***
Jag börjar med att presentera delar av tidskriftens deklaration:
"From modest beginnings in 1988, when it was a listings newsletter, Poetry London has developed into one of the UK’s leading poetry magazines.
Do not be misled by our name: Poetry London has the same relation to London as The New Yorker has to New York. In other words, it is a national and international magazine. We publish three times a year and feature poems and reviews from across the UK and Ireland, but also from the US, Canada and Australia and many in translation."
***
A bowl of warm air, by Moniza Alvi
(Published in Poetry London, Summer 1995.)
Someone is falling towards you
as an apple falls from a branch,
moving slowly, imperceptibly as if
into a new political epoch,
or excitedly like a dog towards a bone.
He is holding in both hands
everything he knows he has—
a bowl of warm air.
He has sighted you from afar
as if you were a dramatic crooked tree
on the horizon and he has seen you close up
like the underside of a mushroom.
but he cannot open you like a newspaper
or put you down like a newspaper.
And you are satisfied that he is veering towards you
and that he is adjusting his speed
and that the sun and the wind and rain are in front of him
and the sun and the wind and rain are behind him.
(Moniza Alvi föddes i Lahore, Pakistan, och kom till England när hon var några månader gammal. Hon växte upp i Hertfordshire och studerade vid universiteten i York och London. Peacock Luggage, en bok med dikter av Moniza Alvi och Peter Daniels, publicerades som ett resultat av att de två tilldelades the Poetry Business Prize, 1991. Sedan dess har Moniza Alvi gett ut åtta diktsamlingar. Källa: Författarens officiella webbplats)
***
The mobile library's last stop, by Paul Farley
(Published in Poetry London, Summer 1996.)
Don't park it outside the World's End Estate -
instead, take it down to the Embankment,
idle in neutral like a suicide the roll
over the edge, the books sliding down shelves,
to hang weightless at the moment you tip,
in silhouette a Brandt nocturne of a bus
beginning its crawl over Battersea Bridge.
 |
| Battersea Bridge |
Watch the river fill the windscreen,
the cockpit dissolve in a fountain of glass
on impact - survive this to tread effluvia
as it fills, sharing a dwindling pocket
of air with the books, whose pages fold
and flap and glow, their ink as bold
as the day they rolled into this world.
(Paul Farley, f. 1965, började tidigt vinna utmärkelser med sin poesi. Han vann Poetry Review's Geoffrey Dearmer Prize och fick the Forward Prize for Best First Collection med The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You, och vann Whitbread Poetry Prize för sin andra bok, The Ice Age, som också valdes till Poetry Book Society Choice. Källa: Poetry Archive)
***
The light collector, by Jean Sprackland
(Published in Poetry London, Summer 2000.)
He knows broad daylight inside out,
can't get excited any more by the tawdry brilliance of it,
flattening everything, dumbing it down.
From an open window on the seventh floor
he watches the street scudding below, and thinks
I must make something of my life, as if it were
a bag of rags for recycling.
Gauzy scraps of dawn
have begun to bore him. He leans out
into the caramel light of late summer evening
smattering wet roofs and TV aerials: too rich, too obvious.
At night he daydreams tricks so bright
he feels they lend him context.
He knows he has a steady way with starlight,
can pick it up like sand on a fingertip.
He goes out under the moon, in the fabulous air
tasting of electricity. He lingers by houses with drawn curtains,
presses himself thin as a shadow and watches light
bleeding from the open doorway of a pub.
But it leaves him hungry. What he seeks
for his own broken purpose is smaller
more secretive sources: the bits you find
in the sweepings of a long day alone.
The cryptic blue cast by a computer. The smash-and-grab
of camera flash. The blade of light under the door
with voices glinting behind it.
He wants to stop all the draughts in this place
with light, he wants it to shed meaning.
In the dark kitchen he opens the fridge
and the light is so sweet and precise it leaves him aching.
(Jean Sprackland, f. 1962, är en engelsk poet och författare. Hon har gett ut tre diktsamlingar och en bok med essäer om landskapet och naturen. Källa: Wikipedia)
