Shaler's Fish

Poems

Helen Macdonald

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780802190703
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Poesie

"Devoted readers of H Is for Hawk will find Macdonald's gift for stunning language, patient curiosity, and expansive wisdom on full display in her poems."— Publishers Weekly From the naturalist and author of the New York Times bestseller H is for Hawk, which appeared on more than twenty-five Best Books of the Year lists, Shaler's Fish is a collection of poetry that roams both the outer and inner landscapes of the poet's universe, seamlessly fusing reflections on language, science, and literature with the loamy environments of the natural worlds around her. Moving between the epic (war, history, art, myth, philosophy) and the specific (CNN, Ancient Rome, Auden, Merleau-Ponty), Helen Macdonald examines with humor and intellect what it means to be awake and watchful in the world. These are poems that probe and question, within whose nimble ecosystems we are as likely to encounter Schubert as we are "a hand of violets, " Isaac Newton as a "winged quail on turf." Nothing escapes Macdonald's eye and every creature herein—from the smallest bird to the loftiest thinker—holds a significant place in her poems.
"Macdonald is a poet of vision and sound, oracular one moment and playful the next, whose first love and only loyalty is to the music of words." – O, the Oprah Magazine

SHALER’S FISH

the new world

Memetics are mute phylogenies and smarting.

What is a hand for, but to be held? It is raining

in Georgia it is raining all over the world

applause rattles from the pilot’s beak in choppy

breves & savoir faire lost somewhere between here

and home where the heart is whatever. The light

is hard in departures & tightness of the chest harder

weak toxicologies the accents of the dreams aren’t murder

scene after scene ships demeanour with trade

sets a leaving tear on each cheek & fades

and says: this is a real blade, fifteenth century, Japan.

Or: a peculiarly Germanic form of armour, no holes for eyes

black all over, annealed, the frayed corporeal manner

as the mouth sups grounds, faults and folds the arms under

but the shade of your eyes approximates the blade’s blued dorsal edge

indigent as the model’s side or even air, seen from below

every moment describes some other music

and I cannot remember banality ever existing

Dale

The storm runs forth on several seas whose manner is

the hard edge of a clamber down gneiss with a split thumb

huge inklings of wonderment, sun and trenchant killing bumped

by wrecked spume and clearing the throat, to try and shout

into the wind. Pulled out like warm glass. Where should flight

Eight choughs and three children, singing to a seal’s head

on the lee side of the cliffs, hair fraying, he-lo, he-lo diatomite

and rain, disyllabic chuckle as the corvids glean turf and turn downwind

pealing back a sheet of egyptian cotton new/vraiment class

bled into a strong silence, just equalled by watching

Thirty breakers cowling in diagrammatic vice-lines with shortening frequency

replaced by thirty more/the ferry aspect two miles out dimmed by light

in cloud and rolls of clean water scrolling down. There are fits of waking.

I am waiting, it seems, for the cliff’s right edge, but it is turned down

into a fence: slack barbs in hubs and shelves of thrift. Nothing sells

Nothing sells about this edge but fragrance, when the eyes are closed

enough to tip the head away from the ledge and settle it in welsh mud

‘this is how the Irish write, as if with their left hand’ she said, as soft

as anything, and the frown was half-sustained astonishment, looking

out across the waves as if a clause, then down at the paper in my hand

Nothing as matter as fact as dislike occurs either here or for other places

as worn, something to get to. I could hurry by in a parsimonious cinch

frosted umbellifers and wagtails in the flat wastes ankle-deep in water

thinking how it got here and confusing this with national history:

natural history arches its timbre uncomfortably: nine races of Motacilla

flava, four of alba, victorious identification through chalk and paste

sliding eastwards on the vicious gradients come the disorientated:

twelve with a broken neck beneath the light and scores in bushes

on the wrong wind for this bird, a miracle behind glass

discarded on reflection

Have Blue

Metal grows warmer against the skin

such implications of expediency call this realism

projected as an interior difficulty, of apprehension

blown past as a sere white line over the desert index

a forefinger held up to the sky could see it, but for lack

of noise unloaded at night since the presupposition of a target

costive pitch and yaw or roll corrected by wire like water

falling all around him with cosine squeals the line rolled up

and light also fell into it. Like wine dark. Sees elsewhere

in disks of water and a rapid participatory grace

elements of predation holding the eye & not without risk

this grace, a candour tipped to cede darkness with order

an aeolian matte stripped as soft as the image of breath

bronze against bronze where the cupped hand

plenty falls. A fox sparrow shadow on blue stone

broke diamond cut cuticle where rain pools schematics

of the calm scintillarions of a falling sky

and the porous wind of a little country

the steep inklings of the tongue’s tip

& the implications of a mountain buried in snow

these are lambent philosophies requiring water

new marks to which the mouth is an applied science

Jack

where diviners are hauling water is a bump of turf

and a cloud caul low over old heather scurf, sleep.

Dodder wrapt and a mimic fit to klepe greenshank

cotton blowing eastward, a match-mime set in as ore

shoulders sunk, heavy as rain and thistlewool merlin

blinking at the roll of weather. New roles settle, ticking

gently at the pitch and yaw singing out an arc overland

a whisper of suspicious music like the stars are dead

and the real fact of succession is dripped over rock in a sincere bid

to stay. But there is no stay. There is ice at the steady damage

patterned ground and small burrows where air laps and falls

an emergency environment at the instant where the jack comes

parabellum of delicacy and mores

violent spoils as manuscript through drier air

manifest as movement

the video slips & marshalled antics fade

On approaching natural colours

The elegy of the bough is turned to earth

turns as a blister. Three tillers have formed. It is dry.

That straight line doth not contain everything I know

& everything I have not yet understood. It is not an is,

nor a cline not a bar, a predicament. The parliament

of fowls & the wheel of clouds, clouds’ sake

Where it sickens again, meaning to place it for hours

& an ill wind picks at heroism, as a fence of flowers

against charms, charm. Ah, but you do suffer charm

who has suffered from the same & not proudly.

If the lips are mute then the claim is yours

something to baffle irrigation with, like sand

The bird is banked with earths & starts for cover.

Take a greate texte-penn and run for same.

Crickets scratch and burn beneath bracken & forms wither

and soak into waves through the optics of sunken light in summer

the water seethes, a tip burned into the wood hinges & hops in scales

of unlikely brilliancy; a patch of growling leaves, scalloped by wormes

Hard data secured in the systematics; one plus and the other

the rest burned off or cordoned into the emblematic eye

the mode for pernicious transcendence

Motifs to sweeten as pie. Such a book

made up as if to remark upon the eye

as of a rock,...