Crucifox

Geraldine Clarkson

• Publisher: Verve Poetry Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781912565597
• eBook ISBN: 9781912565993
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Poesía

It feels like this incredible pamphlet from Geraldine has been ages arriving. We're so glad it is finally here in all its foxy glory!

Crucifox is more a state of mind than a particular creature or person. The collection circles rebellion, emergence from disappointment and fasting, new beginnings, recreation following destruction; soulwork; inspiration and the act of writing itself. There is a focus on female desire and feral impulses behind polite exteriors; assumed responsibilities and pre-packed creeds; the role of women within close-knit community, the silent and marginalised aspects of women, their masking and unveiling and the stilling of their tongues. There is no shortage either of vermin and sleaze, crime, including murder; along with curlicues, cleaners, clowns, gambling, lotteries, and a lot of luck…

These poems are intricate poetry masterpieces – breathtakingly beautiful, stomach churningly real. We know you will love this wonderful work!

After ‘IF—’

If you can loose your heart from headlock,

and touch it, puggish and stubborn

as it is, stunted fist, and keep its company,

and learn its tongue, half-mute, unbuckled

from its bridle—if you can taste the flavour

of mistrust, metallic, and transfer it from yourself

to those who placed the rules in metal struts

across your mental shoulder blades, before you knew what rules

were—old rules—and yet knew—

                                                            if you can overturn

the virtue formerly known as waiting, its precious pointless shiny end,

the child’s Big Day ahead; and if you can dig out—with townie hands—

that undulating fungus, sickly nub of anger, three-quarter-strangled

infant, kept terminant in a bowl underground, mouldering and not quite

dead, enduring years of patient schooling from ersatz prophets

who offered a pre-packed resealable bloodless creed as food—and that

in crumbs—swapping the birthright of fire and wind and earth and sea,

which kindled you, for teaspoonfuls of pleasing pottage—

syrupy inducements to surrender self before possessing it—

which, like a shivering cur, you gobbled to pacify your hunger (your fathers

                                                                               weeping); if you can forgive

those who clothed you in a tragic lycra mantle of this vale of tears,

but there’s hereafter, little one, just wait and see, and forgive

yourself for listening—if you can clamber like the child you never were

into that moment where present is, and see it spacious as an eye, a cave

with wallflowers and rampant peonies, and feel safe there, for that second—

for the first

time—and begin to maybe

                                          play—

                        if you can take the sword to people-pleasing dragons,

without apologising, accept your dreams

as signals, smart invites, small disturbances

from elsewhere, rather than unruly mongrels to be restrained,

retrained—if you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

and be glad and affable with the one and not so tea-and-scone-

                                                 bearing, spare-room-lending, with the other—

if you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken be repeated back to you

verbatim, and watch the things you broke be mended by-

and-by by grace’s mad reversal, with tools you never used

before—if you can gamble all your winnings like your father

and your Father, spindrift, spendthrift as the wind, and advertise

ungrumbling all your losses and your gains—if you can force your nerves

and sinews to try less hard, and let go of will, after all this time—

if you can stop making a virtue of bleedin’ virtue, bleeding

white ghost bleeding you, and all the men who courted you (but not

too much), for the moments which remain—consecutive

eternities—discovering the Mother-King we have in common;

till yours is heaven and everything that’s in it—

and what is more, all this is too— then you’ll dispossess

the angel and the demon, and own living, as woman-made-man-made-

woman,

bashed in but unabashed, unpicked and yet unpickled, conditioned and

matured in countless asks, now shed, mutated, without whatifs.

lemonjim hour: brittle england

the muse, here to amuse, brings a clock.

my hands and brain are chapped from taking her notes.

glimquist and sunkissed on a burgundy chaise longue

she turns phrase after phrase on the lathe of her tongue

until fluted and threaded, drilled, joisted and planed, she produces

five flights of solicitors’ banisters to snake down the staircase,

hemming me in and

she is truth-pillowing everything out so that I’m breathing as

shallow and stinky as rockwater, anemone-blind, choking on her alien

mouthwash as she bats me from pillar to post, copper-manic,

feeding me what she calls ilk milk, squeezed from white cliffs of dover,

she a sovereign autonomous rose, till she drops

like a poppy, one ochre petal for each bong of the clock

at tea time, drumming the carpet

with glee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Janus
• The flowers you gave me star ted speaking
• On a Hill
• Christmas Surgery
• Apple Snow
• My spirit broke her fast on you
• The Fainting Room
• In Old Mr Spence’s Kitchen
• FILTH
• Fox, the Prisoner
• Fox, the Prisoner II
• FOX NEWS : CREATRIX
• CROSSFOX : CROSSBOX
• After ‘IF-’
• lemonjim hour: brittle england
• Compliments of the Patron
• St Osburga’s Surprise
• Brood
• Bell-ringer’s Knee
• In Praise of the Office Cleaner
• Labials of a Half-Remembered Lover
• BOOK OF BLUE
• éclat & cast lots
• I could murder a prose poem
• winding down
• The Three Felicities
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements & Thanks
• About Verve Poetry Press