the terrible

Daniel Sluman

• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780993120183
• eBook ISBN: 9781911027508
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Daniel Sluman 's bleak brilliance in the terrible is a masterclass in the power of poetry to confront difficult subject matter with accuracy and painstaking openness. These are rigorous and exacting poems, that dare to go to some of the darkest places and speak with stark precision.

These poems may be stripped down, intense and utterly frank, but they are not without deep reserves of sincerity and beauty. Sluman writes of the heady cocktail of being alive, where loss, love, sex, close shaves with mortality and sharp narratives of pain and suffering are explored with concise and humane clarity.

"Daniel Sluman's new collection explores acute and chronic, emotional and physical pain (and, albeit less often, pleasure) with a raw, compelling urgency. At times playful, at times harrowing, the terrible always brims with life." – Carrie Etter

"Vivid and honest poems of intense experience, in which no wound is too deep to be cauterised by language. " – Jean Sprackland

every window in the world slams shut

human/beauty

the first thing you taste

is the sweat & bleach

of human delivery

the story of life

is always the thing

& something to wash

away its stain each year

a step you tumble down

falling apart a little more

how time drags you

by the ankles so slowly

through the grass

you watch it all pass

the expectant faces

of the people you love

slipping into the dark

you clutch at weeds

but nothing will grip

& in the end like us all

you fall into the cold

black earth every window

in the world slams shut

1991-2006

my father’s pounded blue ford

& my feet barely glancing the receipts

& marlboro cartons piled on the floor

the strips of paintwork peeling empty promises

from neon signs the city’s yellow horizon

a pair of hands composing the softly-lit dreams

of businessmen in hotel rooms screwing

silk ties in their worn palms their heads

full of yes each night a heaved dice

& we’re driving further through it each year

my toes starting to plant the mat your hair

greying in the rear-view mirror the faces

from our life passing like boarded-up doors

ouija

for as long as I remember I never wanted

what I had the half-read books cluttered

in piles the guitar’s strings ruined to dust

I’ve always been dirty tobacco wedged

under nails the shock of snowflakes shook

from scalp to shoulders I’d never seen

someone like me stride from pay-cheques

to a wedding I slept in abandoned rooms

at school nothing in this world was worth

waking for so I tried to pry open others

the tarot with its sharp answers & shots

in the dark the offcut in woodwork

I painted with the alphabet the glass hovered

in my hands I knocked & no-one answered

I was alone I’d have taken a broken ghost

or a death-scream reeled over & over again

in fits of tears of blood I wanted something

to need to love me to love to need me as I am

confession

the smell of motor oil & sawdust

& the moon threaded through

the chipped-blue shutter window

of the shed his breath tumbling

through my right ear & slipping

from my left as my life shook

& settled the thick white stains

hung in the sky & the warmth

expanding through denim

it’s not that I didn’t want

to tell you I didn’t think

you’d want to know

matches

the sudden tricks between blackened fingers

we flicked to smoulder on the grass of the hill

we burnt our weekends on twenty years’ distance

& now you spend summers plucking down birds

with your rifle the tiny purse of smoke & whip-

crack puncturing the air as I write you back

into my life from this freezing house-share

a cigarette pinched between lips a shred

of light in my hands & we’re here again

passing the whiskey that started the fire

in our throats watching the town-

lights wash slowly into darkness

killing the darling of smoke

a name you’ve held more times in your mouth

than lovers’ the weight of a full pack in your palm

as you split the film & find tw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• every window in the world slams shut
• the terrible
• further towards the stalling heart
• Acknowledgements