’s correspondence with precision

being what the cherry-faced picker’s perfected?

You don’t lock the case and hand the keys in

having posted into history your aural factoid:

not to petrify into loathsome cliché,

but you persist, lonesome, on edges. My great danger

is to talk about literature

as if it were all poetry. It’s poker, it’s ouija;

it’s houses and widgets. You swipe

right and left. The vehicle remains

in a stopping position, and yet. I also hope

though don’t quite see how at the moment.

MIRRORBALLS

I couldn’t get any beakers. I’d have kept

my acid in mid-air, but the swishly swept

floor implored so. Jeepers wept.

To the blackning church, totes apols.

Likewise its basement, home of mirrorballs.

To each there...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• I CULTURE
• II STUFF
• III FUTURES
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright