The Nameless Places

Richard Lambert

• Publisher: Arc Publications
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781911469018
• eBook ISBN: 9781911469025
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

A hotel with mysterious guests, a city where the moon wanders, an abandoned seaside pavilion, are some of the places visited in this, Richard Lambert 's second collection. Structured around a movement from city to sea and always alert to the emotional resonance of landscape, The Nameless Places dwells on those spaces that lie at the edge of our lives and vision, and that seem somewhere between reality and dream. The collection culminates in a sequence that follows a journey made along the course of a river from its source to its mouth. Here, an English landscape's margins are investigated – suburb, waste ground, marsh, and estuary beach. In poems that are formally various (rondeau, villanelle and sonnet) and conjuring an atmosphere of melancholy, The Nameless Places explores forgotten and neglected spaces – both of the mind and of our physical world.

THE HOTEL GUIDEBOOK

1. The Station Hotel

Down in the deep street a horse

has unchained itself from your dream

and stands by the station entrance

where no trains arrive or leave any more.

*

In the lobby you can fill in the spaces yourself

the way the hotel detective has filled in the newspaper

crossword, and left it on the arm of his deep chair.

*

It’s not just the hotel that’s empty, of course,

but the city, surrounded by a six-lane orbital

of yellow-eyed vehicles that hum through the walls.

*

Dining alone in the restaurant, at a noise

you put down your knife and fork and turn

but no-one is there except, in the mirror,

a man with no face, which is yours.

2. A Late Guest

The way her suitcase weighed her down,

I wondered what it held.

Her hands, when she signed the register,

were smooth, the veins as blue

as china, the bone at each temple

as delicate as china too. And her eyes,

when she lifted them to mine, were strange,

one green, one blue. Which is when she raised

an index finger, its pad inked black

like a fingerprinted criminal’s, and said,

It leaks. And it did,

the fountain pen had blotted

her name. It was only afterwards

– after I had offered her a handkerchief

and she replied, Don’t worry about it –

after she had gone,

that I thought it was deliberate, her spill,

after she had vanished entirely,

not even checking out, leaving

her suitcase on the bed which,

when opened,

contained a life, neither alive nor dead.

3. The Hotel Pool

He does not stop. I wonder what it is

that draws him to the pool, makes water his,

and once he’s gone, wrapped in a towel,

once he’s abandoned his cage-like prowl...

Table of contents

• Contents
• CITY
• THE HOTEL GUIDEBOOK
• Poem of the Hand
• Slight Poem on a Rough Surface
• Unnecessary Poem
• PHASES OF THE MOON
• Summer Night
• The Deer
• A Country Visitor
• Man with the Head of a Stag
• Tree
• Her Tail
• Her Hands
• The Painter
• The Line
• Sea Ballad
• Your Rule
• Snow at the Window
• The Magnolia Blossom in the Gardens
• Leaving the City
• Suburban Rain
• The Valley, Rain Coming
• Down the Valley, Water
• The Token
• The House
• The Heart
• Creatures and Ghosts
• A-Road
• Marsh Songs
• The Wind
• Coastal
• Sunday Afternoon
• Sleepless
• Island
• Sonnet
• Biographical Note