I have just bought and read 'The Floating Man' by Katharine Towers (Picador Poetry). I love poetry and the title of this one fascinated me. It is a first collection of only 39 pages, and many of the poems are short - but all are well worth the read.
Longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2010.
An original collection, subtle yet powerful..
The Floating Man
by Katharine Towers
Appropriately for a book haunted by music, Katharine Towers' poems exhibit an almost pianistic sense of timing, touch and tone. In The Floating Man , Towers writes about weight and weightlessness, presence and absence, the body in space, and our oblique relationship with the natural world, always with a wonderful sense of compositional balance; she is expert at registering the huge emotional shifts effected by the smallest things, whether the scent of apples, the slant of the light, or the grace-notes of memory. Music expresses the things we cannot say, but Towers recruits its power to bring the beyond-words into the realm of speech. The result is a debut of great originality and subtlety.
Katharine Towers was born in London in 1961 and read Modern Languages at St. Hilda's College, Oxford. She has an MA in Writing from Newcastle University. Her pamphlet 'Slow Time' was published by Mews Press in 2005 and her poems have appeared in publications including Mslexia and The North. She lives in the Peak District with her husband and two daughters.
Three poems from Katharine Towers's debut collection, longlisted for the Guardian first book award 2010
In The Oak Woods
I waited to hear
the owl's late evening
call to prayer.
I lay down
under old-fashioned oaks,
quiet for fear the owls might startle
and fly from their tooms.
I waited to hear
the owl's late evening
call to prayer.
and dreamed of moonshine
and moths, the sidelong
sidestepping fox who turned
to ask why I stayed.
I waited to hear
the owl's late evening
call to prayer.
and lay all night
in old-fashioned woods
as the owls' pale faces
turned to ash in their rooms.
Pianola
This is the tune it has known all along
but kept in its puppeteers' chest of velvet and string.
The notes of Chopin's Ballade march out
as if years of practice have put them
beyond the reach of mistake or expression.
The keys dip and lift, efficient as clocks,
and we notice the piano's reluctance to tremble or weep
as the signature dims into minor. When the adagio comes
there's no sigh, no blissful easing of fingers,
only a rickety pause that wants to be over.
With the last chord, the piano relaxes and shudders,
as if it has said what it meant, and none of it mattered.
Planting Tulips
They might have thought I was praying
knelt so long on the path; and truly
my hands were glad to be down in the dead earth.
Today a man was lifted from our bog.
He came out dark, shining like a length of flexed rope
and opened his inside-out eyes to the sky.
I would have said to leave him be
under the mosses and ling in the bog's orange juices,
not to take him from his own people.
I can almost forget which are my fingers
and which are worms trickling between them.
Perhaps I look like a beast run to ground,
or someone weeping. In spring
these tulips will come up black, stately.
Read The Guardian review of this book by Ben Wilkinson
I hope you found this interesting.....
Warmest Wishes
Katie
