Lighthouses

Allison McVety

• Publisher: Smith|Doorstop Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781906613891
• eBook ISBN: 9781910367278
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

In Lighthouses, Allison casts a light over the world, catching as she does, a man grafting in his shed; the new moon's pull on a love affair; Emily Wilding Davison hiding on Census Night; a mother as a listening telescope and Amy Hopkins falling for a comet.

Virginia Woolf dips in and out, with her charcoal stare, her diaries and essays. And there are quiet poems too: sat at bedsides when ghosts and love, like the keeper's light, are never far away.

Lighthouses

Allison McVety

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to the editors of Ambit, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Magma, Manchester Review, New Welsh Review, The North, Poetry Ireland Review, Oxford Poetry, POEM Magazine, Poetry London, Poetry Review, The Rialto and The SHOp where some of these poems first appeared. ‘Afterwards’ and ‘The “Stradivarius” Tree’ were published in The Arts of Peace: A Centenary Anthology (Two Rivers Press), ‘Finlandia’ in The Best British Poetry 2013 (Salt Publishing), ‘White Jeans’ and ‘Meeting Mallory’ in The Sheffield Anthology: Poems from the City Imagined (smith|doorstop), and ‘Pandemic: Incidents of Mortality’ in The Hippocrates Prize Anthology 2013 (The Hippocrates Press).

‘To the Lighthouse’ won the National Poetry competition in 2011.

‘Crossings’ was written for Traced in the Shadows: ways of looking at poets, a photographic exhibition by Derek Adams. ‘Lookout’ was written during The Poet’s Hour in the Tower: a Poetry Trust initiative for readers at the 2010 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.

Thanks are also due to Ian House, Lesley Saunders, Susan Utting and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch.

Also by Allison McVety

Miming Happiness

The Night Trotsky Came to Stay

Published 2014 by

smith|doorstop Books

The Poetry Business

Bank Street Arts

32-40 Bank Street

Sheffield S1 2DS

www.poetrybusiness.co.uk

Copyright © Allison McVety 2014

Digital Edition © 2015

ISBN 978-1-910367-27-8

Allison McVety hereby asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: © Anthony Ware

Author ...

Table of contents

• White House
• To the Lighthouse
• Hedging
• Departures
• Finlandia
• Morte d’Arthur
• Light House
• The Light Fantastic
• Drowning
• Last Known Good
• My mother as the Lovell Telescope
• Crewe
• Waking
• White Jeans
• Saturdays,
• Eighteenth
• Nureyev
• Levenshulme Semi
• Semi-detached
• The Mile Road at Midnight
• The New Fence
• From the neck of the bottle I stored in the shed
• Lido
• Surgeon-god
• Lighthouses
• Falling
• Honeymoons
• Mallory
• Bombazine
• Handsfree
• Wounds
• Landings
• Tightropes
• Noise
• Afterword
• Night Houses
• The Wedding Gift
• Sunday Evenings
• Philomela
• Dog
• The Occupation
• Afterwards
• Museum
• Coattails
• Residency
• Crossings
• The Left-Handed Bride
• The “Stradivarius” Tree
• Not Speaking of You
• Requiem from the steps at Pendlebury Station
• Ivy
• Pandemic: Incidents of Mortality
• Man Engine
• The English Translation
• Treasure
• Lookout
• Notes
• About the Author