Full Description
Like the work of the European poets who have nourished him, David Constantine's poetry is informed by a profoundly humane vision of the world. The title of his eleventh collection, Belongings, signals that these are poems concerned both with our possessions and with what possesses us. Among much else in the word belongings, the poems draw on a sense of our 'co-ordinates' - something like the eastings and northings that give a map-reference - how you might triangulate a life.
The poems ask: Where do you belong? And have in mind also the hostile: You don't belong here. Go back where you belong. Many, possibly all, the poems in the collection touch more or less closely on such matters. Perhaps all poetry does, showing a life in its good or bad defining circumstances. In the poem 'Red', the defining geography is literal, drawn from an old geological map of Manchester in which Constantine finds 'the locus itself, a railway cutting / Behind the hospital I was born in', from which the paths of a life led outward. In other poems the particular becomes universal, a territory holding all our belongings, our memories of the people and the places we hold in our hearts. Behind these explorations another kind of belonging is challenged: our relationship with the planet to which we belong, but which does not belong to us.
Contents
1
11 My recent encounter with the Good Angel
15 Red
16 Lake
17 Puddles on the track...
18 Maps
19 How it saddened me...
20 Eye test
2
22 For the love of it
23 High wind, sunset, high spring tide
24 Full moon and cloud-cover
25 Abandoned bulb fields under Samson Hill
27 Strata
28 Landfall
29 The lucky and the unlucky
31 Black Dog
3
35 At the garden centre
37 The lady on the lid
38 My Tilley hat
40 Both knowing, neither saying...
41 Recall
42 My neighbour
43 He awoke and found it true
44 Dad's Wastwater
45 As when on a usual Sunday...
47 Open Mic
4
50 Ballad of the barge from hell
51 Ballad of the slave ship in the eye of heaven
52 Song: The way things are is the way things have to be
54 Ballad of the cruise ship
5
59 I will hold you in the light
60 First thing I saw then...
61 Côté coeur
62 The horseshoe
63 Fields
64 The tidebreak
65 On the borderlands
66 Stele
6
69 Leaves
70 Ash
71 Ways of being
72 Sycamore
73 The blackthorn path
74 Plane tree
7
77 My friend's belongings
78 Young woman with a cello on the metro
79 Old men walking the streets
80 Unborn child of Elizabeth Gaunt
81 Young woman asleep
82 Rescue dog
83 The Marazion man
84 Dancer
85 Mazey
86 English lesson
87 I watched a man...
88 The morning after
89 Carousel
8
91 Six more Hölderlin Fragments
9
98 Chorus from Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus
99 Chorus from Sophocles' Antigone
101 Dolphin
103 Notes
