Infragreen - Softcover

Kate Bingham

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1781722439 ISBN 13: 9781781722435

Publisher: Seren, 2015

Synopsis

Perceptive, persuasive and intricately made, the poems of Kate Bingham s third collection, Infragreen, take the reader on a startling and unfamiliar journey through everyday experiences and phenomena. Her keen eye, reflectiveness and quiet wit endow her subjects with a shimmering freshness.

Set within the four walls of home, on the streets of north London and in the Yorkshire countryside, the poems build out from mundane activities such as taking the pill, traveling a daily bus route and scything thistles. In Bingham s hands, the familiar sights and hypnotic routines that normally lull the brain into unthinking acquiescence are the starting points for finding new richness in the world around us and our participation in it.

The book contains three sections, each infused by a different season and place, but a spirit of serious play presides throughout. Contemporary versions of Hardy and Frost, a collage cut from old favourite Christmas carols, and a refleshing of some of English poetry s oldest clichés are part of it, but so too is Bingham s fascination with pattern: the patterning required by some of poetry s stricter traditional forms, and pattern as content, a subject in itself.

Those who know Bingham s earlier work will recognize in this collection her playful, often darkly comic, appreciation of the surreal, which features hearts and hands, feet, and even a pair of shoes with minds and agenda of their own. Elsewhere, a milk-bottle breathes, a pocket of air turns into a winged creature, flies serenade the poet whose mortal scent has drawn them into her room. A ballad at the start of the final section tells the story of an artisan paper-maker whose origami creation is so perfect it comes to life, only to be destroyed again by its maker.

But beneath the gently cynical, almost self-deprecating tone lie Infragreen s darker themes: a base note of environmental and existential anxiety in which teasing self-deprecation can mutate into a desire for disembodiment, and a ruthless wishing away of consciousness and self.

About this title

About the Author

Kate Bingham lives in London where she works as a poet and filmmaker. She has published two collections of poetry for Seren, Cohabitation and Quicksand Beach which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2006. Her poem 'On Highgate Hill' was shortlisted for the The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2010. She is also the author of two novels, Mummy's Legs and Slipstream and in 1996 she received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. www.katebingham.com

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Infragreen

By Kate Bingham

Poetry Wales Press Ltd.

Copyright © 2015 Kate Bingham
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78172-243-5

Contents

I, 
Ultragreen, 
Infragreen, 
Spring, 
look at the rain ..., 
On Highgate Hill, 
Silt, 
The World at One, 
Heels, 
Tulips, 
Arrangements, 
Rosa Wedding Day, 
At Night, 
Questions, 
Midnight, 
two of us awake ..., 
II, 
Open, 
The Children's Room, 
String, 
Strip, 
Ten O'Clock, 
To, 
Cows, 
Thistles, 
August, 
Tapetum Lucidum, 
Cull, 
The Wood, 
Blackberries, 
Down, 
III, 
By the River Lau, 
My Hand, 
no handkerchief ..., 
Between Our Feet, 
Look, 
One, 
My Heart, 
Between, 
Two, 
Next Door, 
Cento, 
call it what you ..., 
Acknowledgements and Notes, 

CHAPTER 1

    Ultragreen

    A water drop
    turns in its skin at the end of the garden
    and opens one eye to the sun.

    Unsteadily, at the speed of light, its plain
    no-coloured heart breaks into such a green I can hear it
    loud and bright and green to distraction.

    It turns its eye in my brain, looks out
    and sees what I have seen.
    Something like photosynthesis begins.


    Infragreen

    Something the sun and I see eye to eye in
    winks in the crux of a leaf.

    For every turn of the turning earth
    it makes a tiny correction

    half letting go of itself
    half hanging on.


    Spring

    You know what the sun is like
    it has a way of looking at us from side to side

    of rising above its various nationalities
    and making things grow

    as if that's what a life-form has to do
    to get more attention.

    Up come snow drops
    pushing and shoving and putting on weight

    daffodil nubs break out all at once
    where the grass is thin

    and even the weak municipal crocuses
    divide and multiply, insisting they matter.

    An empty plastic milk container
    left on the kitchen table

    takes a breath, increasing in volume
    filling with light.

    look at the rain it always seems to know what to do
    coming down clear and direct silver and fearless
    many too many to count in one quick freshwater shoal
    no thought no thought at all for what happens next

    shaped by the air it runs through going its absolute fastest
    round at one end sharp at the other in and out of control
    it manages somehow to look its best its every last drop
    clean and true and hurrying to put its foot in its footstep

    falling over itself into earth's cracked bowl
    it disappears as it collects vanishing from the pavement up
    grounding the sky and lifting filthy waters
    falling into itself in the street as if only falling matters


    On Highgate Hill

      How it rained;
    we caught the bus up Highgate Hill
    past Whittington's cat and the hospital.
    The driver insisted he was full –
    twenty wet children, pleading, shrill,
      how it rained.

      How it snowed;
    the bus got stuck on Highgate Hill
    and we stood on the pavement in pumps and heels,
    children pelted the windows and wheels,
    their walk to school a wild white thrill,
      how it snowed.

      How it shone;
    we held our breath down Highgate Hill
    through stinking heat. A teenage girl
    chucked study guides across the aisle,
    a boy spat on Swiss Army steel
      and it shone,

      how it shone;
    the children kicked their seats until
    the driver came roaring up out of his stall.
    He bent in the middle. We saw it all.
    The engine turned over. Traffic stood still.
      How it shone.


    Silt

    Between the school and Whitehill Food Market
    two small motor repair shops operate
    from opposite sides of the street, one on the corner,
    one with Hand Car Wash And Valet Services
    sharing its neat white stucco art deco yard,
    where less than once a year I take the car
    to have its moss scraped off and some of the silt
    sucked out of the velvet-effect upholstery,
    sugar and salt and worms of rubbed white tissue,
    anonymous embedded grime, filaments
    and particles of inner-city filth
    accumulated through the ins and outs
    of all those journeys, prints of my footprints pressed
    on the brake like a prehistoric assemblage,
    the padded bodywork a safe, repulsive
    five-seater cave I have to return to,
    part of the landscape, its familiar volume
    somewhere to look from as a dirty sun
    slides behind chimneys and rooftops, or the moon
    comes out from a billboard, centring the sky
    between Whitehill Food Market and the school,
    where a glade of plane trees reaches over the fence
    of the padlocked playground and a broken drain
    wells at the side of the street in long black water,
    sluicing the pavement, falling back on itself
    and sluicing again as cars slow through ahead
    of the traffic island, washing a black sand beach
    inland over glittery concrete flood plains
    to the walls of houses no one seems to occupy,
    leaving a line of scribbled minuscule trash,
    the loose-packed stinking edge of a continent.


    The World at One

    I lie in bed until The World at One,
    why should my heart go off with an alarm?
    The body's woman's work is never done,

    the blood gets up to exercise the lungs.
    The kettle sings, I count my lucky charms –
    a chain connects and separates each one

    and when I shake my wrist it shakes the sun
    that scatters off the wall and scalds my arm.
    It's only skin and coffee, no harm done.

    War continues, voting has begun;
    my left-hand thumb elects my right-hand palm.
    We couldn't all go on to be someone.

    I have a little silver house to run,
    a silver Scottie dog to keep me calm.
    I don't remember everything I've done

    but bring me pencil, paper, chewing gum
    and I will stay at home and do no harm,
    imagining myself a world for one
    where what I did was what I should have done.


    Heels

    High over dogs and tricycles at the gate
    I carried myself like wine in a wine glass

    managing to avoid the usual huddles
    of mums and dads

    as instep to instep left and right
    admired their patent leather reflections

    proud and voluptuous still
    after years in a box at the back of the wardrobe.

    Nothing I had to celebrate but the shoes themselves
    could account for such inappropriate footwear

    and as I sank into the playground's spongy pink tarmac
    even the littlest children knew it.


    Tulips

    My love arrived with tulips, 'ten for a fiver',
    picked up from the supermarket at the end of the street.

    Fresh off the plane, perhaps he would have preferred
    to wash his hands but stood in his coat in the kitchen

    watching me slice through cellophane
    and crush the stems with the stainless heel of the bread knife.

    All across Holland trucks were going to and fro
    between the flower farms and distribution facilities

    rocking their harvest to sleep over good Dutch tarmac
    so every bunch could be in store before it opened its eyes

    and even as I filled the vase, people on nights
    were dumping crates of slender-headed replacements

    cut so premature they didn't know what kind they were
    in tubs of glucose solution up and down Holloway Road.

    Soon these too would speak the international language of flowers
    and be the thing someone can't find the words to say

    carrying on with the business of tulips, ripening through
    the colourful inconvenience of their visit

    into a blousy, brittle, burnt black-burgundy arrangement
    of decay, like mine, too tongue-twisted to throw out.


    Arrangements

    I

    I let my best-laid plans be rearranged,
    my point of view is narrow and pragmatic:
    for things to stay the same they have to change.

    I listen to the people I estrange.
    I'm insincere, they say, too diplomatic.
    Once they liked the world my words arranged

    but now they find my argument restrained,
    my thought provisional and undogmatic.
    No one hears when I explain that change

    is necessary, just as truth is strange
    and adaptation rarely democratic.
    To keep ahead, one must extend one's range.

    My family suspects I am deranged.
    Insanity could not be less dramatic:
    to stay the same a person has to change.

    Survival is a complicated game
    that disadvantages the bureaucratic;
    all my promises are prearranged
    to break, should certain circumstances change.


    II

    I will not tell you what I have arranged
    but promise this: I only seem pragmatic.
    Let their circumstances stay the same

    and people will have reason to complain.
    My insincerity is diplomatic;
    revolutions need to be arranged,

    protest stimulated and contained.
    History applauds the undogmatic
    but, to change, we have to stay the same.

    All my relationships are under strain.
    My critics wish I were more democratic,
    they want everything to be arranged

    around the give-and-take of praise and blame,
    but compromise will not provoke dramatic
    change. The status quo must stay the same.

    When there is fighting in the streets again
    my point of view will look less bureaucratic.
    Wait, and see the old world rearranged.
    For things to change they have to stay the same.


    Rosa Wedding Day

    More than a thousand buds have arrived in the garden.
    Yesterday I looked and there were none.

    Tangled into a slump of sullen green
    and bursting with sap they've overrun

    the armandii buddleia jasmine vine
    and cluster by cluster flick their swollen thumbs

    or sit on their fingers waiting to open,
    point their beaks up at the little sun.

    Their copper thorns will not be soft for long
    and something like a feather in a lung

    unfurls its spine inside their inside skin.
    A feeling wonders what it might become

    as daylight budges up, slips in between
    as if there were enough for every one.

    Rain or shine they will be flowers soon
    and by their own extravagant over-production

    lost in a scented commotion of white then gone:
    hips where their heads were, this year's growing done.

    The rose will forget its name but ramble on
    with a fence in its shoulder, rubbing its bones, unstrung.

    The sky remembers everything it's seen.
    More than a thousand buds stick out their tongues.


    At Night

    I take the little pill I take at night.
    In strips of 21 as flat and white
    as faces in the bathroom mirror light
    it waits behind the mirror out of sight.
    Its days are plastic-coated, watertight,
    and all, until the day the day is right,
    some sharp or softer shade of dull or bright.

    The sun goes in and out but every night
    no matter if the day was blue or white
    I catch myself in the electric light.
    I can't intend an act of oversight.
    I tie a ponytail and pull it tight.
    I know the pill is perfectly alright
    (its documented side-effects are slight)

    but wake up with a question in the night
    or sometimes keep its sweet dissolving white
    on my tongue long after turning off the light,
    just as the moon keeps me in line of sight
    although the blind is drawn, the curtain tight,
    imagining an answer, mine and right
    and unconditional as stars are bright.


    Questions

    How I have grown to love watching you
    not answer questions

    your openly uninformative eyes
    your inadmissible forehead, figured brow
    and chin's obscure intelligence

    the in and out deliberation of your breath
    your steady hand, your other hand

    your mouth's unstated strategy
    for the avoidance of speech
    the generous glue that sets your lips apart

    your tongue's invertebrate mobility
    dusk pink in the black of your throat

    the black of your voice box, fitted as standard
    still to be found, still signalling a wish
    upon its own red light

    the possibility that somewhere
    in the processes of deep non-verbal reasoning

    some filament might signal back
    and the silence between us
    end in words.


    Midnight

    I have had too much sleep to sleep
    but not enough to let me keep
    tomorrow's promises and lie
    awake all night. Instead of sheep

    I count the faint familiar sighs
    of taxi drivers passing by.
    I wonder if they've lost their way,
    the roads are hard to recognise –

    even our own – the houses sway
    in light-polluted pavement grey.
    Your breath is seasonless and slow
    as aeroplanes at break of day

    and when I hear your step below
    my heart gets up to meet you, though
    you're here with me asleep, I know,
    and haven't anywhere to go.

    two of us awake in the dark at least not sleeping
    as the morning's first soft notes poke out their pale green shoots

    a line of cracks of light
    so like a line from birdsong they must be birdsong

    lifting its head for an in-breath shoulders opening into wings

    its flutter of pitch a quick explosion in my ear
    where a pear tree stands with its hands out hoping for music

    and two small thoughts keep still on a branch in the streetlight
    one listening one listening to itself

CHAPTER 2

    Open

    The sound of the place was the sound of summer air –
    on holiday the same place every year
    it was a field or tree or temperature
    I never thought to hear and never heard

    until the time I took a boy up there
    and closed his eyes and with his open ear
    my prickled lips and cheeks and forehead saw
    behind the sun the singing of a bird.

    If I had never listened to a heart
    till then, I would have felt the sudden shame
    and same unfolding lunatic delight

    I felt beneath that fluttering spark in flight,
    discovering the lark and in its name
    a song that had been with me from the start.


    The Children's Room

    for Mum and Dad

    You gave us the warmest room in the house
    and a pair of old iron frame hospital beds
    we'd jump between in our dressing gowns,
    pounding the beams in the kitchen below as we landed,
    louder and faster each summer holidays
    till the cracks in the skirting filled with light
    and the sound of grown-ups rattling cutlery
    and chairs tucked under for the night
    lullabied through the floorboards. We could hear
    every creak, every whisper, even the dust
    in the background where you dozed on the sofa,
    face to the ceiling, eyes half shut.
    World going on as it would with us not there
    was a world we could sleep through.
    Half a life later, nothing has changed up here:
    flower-men holding hands still nod and bow
    in the wallpaper, bedsteads lean,
    and the same pyjama-striped horsehair mattresses
    scrunch under candlewick counterpanes
    when the children climb in, upping their voices,
    clamouring to be kissed. How quickly quietness
    comes back to a house after the noise of bedtime
    as I chop an onion, open wine,
    sit down, slip out of earshot, out of mind.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Infragreen by Kate Bingham. Copyright © 2015 Kate Bingham. Excerpted by permission of Poetry Wales Press Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Seren
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1781722439
• ISBN 13: 9781781722435
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 64