from (Un)threading Clare: part of British Standards: book three of The English Strain
I love to see the old heath’s withered brake
In this poem, I force
myself out of doors,
face the heron flapping
across Greenbank lake –
it tips bold wing over
long-legged arrest, alights
amid a squad
of cormorants that shuffles aside
oily wings in silent grudge.
On the fallen ash stump, a
robin poses, without sharp
trill, all life in its eye –
out of the generation that
love-struck Audubon
sketched here, snatched
in a line’s quick fling.
Stranger birds, screeching
parakeets, hide
or are hidden, in a
communal flip and rip
atop the old holly
tree; its unhorned leaves,
grown smooth and
unberried, shake –
not a flash of yellow-green
flitting,
just migrant voices under
the poem’s hood.
(i.m. Christopher Middleton)
16th December 2020
Robert Sheppard is author of many volumes of poetry and criticism, including recent volumes The English Strain (Shearsman) and Bad Idea (Knives Forks and Spoons), which are the first two parts of a trilogy of ‘transpositions’ of traditional sonnets. Shearsman also publish his selected poems, History or Sleep, and a book of essays on his work, The Robert Sheppard Companion, edited by James Byrne and Christopher Madden. He is emeritus professor of Poetry and Poetics at Edge Hill University, and blogs at www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com .
My links; blog: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com
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