Miming Happiness

Allison McVety

• Publisher: Smith|Doorstop Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781906613143
• eBook ISBN: 9781906613433
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

"Allison McVety's follow up to 2007's The Night Trotsky Came to Stay is a paean to the everyday." - Poetry Book Society

" Miming Happiness's final section is collected into almost magical intensity. McVety's long lines describe her sister's mysterious illness, with lovely glances of sound, and the energy of verbs: 'on she swims, a shiver/ a shine, surfacing for air; slip-streaming the light'. Closing rhythms pulse with a town's life: 'the factories [..] breathe out, breathe in, go on'. McVety, the poet of solid things, reveals the wish 'to crumble away' into the 'infinitely small'. Her final poem is a vision of inwardness: 'the atom/ cracking with the thunder of a goldcrest's heart'. It is an astounding line. The best of Allison McVety's collection reveals the uncontainable power of poetry.' — Alison Brackenbury, PN Review

Miming Happiness

Allison McVety

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Peter Carpenter, Jane Draycott, David Morley and Susan Utting, to my tutors and mentors at RHUL, Andrew Motion and Jo Shapcott, and to Kate Long for her support and encouragement.

Versions of some of these poems were previously published in The Interpreter's House, Magma, The North, PN Review, Seam, The SHOp, Smiths Knoll, and The Warwick Review.

'In Little Black Dresses' was commissioned by Selfridges as part of their centenary celebrations.

'Offspring' appears in the paperback edition of The Daughter Game (Picador, 2010) by Kate Long.

'Two Mugs' was read on BBC Radio 3 by Ian McMillan and five poems, 'The Train Driver's View', 'Urmston Brickworks', 'Typewriter, Offices' and 'Exercise Books' were shortlisted for the inaugural MMU Poetry Prize 2008.

The Night Trotsky Came to Stay was shortlisted for the Best First Collection Prize 2008.

Contents

Dedication
Acknowledgements
Contents

This Year's Skin

Extra Curricula

i The Lesson

ii Exercise Books

iii Six Rows Back

iv Experiment

v The Young Person

Two Mugs
Town House, Tansley Drive
In The Year of Splitting Up
This Year's Skin
In Little Black Dresses
Night Shifts
Land's End to John O'Groats
Offices
Head Count
Offspring

And Another Thing

Syrup of Figs
Good in a Crisis
On the East Lancs Road
In the Weeks After Rationing
Whit Walks
Women at the Swimming Baths
What the Women Say
Pathology
Making a Show
Breath
Button Keepers
Typewriter

A Grip on the Land

In a Northern Town
Irwell
The Train Driver's View
Urmston Brickworks
Backyards
No Tick
After Darwin
Beginnings
Like Coastal Houses
Family Trees
Timbral Praxis
Liquid History
Ordnances
In the Reading Room at the British Library

Biography

This Year's Skin

... but the rain is full of ghosts tonight ...

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Extra Curricula

i The Lesson

We write to ourselves ten months on.

The friendless girls dream of prefects' badges.

Gill asks how you spell R.A.D.A. and Lucy asks

for more paper. David Essex features in most

and we all see Purdy hair as the answer.

What to ask for the future, even if it's in three terms' time,

is harder than the cut-and-come-again of Christmas.

Imagine a letter you'd written where all you wanted

was to kiss Mr Waters, as he packed up his notes.

So the dilemma was where to set the benchmark:

too high could break you, we knew that even then, but too low -

too low would put you in the gutter for life,

the kerb stones always out of reach, the stars

inching apart as you write.

ii Exercise Books

Kat's eyes are the colour of chemistry

and Frobisher house-points, but when Emily

says modern languages are purple, I see

papal robes and Mr Gregory's Redford tash.

Surely French is in the ruffles of plane trees

and Drake's maps? And how can red be geography,

when it's clearly in calculus, in the paisley

folds of further maths; in Scott's immortal dash?

Livingstone and English literature stream

through the atrium, find us laughing at a leaky

pen. Thirty years from Mrs Wadden's speech

impediment and she is still Anthony and Lycidas.

I cry for Joe Keller, for his sons; for the cabby,

for the poor horse, for Stevie on the street.

And not even Mallory's orange zest of history

can pull me from her daffodils in class.

iii Six Rows Back

Mme. took us to admire Alain Delon.

The afternoon was filter tipped; the usherette

against the wall in impossible heels, the strap

of the tray raw on her shoulders, the shift

of wei...

Table of contents

• Miming Happiness