Poems of the Decade Read online

  Poems of the Decade

  An anthology of the Forward books of poetry

  This anthology was designed and produced by Forward Worldwide, who also support the Prizes. Forward Worldwide is a leading content marketing agency based in London, Shanghai and Singapore.

  We create engaging, shareable editorial in multiple languages, raising brand awareness and driving sales. Clients include Patek Philippe, American Express, Standard Life, Fidelity, B&Q and Tesco.

  Find us at forwardww.com and @tweetfwd

  First published in Great Britain by

  Forward Ltd

  in association with

  Faber and Faber

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  ISBN 978 0 571 32540 5 (paperback)

  Compilation copyright © Forward Worldwide Ltd 2011

  Cover copyright © Grayson Perry

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK)

  Croydon CR0 4YY

  Ebook conversion by leeds-ebooks.co.uk

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available at the British Library.

  Poems of the Decade

  An anthology of the

  Forward books of poetry

  London

  To Felicity Ann Sieghart with love and thanks

  Contents

  Preface by Susannah Herbert, Executive Director, Forward Arts Foundation

  Patience Agbabi · Eat Me

  Ann Alexander · Dead Cat Poem

  Simon Armitage · Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass

  Tiffany Atkinson · Zuppa di Ceci

  Ros Barber · Material

  Edward Barker · Crystal Night

  Judi Benson · Burying the Ancestors

  Kate Bingham · Monogamy

  Eavan Boland · Inheritance

  Sue Boyle · A Leisure Centre Is Also a Temple of Learning

  Colette Bryce · Early Version

  John Burnside · History

  Matthew Caley · Lines Written Upon a Prophylactic Found in a Brixton Gutter

  Ciaran Carson · The War Correspondent

  Kate Clanchy · One, Two

  Chris Considine · The Cruellest Class

  Wendy Cope · Being Boring

  Julia Copus · An Easy Passage

  Allan Crosbie · Manifesto

  John F Deane · Stranger

  Tishani Doshi · The Deliverer

  Nick Drake · c/o the Sea at Patea

  Carol Ann Duffy · The Map-Woman

  Ian Duhig · The Lammas Hireling

  Helen Dunmore · To My Nine-Year-Old Self

  Douglas Dunn · The Year’s Afternoon

  Paul Durcan · The Far Side of the Island

  UA Fanthorpe · A Minor Role

  Helen Farish · Programme

  Paul Farley · Liverpool Disappears for a Billionth of a Second

  Vicki Feaver · The Gun

  Leontia Flynn · The Furthest Distances I’ve Travelled

  Roderick Ford · Giuseppe

  Linda France · Cooking With Blood

  Tom French · Night Drive

  John Fuller · My Life on the Margins of Celebrity

  Lydia Fulleylove · Night Drive

  John Goodby · The Uncles

  Vona Groarke · Bodkin

  Paul Groves · Man and Boy

  Jen Hadfield · Song of Parts

  Michael Hamburger · The Dog-Days Interrupted

  Sophie Hannah · God’s Eleventh Rule

  David Harsent · Street Scenes

  Seamus Heaney · Out of the Bag

  David Herd · September 11th, 2001

  Ellen Hinsey · XVII Correspondences: Aphorisms Regarding Impatience

  Mick Imlah · The Ayrshire Orpheus

  AB Jackson · Filing

  Kathleen Jamie · Speirin

  Alan Jenkins · Effects

  Emma Jones · Sonnet

  Jackie Kay · Late Love

  Judy Kendall · Wa, Harmony

  John Kinsella · The Hierarchy of Sheep – A Report From My Brother

  Nick Laird · The Layered

  Michael Laskey · The Pain on His Face

  Gwyneth Lewis · Mother Tongue

  Michael Longley · The Holly Bush

  Mary MacRae · Jury

  Derek Mahon · Romance

  Lorraine Mariner · Thursday

  Glyn Maxwell · The Snow Village

  Roger McGough · The Wrong Beds

  Medbh McGuckian · She Is in the Past, She Has this Grace

  Patrick McGuinness · A History of Doing Nothing

  Jamie McKendrick · An Encroachment

  Allison McVety · Boy on the Bus

  Hilary Menos · Bernard Manning Plays Totnes Civic Hall

  Robert Minhinnick · The Fox in the National Museum of Wales

  Deborah Moffatt · Along the Coast

  Sinéad Morrissey · Genetics

  Graham Mort · Pianoforte

  Andrew Motion · From the Journal of a Disappointed Man

  Daljit Nagra · Look We Have Coming to Dover!

  Sean O’Brien · Fantasia on a Theme of James Wright

  Ciaran O’Driscoll · Please Hold

  Dennis O’Driscoll · Out of Control

  Caitríona O’Reilly · Autobiography

  Helen Oswald · The Passion

  Marita Over · Spiders

  Ruth Padel · You, Shiva, and My Mum

  Don Paterson · Song for Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze

  Clare Pollard · Thinking of England

  Jacob Polley · The Cheapjack

  Andrea Porter · Assassinations

  Peter Porter · Last Words

  Richard Price · from A Spelthorne Bird List

  Sheenagh Pugh · Night Nurses in the Morning

  Sally Read · Instruction

  Robin Robertson · La Stanza Delle Mosche

  Fiona Sampson · From the Adulteress’s Songbook

  Myra Schneider · Goulash

  Jo Shapcott · Of Mutability

  Kathryn Simmonds · The Boys in the Fish Shop

  Catherine Smith · The New Bride

  John Stammers · Ask Them

  George Szirtes · Song

  Adam Thorpe · On Her Blindness

  Tim Turnbull · Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn

  Anna Wigley · Dürer’s Hare

  Sam Willetts · Trick

  CK Williams · Either / Or

  Hugo Williams · Poems to My Mother

  Jackie Wills · Don’t Commit Adultery

  Publisher acknowledgements

  Winners of the Forward Prizes 2001-2010

  Preface

  Treat this anthology with caution. It looks harmless, but contains multitudes: works that speak of violence, danger and fear alongside love and longing, in forms broken and reshaped by the need to communicate what it is to be alive now, here.

  Beyond this book lie ten Forward anthologies of poetry, one for each year of the millennium’s first decade. And beyond them? Many hundreds of slim volumes and thousands of single poems submitted to the Forward Prizes for Poetry in that time.

  The Prizes were first awarded in 1992 by a young entrepreneur, William Sieghart, who wanted to find a way of discovering and sharing whatever good poetry was being written at the time. It is easy for a curious mind to learn of the most exciting movies, music, novels and artworks created in recent
years, he reasoned. Why should poetry be any different?

  Sieghart’s idea was simple: in the spring, he invited publishers to send their ‘best’ recent poetry books to a five-strong panel of judges, then invited the judges to choose the ones that lodged most vividly in their minds over the summer. And in the autumn, three prizes were awarded: Best Collection, Best First Collection and Best Single Poem. A selection of the shortlisted and highly commended poems were then collected in the first Forward Book of Poetry . This happened again. And again. New judges. New winners. New readers. After a decade, during which he founded National Poetry Day, Sieghart plucked his favourite poems for a Forward book of books. Now that’s happened again, too. The judging doesn’t stop and start: it continues. We hope you join in the work of sifting, choosing, celebrating as readers: for ideas on how to do this, go to the Forward Arts Foundation website and social media feeds.

  There are poems here by authors who have long been famous: Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage. Others deserve to be far better known. But none is in by chance: each work was chosen because a phrase, a sound, an image or pattern alerted a judge to something happening – something important and interesting, quite possibly in the gap between one line and the next. Forward Prizes judges are themselves poets, musicians, actors, journalists, writers and artists: none reads a poem in quite the same way as another. They argue as they cast their nets, and sometimes for many years afterwards.

  If you wonder which of these poems are prize-winners, turn to the back of the book . They may not be the poems, or indeed poets, you expect. A writer you rate highly may not figure in the roll of honour, and vice versa. And if this surprises and annoys you, then welcome to the big conversation about poetry and taste. For whatever the claims made at the moment of judgment, few poetry juries would be rash enough, years later, to insist that their time-pressured verdicts are definitive or beyond dispute. How could they be? The formation of a canon takes years and involves the thoughts of many: taste may possibly be shaped by five eminent creative and critical minds in a book-lined room, but it cannot be controlled. The days when a poem could be anointed from on high as ‘great’ – and accepted serenely without argument – are over, if they ever existed.

  Grayson Perry allowed the use of an image of his pot Language of Cars on the cover: his kindness will seem all the more remarkable to anyone who reads Tim Turnbull’s Keatsian ode on a Grayson urn .

  We thank Forward Worldwide, loyal and generous supporters of the Forward Prizes since the start, particularly Casey Jones, Will Scott and Christopher Stocks who produce the Forward anthologies. Ben Sinyor’s extraordinary care and attention to detail made this revised edition possible. Arts Council England, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the John Ellerman Foundation and the Rothschild Foundation all fund us to celebrate excellence in poetry and widen its audience through the Forward Prizes and National Poetry Day. Thank you to each.

  And finally, thanks to our founder chairman William Sieghart, whose curiosity and passion continue to drive the Forward Arts Foundation.

  January 2015

  Susannah Herbert

  Executive Director, Forward Arts Foundation

  www.forwardartsfoundation.org

  @forwardprizes

  facebook.com/forwardprizes

  Poems of the Decade

  An anthology of the

  Forward books of poetry

  Patience Agbabi

  Eat Me

  When I hit thirty, he brought me a cake,

  three layers of icing, home-made,

  a candle for each stone in weight.

  The icing was white but the letters were pink,

  they said, EAT ME . And I ate, did

  what I was told. Didn’t even taste it.

  Then he asked me to get up and walk

  round the bed so he could watch my broad

  belly wobble, hips judder like a juggernaut.

  The bigger the better , he’d say, I like

  big girls, soft girls, girls I can burrow inside

  with multiple chins, masses of cellulite .

  I was his Jacuzzi. But he was my cook,

  my only pleasure the rush of fast food,

  his pleasure, to watch me swell like forbidden fruit.

  His breadfruit. His desert island after shipwreck.

  Or a beached whale on a king-size bed

  craving a wave. I was a tidal wave of flesh

  too fat to leave, too fat to buy a pint of full-fat milk,

  too fat to use fat as an emotional shield,

  too fat to be called chubby, cuddly, big-built.

  The day I hit thirty-nine, I allowed him to stroke

  my globe of a cheek. His flesh, my flesh flowed.

  He said, Open wide , poured olive oil down my throat.

  Soon you’ll be forty ... he whispered, and how

  could I not roll over on top. I rolled and he drowned

  in my flesh. I drowned his dying sentence out.

  I left him there for six hours that felt like a week.

  His mouth slightly open, his eyes bulging with greed.

  There was nothing else left in the house to eat.

  Ann Alexander

  Dead Cat Poem

  She who flowed like mercury, or mist

  over silent fields,

  who had seen off foxes,

  terrorized hedgerows, endangered

  several species of rodent,

  was now sitting on death’s lap

  and feeling his cold fingers.

  We stood and looked for signs of her

  in the grey bundle we had petted and stroked

  lugged and loved through the years.

  But she was looking elsewhere,

  untidy for the first time,

  dusty and in disarray.

  Strange that when we buried her

  beneath a flowering bush, in the sunny place

  where she loved to sit,

  we could not touch her.

  Scooped her up with a spade.

  Simon Armitage

  Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass

  It seemed an unlikely match. All winter unplugged,

  grinding its teeth in a plastic sleeve, the chainsaw swung

  nose-down from a hook in the darkroom

  under the hatch in the floor. When offered the can

  it knocked back a quarter-pint of engine oil

  and juices ran from its joints and threads,

  oozed across the guide-bar and the maker’s name,

  into the dry links.

  From the summerhouse, still holding one last gulp

  of last year’s heat behind its double doors, and hung

  with the weightless wreckage of wasps and flies,

  moth-balled in spider’s wool…

  from there, I trailed the day-glo orange power-line

  the length of the lawn and the garden path,

  fed it out like powder from a keg, then walked

  back to the socket and flicked the switch, then walked again

  and coupled the saw to the flex – clipped them together.

  Then dropped the safety catch and gunned the trigger.

  No gearing up or getting to speed, just an instant rage,

  the rush of metal lashing out at air, connected to the main.

  The chainsaw with its perfect disregard, its mood

  to tangle with cloth, or jewellery, or hair.

  The chainsaw with its bloody desire, its sweet tooth

  for the flesh of the face and the bones underneath,

  its grand plan to kick back against nail or knot

  and rear up into the brain.

  I let it flare, lifted it into the sun

  and felt the hundred beats per second drumming in its heart,

  and felt the drive-wheel gargle in its throat.

  The pampas grass with its ludicrous feathers

  and plumes. The pampas grass, taking the warmth and light

  from cutti
ngs and bulbs, sunning itself,

  stealing the show with its footstools, cushions and tufts

  and its twelve-foot spears.

  This was the sledgehammer taken to crack the nut.

  Probably all that was needed here was a good pull or shove

  or a pitchfork to lever it out at its base.

  Overkill. I touched the blur of the blade

  against the nearmost tip of a reed – it didn’t exist.

  I dabbed at a stalk that swooned, docked a couple of heads,

  dismissed the top third of its canes with a sideways sweep

  at shoulder height – this was a game.

  I lifted the fringe of undergrowth, carved at the trunk –

  plant-juice spat from the pipes and tubes

  and dust flew out as I ripped into pockets of dark, secret warmth.

  To clear a space to work

  I raked whatever was severed or felled or torn

  towards the dead zone under the outhouse wall, to be fired.

  Then cut and raked, cut and raked, till what was left

  was a flat stump the size of a manhole cover or barrel lid

  that wouldn’t be dug with a spade or prized from the earth.

  Wanting to finish things off I took up the saw