bare flanks of sand. Beige sand.
 |
| Dilston Grove, Bermondsey |
[Image source: https://www.ackroydandharvey.com/dilston-grove/ . Sarah Maguire's poem "The Grass Church at Dilston Grove" refers to this installation in a derelict London church (Ackroyd and Harvey, 2003).]
This week I'm on the road and (being short on mobile data), I'm using my occasional wifi opportunities to discover the poetry of Sarah Maguire (1957 - 2017). I read about her on a flower blog that I follow. So this is still an evolving post, but I'm publishing it now so I can use my own links.
It was SM's twin interests in plants and in translation from Arabic and other Middle Eastern languages that made me curious to learn more about her. I won't repeat her biography, which you can read on Wikipedia or in the Guardian obituary or in this memorial of Sarah Maguire by Clarissa Aykroyd:
https://www.poetrytranslation.org/articles/in-memory-of-sarah-maguire-1957-2017
SM's work on setting up the Poetry Translation Centre was so self-evidently valuable that it perhaps threatens to overshadow her own poetry but I liked the four poems that I've been able to track down online. I'm putting the links below, along with an extract from each poem.
ALMOST THE EQUINOX (Sarah Maguire)
and the Thames so emptied of current
it shows bare flanks of sand. Beige sand. A beach.
The sudden vertigo of hardness when we're cupped
over the walls of the Embankment
examining the strange cream stones below,
driftwood, bottle-tops, crockery, one sodden boot.
And the slow mud opens its mouth.
Jets long departed, their con-trails fire
across the fierce blue skies, unfurling
into breath. The very last weather of a summer
spent impatient for change,
waiting for a sign, an alignment.
http://thestoneandthestar.blogspot.com/2013/09/sarah-maguires-almost-equinox-wondering.html
THE FLORIST'S AT MIDNIGHT
Stems bleed into water
loosening their sugars
into the dark,
clouding dank water
stood in zinc buckets
at the back of the shop.
SPILT MILK
Two soluble aspirins spore in this glass, their mycelia
fruiting the water, which I twist into milkiness.
The whole world seems to slide into the drain by my window.
It has rained and rained since you left, the streets black
and muscled with water. Out of pain and exhaustion you came
into my mouth, covering my tongue with your good and bitter milk.
....
My hand moves into darkness as I write, The adulterous woman
lost her nose and ears; the man was fined. I drain the glass.
I still want to return to that hotel room by the station
to hear all night the goods trains coming and leaving.
https://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/spilt-milk
Difficult to extract from such a short poem, but I've missed out three lines as a concession to this rather ring-fenced oeuvre.
A sex poem, its graphic central image pulsing through the rest of the poem. In that last line, for instance, apart from "coming and leaving" there is surely a submerged memory of the "milk train", proverbial in the UK for an early-morning train.* But whether you see that or not, "goods" echoes the "good" of line 6.
[* The milk trains, gradually replaced by road transport after the 1960s, were indeed early trains but these early journeys were mostly West-East, i.e. from the dairying districts towards the population centres of London and elsewhere. (The return journey with the empty wagons took place in the afternoon.)]
The man's pain has been transferred to the woman who's now downing painkillers but regret is clearly not the dominant emotion about those unsleeping nights at the station hotel. The poem doesn't cry over spilt milk, it's nearly a celebration.
I suppose you might criticize the poem as over-engineered but I feel it conveys that moment of distress or ecstasy when, even if we are not poets, there's a convergence of metaphors: everything represents something else.
PASSAGES
....
A cast of slowing jumbos,
emptied of fuel, begins
the descent:
trawling
the long southern flight path
down into Heathrow.
When the huge wheels
Hatch
from that cold,
aluminium belly,
will a petrified figure
plummet down
(this time)
into a carpark,
breath frozen midair,
the wrapt human form
seared
on the landing gear
tossed three miles clear
from touchdown,
from migration?
The big silvered craft
run the gamut of light,
taking in evening
buoyant, journeyed:
pushed to the edge
of the city: now exposed,
with its parcel of lights,
its human freight
inching homewards
through dusk, mid-September
as fear
slips its cold roots
through the known.
The dull muddied Thames
is full of the equinox,
dragged by the moon
the dun waters
flush to the Barrier:
.....
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/aug/08/forwardprizeforpoetry2005.forwardprizeforpoetry1
Around three-quarters of wheel-well stowaways fail to survive the flight.
A wheel-well stowaway on a Kenya Airways flight fell into a garden in Clapham in July 2019... Just the latest of many, especially descending into Heathrow over West London.
https://www.businessinsider.com/heathrow-london-hotspot-plane-stowaways-falling-from-sky-2019-7
SM was probably thinking of
Mohammed Ayaz in 2001. His body fell into the Homebase car-park in Richmond.
*
A talk by Sarah Maguire:
'Singing about the dark times': Poetry and Conflict
https://www.poetrytranslation.org/articles/singing-about-the-dark-times-poetry-and-conflict
*
I've managed to read some other Sarah Maguire poems for free. I downloaded the Kindle sampler of her final collection The Pomegranates of Kandahar (2007); it contains "The Grass Church at Dilston Grove" (see pic at head of post), "Cow Parsley, Bluebells" and "Vigil". And looking up The Invisible Mender (1997) on Google Books gave me "Travelling Northward", another train poem. Here's the beginning:
TRAVELLING NORTHWARD
through the worst March snowstorm
anyone on this train has ever heard of --
Water Street in Bridgeport, Connecticut
is stopped, a quilt of ice --
only the restless and the homeless
risk the streets tonight.
This train, like any train
I've ever taken anywhere,
moves from metropolis to detritus,
its trajectory --
from dressed-stone, steel-clad, po-mo vaults,
heated, peopled, electronic,
to those laid-off warehouses,
their tall machines eviscerated,
left to breed a skin of verdigris
against the open, negligent air --
is voodoo economics stripped:
the counting houses, gilts and deals
are come to this,
a rusting chain-link fence
around an empty lot,
two huge cogs lying out of gear,
fabulously swollen with the snow.
The stilled train
creaks a little to itself, then leaves
New Haven....
At this time "voodoo economics" referred to "Reaganomics" or "supply-side economics"; the theory that little-taxed and little-regulated capitalism would bring prosperity to everyone else.
Difficult to extract from such a short poem, but I've missed out three lines as a concession to this rather ring-fenced oeuvre.
A sex poem, its graphic central image pulsing through the rest of the poem. In that last line, for instance, apart from "coming and leaving" there is surely a submerged memory of the "milk train", proverbial in the UK for an early-morning train.* But whether you see that or not, "goods" echoes the "good" of line 6.
[* The milk trains, gradually replaced by road transport after the 1960s, were indeed early trains but these early journeys were mostly West-East, i.e. from the dairying districts towards the population centres of London and elsewhere. (The return journey with the empty wagons took place in the afternoon.)]
The man's pain has been transferred to the woman who's now downing painkillers but regret is clearly not the dominant emotion about those unsleeping nights at the station hotel. The poem doesn't cry over spilt milk, it's nearly a celebration.
I suppose you might criticize the poem as over-engineered but I feel it conveys that moment of distress or ecstasy when, even if we are not poets, there's a convergence of metaphors: everything represents something else.
PASSAGES
....
A cast of slowing jumbos,
emptied of fuel, begins
the descent:
trawling
the long southern flight path
down into Heathrow.
When the huge wheels
Hatch
from that cold,
aluminium belly,
will a petrified figure
plummet down
(this time)
into a carpark,
breath frozen midair,
the wrapt human form
seared
on the landing gear
tossed three miles clear
from touchdown,
from migration?
The big silvered craft
run the gamut of light,
taking in evening
buoyant, journeyed:
pushed to the edge
of the city: now exposed,
with its parcel of lights,
its human freight
inching homewards
through dusk, mid-September
as fear
slips its cold roots
through the known.
The dull muddied Thames
is full of the equinox,
dragged by the moon
the dun waters
flush to the Barrier:
.....
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/aug/08/forwardprizeforpoetry2005.forwardprizeforpoetry1
Around three-quarters of wheel-well stowaways fail to survive the flight.
A wheel-well stowaway on a Kenya Airways flight fell into a garden in Clapham in July 2019... Just the latest of many, especially descending into Heathrow over West London.
https://www.businessinsider.com/heathrow-london-hotspot-plane-stowaways-falling-from-sky-2019-7
SM was probably thinking of
Mohammed Ayaz in 2001. His body fell into the Homebase car-park in Richmond.
*
A talk by Sarah Maguire:
'Singing about the dark times': Poetry and Conflict
https://www.poetrytranslation.org/articles/singing-about-the-dark-times-poetry-and-conflict
*
I've managed to read some other Sarah Maguire poems for free. I downloaded the Kindle sampler of her final collection The Pomegranates of Kandahar (2007); it contains "The Grass Church at Dilston Grove" (see pic at head of post), "Cow Parsley, Bluebells" and "Vigil". And looking up The Invisible Mender (1997) on Google Books gave me "Travelling Northward", another train poem. Here's the beginning:
TRAVELLING NORTHWARD
through the worst March snowstorm
anyone on this train has ever heard of --
Water Street in Bridgeport, Connecticut
is stopped, a quilt of ice --
only the restless and the homeless
risk the streets tonight.
This train, like any train
I've ever taken anywhere,
moves from metropolis to detritus,
its trajectory --
from dressed-stone, steel-clad, po-mo vaults,
heated, peopled, electronic,
to those laid-off warehouses,
their tall machines eviscerated,
left to breed a skin of verdigris
against the open, negligent air --
is voodoo economics stripped:
the counting houses, gilts and deals
are come to this,
a rusting chain-link fence
around an empty lot,
two huge cogs lying out of gear,
fabulously swollen with the snow.
The stilled train
creaks a little to itself, then leaves
New Haven....
At this time "voodoo economics" referred to "Reaganomics" or "supply-side economics"; the theory that little-taxed and little-regulated capitalism would bring prosperity to everyone else.
Labels: Clarissa Aykroyd, Sarah Maguire
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