The Movement of Bodies is a book you want to read - Neil Curry: The North
The Movement of Bodies made the shortlist for the T S Eliot Prize - see the PBS web site for details.
My latest collection, The Movement of Bodies, came out in March 2005. It has been named as a Poetry Book Society recommendation for Spring 2005. Cover pic on the right. The PBS asked me to write a couple of paragraphs about the book. Here's what I wrote:
"The Movement of Bodies, when I look at it, has a lot of names in it. Poems about, and dedicated to, people. The known, George Mackay Brown, Karl Schlechter, Johnny Cash, William Dampier; the unknown, John Thomson, Sheraq Omar, Robina Anderson, an oilman called Rachid Khalifa and a shipload of sailors in a Shetland churchyard. Then there are names that never appear, among them that of Isaac Newton, whom the title poem concerns. I got that one from that godawful TV programme Great Britons.
There's a sequence, in the voice of the painter Nicholas Hilliard about his methods for capturing a character in paint, and a long central poem, "The Grave of the Grande Armée at Vilnius". This started from a newspaper account of a ceremony at the mass grave for the remnant of Napoleon's army after the retreat from Moscow. Most of the dead succumbed to hypothermia and there was an account of one corpse, uninjured and very young, that interested me, because to be where he was, he had to have survived the whole Russian campaign. At the time, I saw it as being historical; I can see now that there were also more modern wars in my mind. There are poems overtly about the Afghan war, "The Bereavement of the Lion-Keeper" and "The Curator and the Art of Concealment".
Several poems are set in Shetland, "Golden Rabbits" and "Best Jesus in Show" among them. And there seem to be a fair few poems about love, as opposed to love poems, which I don't really do. "Times Like Places", my personal favourite, is an oddity of fictionalising fact, a thing I enjoy doing. All the places in it have played a part in my life, but the story attached to them in the poem is not mine. Originally it was about a fictional man, but as I wrote, he came to resemble someone I know slightly. So it's on that boundary between fact and fiction where I most like being.
"Ballad of the Lovesick Traveller" was written at a science fiction convention where I defended poetry to a man dressed as a giant alien lizard, who said "Poetry isn't real, is it? It has no connection with everyday life".
This is the collection's title poem.
The Movement of Bodies
He fractured white light into seven colours,
reckoned the distance to the moon,
wrote laws for the movement
of bodies: no mystery to him
until now. Planets in their orbit,
the sea's tides, his eyes
locked to the lit face
of the young mathematician.
A body at rest remains so
unless some force act on it.
So many years, no joy
but in numbers, no troubling
of the flesh. The pink tongue-tip
idly licking a finger
constricts his heart. His edges
flicker, scintillate, like a heat-haze.
A hand brushes his cheek
and it colours: to each action
an equal and opposite reaction.
He tries to think straight:
the moon. I worked out its mass. Moonlight,
kissing in moonlight. The movement
of bodies. The moon draws
the tides. A knife in my eye.
Once, probing for truth,
he nearly blinded himself.
This time, he will flinch
from the lacerating light.
Legend will say he died a virgin
and never saw the sea.
This poem was first published in PN Review.
And here's another poem from the book.
Times Like Places
There are times like places: there is weather
the shape of moments. Dark afternoons
by a fire are Craster in the rain
and a pub they happened on, unlooked-for
and welcoming, while a North Sea gale
spat spume at the rattling windows.
And most August middays can take him
to the village in Sachsen-Anhalt,
its windows shuttered against the sun,
and a hen sleeping in the dusty road,
the day they picked cherries in a garden
so quiet, they could hear each other breathe.
Nor can he ever be on a ferry,
looking back at a boat's wake, and not think
of the still, glassy morning off the Hook,
when it dawned on him they didn't talk
in sentences any more: didn't need to,
each knowing what the other would say.
The worst was Aberdeen, when they walked
the length of Union Street not speaking,
choking up, glancing sideways at each other,
but never at the same time. Black cats
and windy bridges bring it all back,
eyes stinging. Yet even this memory
is dear to him, now that no place or weather
or time of day can happen to them both.
On clear winter nights, he scans the sky
for Orion's three-starred belt, remembering
whose arms warmed him, the cold night
he first saw it; who told him its name.
This poem was first published in Poetry Review
The Movement of Bodies is published by Seren, 57 Nolton Street, Bridgend CF31 3BN, Wales
Tel 01656 663018. Email enquiries@seren-books.com You can also buy books via their web site
