Where the Road Runs Out

Gaia Holmes

Description

Gaia Holmes' third collection of poetry transports us to the edge of things: to remote, treeless islands, to dark, unfathomable mines, to the gaping maw of grief. With frailty and ferocity, these poems map out the strange absences left in our lives when a rupture occurs like the sudden appearance of a sinkhole threatening to pull everything else down with it. Where the Road Runs Out is a powerful and intimate portrait of loss, isolation, and ultimately healing. Above all, it is a paean to the landscape, and the myths, magic and mysteries that lie just beneath the surface.

Informations

• Publié par: Comma Press
• Date de parution: 06 septembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781912697144
• Langue: English

Extrait

Contents
About the Author

And Still we Keep on Singing
Leaves
I Belong Here
Feckless
Hygge
The Wrong Kind of Birds
Stone Soup
The Lord’s Prayer
Reek
Playing Alive
The Weather
Guests
Kummerspeck
Preservation
Fixed
The Hole Room
In the Pancake Room
Before All This
The Audition
Google-it
Lack
Holes
Kneading
Ballast
Angel of the Checkout
Your Orange Raincoat
Those Spaces You Try to Fill
Milk
The Twitcher
The Mushroom Gatherer
Sacramental
And There was Just this Monstrous Hole…
Reporting Back
And Afterwards
Driving
Remembering Light
In Passing
Stay Misty for Me
Someone to Blame
What Pylons Dream of
The Allure of Frost
Voyeur
Thermals
The Great Storm of ‘53
Last Orders at the Light Bar
Shadow Play
The Day the Sky Turned Black
The Runners Versus the Ramblers
Road Salt
Rain Charm for Stirling Street
Your Fault
Bloom
Imported Goods
The Morning we Dragged the Settee into the Garden
The Midge Hour
How to Please the Sea
Being a Seahorse
Wild Pigeons
The World’s Sharpest Knife
Hope

Notes
About the Author

Gaia Holmes is a poet and tutor in creative writing. She has previously made a living as a busker, a cleaner, a gallery attendant, an oral historian and a lollypop lady. In 2017, she was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship and shortlisted for a Pushcart Prize, and her poem ‘Guests’ won the Bare Fiction Prize 2016 for poetry. She has had two full length poetry collections published by Comma Press: Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed (2006) and Lifting the Piano with One Hand (2013), as well as Tales from the Tachograph , a collaborative work with Winston Plowes (Calder Valley Poetry, 2017). Her poems have appeared in various anthologies including Milestones, I Belong Here, The Book of Love and Loss and Seductive Harmonies . She lives in Halifax.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Hawthornden Castle who awarded her a month’s fellowship in 2017, enabling her to work on the poems in this collection. Thanks are also due to the following websites on which some of these poems appeared: The High Window, 3 Drops from a Cauldron and Claudius Speaks . ‘Ballast’ was commended in the Larkin Poetry Competition, 2013. ‘Holes’, ’Your Orange Raincoat’, ‘Kummerspeck’ and ‘Voyeur’ were all commended in the York Mix Poetry Competition and the following poems were also commended in various poetry competitions: ‘Kneading’ (Ver Poets),‘And There was Just this Monstrous Hole’ (Otley Word Feast). ‘The Allure of Frost’ first appeared in The Butcher’s Dog magazine, 2015.
‘I Belong Here’ came third in the Carers UK creative writing competition in 2016 and appeared in print, alongside ‘Hygge’ in Caring: Carers UK Members’ Magazine #44 in February 2017. ‘Last Orders at the Light Bar’ was awarded second prize in the Blackpool Wordpool Poetry Competition, 2014. ‘Guests’ won the Bare Fiction Prize 2016 in poetry.

By the same author
Dr James Graham's Celestial Bed
Lifting the Piano with One Hand


First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Comma Press.
www.commapress.co.uk

Copyright © Gaia Holmes 2018.
All rights reserved.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.
A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 1-910974-45-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-910974-45-2



The publishers gratefully acknowledge assistance from the Arts Council England.
where the road runs out





GAIA HOLMES
And Still we Keep on Singing

Up here the hours go backwards
and we’re closer to the edge of things.
Up here you have to know the language of the wind,
you have to understand the manners of mist and riptides
in order to go to sleep singing,
in order to wake up
on the brighter side of life.

Some days sunlight sugars the island.
Cats lie on their backs bleaching their bellies,
seals bask on the rocks, braise their lovely fat
until it’s close to boiling point.
Orange crocosmia burns gently
around the mill dam.
Every kitchen smells of bread.
The world hums as it hangs out its washing.

Other days we gag on the reek of drift-tide rot.
Broken gulls and fulmars
float in the harbour
like oily rags.
Damp socks and dresses
freeze and stiffen on the washing line.
A furze of fret blots out our thin and precious light.
The glow of the mainland, that cosy grail we cling to,
that glimmer of cars, buses, shops and living,
disappears into the dark, monstrous mouth
of the island where lightbulbs shatter and fuses blow
and we’re left with singed fingers, the thick stink of wax
and candles whose wicks are too damp and weak
to sustain a flame.
Leaves

There are worse things
than a loose tooth,
a ladder in your tights,
a burnt dinner.
There are worse things
than losing your keys.

My father is fevered
and godless.
My father is dying
on an island
with no trees.
I send him prayers.
I send him bulging sacks
of autumn leaves.
I Belong Here

I belong here,
Mistress of Haar, Our Lady of the Seals,
your angel, your fumbling nurse, your little star,
stumbling around in your size 10 wellies
and your clay-crusted fleece,
stubbing my toes on shadows,
walking to the village shop
to buy red wine and Complan,
waving at the locals,
letting the mad winds bruise my cheeks
and twist my hair into witch-knots

I belong here
cooking stone soup every day,
beach combing for hope,
scrumping kelp and driftwood to burn
in our evening fires,
cooling your brow
with lavender on a mouldy flannel,
singing love, love, love.

I belong here
with the cracked windows,
the damp, your denial,
the wild and the raw,
the lying dog-eared books:
How to Live to be 100,
How to Outsmart your Cancer ,
stacked between the jars of pills
and the sticky bottles of morphine
on your bedside table.

I belong here in December
with you and your three white cats,
grinding your tablets
to powder at midnight,
as the Orkney gales rock the caravan.

I belong here
with your dying
and every dawn sky
seething
and blistered
with stars.
Feckless

Sometimes it makes him angry, this dying,
and I keep doing things wrong,
forget to soften the stars with almond milk
before I bring them to his bedside on a saucer,
buy the wrong kind of green tea,
the wrong kind of holy water
from the village shop.

He says there are things that need darning
but I end up darning the wrong holes
so there is less light
and it’s hard to read the instructions.

I have to sign lots of papers now
in order to be a proper daughter
and I keep writing my name backwards.
Forgodsake , he says, still strong enough
to make the caravan shake,
to make the clock fall off the wall,
to scare the fat white cats
from where they lay
scorching their fur on the gas fire.
Forgodsake .

And I know that I’ve lost