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PostPosted: Sun Jun 18, 2017 5:44 pm 
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Could anybody please transcribe the new poems from the video?


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PostPosted: Thu Jul 06, 2017 8:13 pm 
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bruise wrote:
Could anybody please transcribe the new poems from the video?


I've had a go:

Roundabout, roundabout, maggoty pie,
My father loves good ale –


Maggoty

The ewes have sodden rumps that smell like death.
We blowfly-dip in March against breech-strike.
The legless worms ascend the diazinon
As Chalmers, fortified by vodka, flogs the eldest ewe’s bonce with a crook.
Her winker pops out, bounces on its rope.
Chalmers Adam exits without guilt,
The wall-eyed Blue-Merle Border at his heel.
Contaminated, Ira makes an oath:
“I plant a crooked nail
On Adam Chalmers’ trail
Towards the golden fleece:
I plant a crooked nail.”


Way down yonder, down in de meadow, there’s a poor little lamby:
Bees and the butterflies picking out his eyes


Mercy on Mallory

Unlucky lad!
Your tender gaze
Eased my days -
*Nestled tripe*, blatched sacrifice.
You I raised, called your name
Until the rooks ripped down February’s dawn.
I found your brains near a sheet of iron, near a fist of thorns,
Where blowflys drank your blood.
Shabby mothers stared.
Your death opens the gates to the dark word.

Black Saturday

Cain Jude shaved me a Number One –
I hung the hair in the hawthorn.
We collected bogeys in a jam-jar to melt and mould into a brain!
Then rubbed our groins on the carpet
Till we got that 'gong' feeling *at Mister Men*.
Cainius Maximus gave me his Y-fronts, made toilet-tube telescopes,
Went on a reconnaissance for German soldiers in Luther’s Copse.
Then Cain Jude killed me with this name:
James Michael Adrian - his invisible friend –
Was a brigadier, a rock singer, and a Liverpool FC football player.
Cain left to play with JMA.
Threw Whitey from the window upside-down,
Threw Blackey in the waterfall.
Whirled till I fainted on the roof of the army den,
Watched the moon block out the sun
Like God’s good eye forever closing.

[Grouse Pen - we already know about.]

Things I Found in the Forest, April 1st -
A reddick’s nest, wind-wrecked, on a rotting leafbed;
Stole an egg
With crooked little fingers.

Things I Found in the Forest, April 2nd -
A dog-fox, snared by the neck by a pull-wire in the northeast corner
That took two days to die.

Things I Found in the Forest, April 3rd -
A young soldier with a gash in his neck, who tried to beg,
And, through the blood,
It sounded like, ‘Love me tender’.


The two introductory sentences in italics are grim nursery rhymes, the first from the UK, the second the US. Breech-strike is a nasty condition sheep get and diazinon is a chemical used in sheep-dip (I now know more about sheep husbandry than I care to). I imagine the sheep's 'winker' is her eye. The 'blue merle Border' is a sheepdog, a Border collie.

The phrases in asterisks I can't quite make out. In 'Mercy On Mallory', the word sounds like 'tripe' but it reads very oddly. In 'Black Saturday', the image of pre-pubescent sexual excitement while the Mister Men are on the TV would fit a setting in the mid-to-late 1970s but again I'm not convinced, the wording is a bit strange.

'Things I Found in the Forest' seems like a single poem in three sections. 'Reddick' is Dorset dialect for a robin.


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PostPosted: Tue Jul 11, 2017 5:07 pm 
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Probably worth mentioning for anyone that missed it, an exert from the interview was broadcast on an otherwise woeful Radio 4 program which is still available on iPlayer:


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PostPosted: Tue Jul 11, 2017 5:08 pm 
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(Just seen it feature on another forum, apologies!)


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PostPosted: Wed Jul 12, 2017 8:16 am 
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Thank you so much, there were too many verses I couldn't figure out


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PostPosted: Thu Jul 20, 2017 9:13 am 
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Re-reading the transcriptions, I think the 'golden fleece' in 'Maggoty' should have capital letters - it's perhaps a pub name. There's a real Golden Fleece in South Chard about 12 miles from Corscombe, but the one in the poem could be imaginary.


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PostPosted: Thu Jul 20, 2017 9:30 am 
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Thanks for these transcriptions. I must admit that some phrases were hard to understand since English is not my native language, therefore your annotations helped a lot. The vocabulary she uses in these poems seems to be much richer and more complex than in the pretty straightforward Hollow of the Hand. It makes me really interested in her next collection of poetry.


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