Hotel

Ali Lewis

• Publisher: Verve Poetry Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781912565290
• eBook ISBN: 9781912565832
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Hotel is a wonderful debut pamphlet from 2018 Eric Gregory award winning poet Ali Lewis. In short, intricate verse, his poems tackle the complexities of modern relationships and city living with great self-deprecation, not a little light-heartedness, and dashes of the surreal. But there is depth here too. In this connected century, with so many eyes on you, with so many opinions and agendas being made vocal, what is the best way to be, as a partner, a friend, a colleague? And what will happen if you get it wrong? The domestic lives large in these works, whether in rooms and halls offices or in the world beyond. Ali Lewi s is a fresh new voice in poetry and is here for the long haul. Read, and you'll see why.

Gloss

A life should leave

deep tracks:

ruts where she

went out and back

— from ‘Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard’ by Kay Ryan

A life should leave

but not be gone;

should remain

in grief

and memories

and stuff,

but it doesn’t.

In this, at least,

we’re reprieved.

A life should leave

deep tracks

that, old and dry

then fresher,

lead us

to familiar

sunchased backs,

but it doesn’t:

nowhere, where

they are, lacks

deep tracks,

ruts where she

or he or they walked.

We should

have portraits

but instead have keys —

icons for face,

charm, character

as for church,

river, sea:

ruts where she

went out and back

(or he, or they)

as words then claggy ash.

How can we grieve

accurately?

What is the knack?

A trick

birthday

candle that

went out and back.

The Diamond Cutter

Coming home one afternoon, the diamond cutter

saw his absent lover’s hand grafted to the wrist

of a stranger in the market. It was not crudely done:

even he, trained from birth to see epiphyses

in faultless rocks could not discern the join, or say

for certain where she stopped and the miscreant began,

but the fingertips, he knew, were hers, the elbow’s

crease, he knew, was not, and that freckled wrist…

that freckled wrist, he studied every night for twenty

years, through a microscope balanced on their marriage

bed, until, one sweat dawn, chisel to hand, he found

the hidden octahedral plane and brought his mallet down.

Wild Fig

Sometimes I feel I grew you, tended you,

in the same way I’ve raised seeds,

kidding myself I made it all happen,

when I have seen laden fig trees

grow out of the red dust on boulders,

when all you ever needed

was light and space and the earth,

which I was not responsible for,

that was simply near me, lying around,

and that you could have got from anyone

who left you the right kind of alone.

Alone, I think there must have been

a last time I sat you at our table

and fed you. Tender sapling, tall fig.

No one ever waters a tree.

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Pressure
• Carpet
• Sonnet
• Typhoon Lagoon
• Making Love to the Knife Thrower
• Test Scenario
• The Englishman
• Free Will
• Fractal Date
• The Best Thing About Falling
• The Past
• S & M
• Gloss
• The Diamond Cutter
• Wild Fig
• Putting the World Away
• Expanding Universe
• Is it, our relationship, even a thing?
• Love Poem to Your Self-Sufficiency
• Acknowledgements