Melanchrini

Maria Taylor

• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780957098459
• eBook ISBN: 9781911027553
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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Shortlisted for the 2013 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize.
In her debut collection, Melanchrini, Maria Taylor's distinctive poetry slips fluently amidst the worlds and underworlds of classical mythology and modernity; between her own Greek Cypriot heritage and British urban upbringing; among betting shops, schools, bar-rooms and hospitals.
Lively and ebullient, from moments of quirky humour to poignancy, these poems demonstrate a poet who isn't afraid to leap into the heart of circumstance and treasure what she finds there. Melanchrini finds personal histories at the kitchen table, tears in the soapsuds, and a moment's sensuality in the midst of a city market. Maria Taylor's poems are deceptively plucky; as entertaining as they are inventive and quietly determined.
"Enjoyable, engaging, serious but unpretentious, confident and well-crafted, this is a debut collection that should attract attention – and ought to win Maria Taylor a lot of readers. Above all the book is full of life, of real lives. It has variety and surprise but is very clearly by one voice – a voice that it is good to listen to because it sees so much."
Peter Sansom
"Maria Taylor's poems sing with the extraordinary in the everyday, full of those moments where something or someone is briefly transformed: a woman takes a merman home; a dead Aunt's house becomes a museum where the main object is missing; the memory of morning coffee is full of birds' wings. The power of these poems is that they constantly invoke the unexpected, and the colours and textures of both times past and yet to come."
Deborah Tyler-Bennett
"This is a distinctive and assured collection of poems. The writing is at once clear-sighted and fully realised. In its mystery, precision and surprise, Melanchrini shows the truth of a powerful new writer."
David Morley
Maria Taylor is a Leicestershire-based poet. Her writing has been published in The North, The Guardian, the TLS, Staple and others.

I

AT HER GRANDMOTHER’S TABLE

Melanchrini, do you remember the coral morning

when the pigeons gathered in the yard,

soft winged and purling the air with sound?

It was so early when you joined them at the table,

your grandmother spooning out coffee,

placing the mbriki on the stove. Your grandfather sat

hushed and stormless, his eyes filled with wings,

peristeria fluttering. The sun waited a little before rising.

A cockerel crowed daybreak and years went by;

now resting your full-grown elbows on the table

you wonder why it survives to feed you still.

A constant narcoleptic, a dead guest who slept

as in a fairy tale through other people’s lives.

Does this table remember the coffee drinkers

who sat by its side singing to a grandchild,

as they reached the grains at the base of their cups?

Melanchrini: dark-featured young woman; Mbriki: coffee pot used for making Greek/Turkish Coffee; Peristeria: pigeons

THEA

No one is surprised that her body is mostly broken

or that her bones show through the shrunken outfit

of old age, but there’s something of flint about her.

With the others gone she’s the only matriarch left.

We arrange chairs around her in a tight semi-circle.

She calls my mother copella, meaning lass elsewhere.

An ice-cream van revs through the afternoon’s fever

playing a chiming Lili Marlene to hot, empty streets.

It’s just us, the twenty-first century is having a siesta;

her icons scan me from walls, I keep my knees shut.

Thea would like to know if I’m married, so she asks

my father, who tells her ‘yes’ and ‘to an English man.’

She stares through me to yesterday’s village,

where bombs are hidden in melon stalls by heroes

and levendes, meaning lads, are hung from ropes.

ASPHODEL, REVISITED

So, after a bit of spaced-out skinny-dipping in the Lethe,

we headed off for a smoke; heads light and stupid,

emerging from the water worse than an unmemoried babe.

I didn’t know the names of the others in our ragged formation,

though I reckon the man third from left, sculling and thrusting,

may have been my father. Forgetting’s harder than you think.

Lunch is always asphodel petals. We all long for Hades

where there’s red meat and wild parties that go on till daybreak.

Afternoons are unceasing here, clouds always bruised.

Idleness is the soil and seed of our souls, but being dead already,

nothing ever grows. I resolve to die again, exhaust the kaleidoscope

of self-harm: pills, blades, hemlock, but nothing. I am still dead.

Now and then I hear them scream in Tartarus. I don’t pity them,

skies are red over their way, our fires wheeze ash and black,

dull smoke fills our rusting lungs. As in all things, we stand well back.

A DAY AT THE RACES

For over twenty years it’s been a cinch,

smiling without any come-on or affection.

Her punters see more of her than their wives,

except nowadays head office calls them ‘clients’.

She means business, stacking coppers into towers,

fingers plump but lissome, Claddagh-ringed.

Her name is May, spelt in gold around her neck,

she takes money from an old man, who’s busy

watching a screen, purple lips parted, lonely teeth,

as he weighs up the impossible odds, coughing guts

into a damp hanky. Today’s your lucky day she fibs;

some day she’ll drag his sheep-skinned corpse out.

Who dares give horses such indecorous names?

Sam Banjo, Mine’s a double, Wholelottarosie.

Cut to ladies, daft complex hats, Lancome smiles,

cut to well-fed gent lifting a ribboned trophy —

‘wanker’ says the man who’s lost all track of time,

making confetti of his hopes on Walter De La Mare.

He’s itching for a drag of tar but it keeps raining,

fuck it, he snaps, holdi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• I
• II
• III