- English
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eBook - ePub
Weighing the Present
About this book
Weighing the Present includes poems about family and wider society, often through brilliantly evoked particular details and specific scenes from 'everyday life'. Short linked poems, which amount almost to sequences, deal with difficult material - elegies for lost friends for instance - while still remaining somehow lifeaffirming. At the heart of the book are tender but unsentimental love poems.A new collection from Michael Laskey is always a cause for celebration.
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Yes, you can access Weighing the Present by Michael Laskey in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Poetry. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Living with Lemons
In the beginning the word
was yours by heart even before
the honey and lemon your mother
would bring to your bedside and sit
you up to sip at, to soothe
a cough or loosen the thick
phlegm on your chest, filling
your mouth with mucus, another
good word you’ve done nothing to deserve.
*
You know we’ve exhausted the planet,
practically milked it dry,
nevertheless go on thinking
the metaphor still holds good –
that the blossom end of the lemon’s
a nipple, as Neruda had it.
*
Coming in from the overcast night
the lemon’s a memo the moon’s
still with us, just out of sight.
*
Not that old story of the boy
baffled by his first banana
after the war. Instead
imagine the tang
of citrus rising again
from the hold, your appetite whetted
for peace and its prospects, not least
the crate the dockers will duly
smash for divvying up.
*
If your boy’s a man now, decades
on from childhood, you’ll know
you’re blessed when across the room
– catch – he tosses you a lemon.
*
The poem you’re writing excites
another, you make a note.
Lemon trees do it too: fruit
and flower at the same time.
*
It was citron pressé your mother
knew and introduced you to
in the shade of a pavement café
in a square th...
Table of contents
- Not That He Wrote Poems
- The Unexamined Life
- Must Be About Now
- Catch
- Alternative
- Either …
- A Breath
- House
- Birthday Cards
- According to Google
- The Hummers
- Visiting
- The Tiger
- The Morrison Shelter
- Volunteers
- Left Standing
- Character
- The Finishing Touch
- Lap
- Distress
- Approaching
- Moment of Hope
- Ladybird, Ladybird
- The Verge
- Unheard Of
- Bayonet
- Callipygian
- February
- Ignorance
- One Life
- Pull
- Spontaneous
- Late
- Nails in the Coffin
- Ladder
- Deathtrap
- The 39th Wedding Anniversary
- Together
- Breakfast
- In the Moment
- Treatment
- At Your Feet
- Living with Lemons
- Aubergine
- Mood
- Chopping Board
- On the Desk
- Curtains
- Perm
- Lucky
- Swifts
- Service
- Footpath
- Scots Pine
- Seeds
- Going the Extra Mile
- Resolutions
- A Bundle of Bamboos
- Waiting for the Wave
- Weighing the Present
- About the Author