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The Victims of Lightning
By Bill Manhire
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Building on previous themes and introducingsome newtechniques, this collection reveals a respected poet at the height of his powers. Here are finely crafted lyrics, found poems, a bracket of songs, and complex emotions—all temperedby the use of humor.
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Book preview
The Victims of Lightning - Bill Manhire
The Victims of Lightning
Bill Manhire
i.m. Heather McKenzie
Contents
I
The Cave
The Victims of Lightning
Velvet
My Girl
Yadasi Clips
The School
Evening
A Lullaby
Song with a Chorus
1950s
Talking to the Moon
II
Frolic
Quebec
The Small Top
Nuptials
A Round
The Secret Wife
Little Elegy
A Married Man’s Story
The Little Match Girl
Bring Me My Matrix Bands!
III
Garden Gate
Pacific Raft
Buddhist Rain
Rarotonga Sunset
Crime Scene
Warehouse Curtains
Bad Man
Making Baby Float
Across the Water
IV
The Best Burns Statue
Captain Scott
Poem Beginning with a Line by Ralph Hotere
The Peryer Arms
The Things I Did
Visiting Europe
Herschel at the Cape
Toast
Pussy
The Lid Slides Back
V
The Carpe Diem Poem
The Workshop
Saying Goodbye to My Mother
The Black Road
The Wrong Crowd
Edit Suite
Peter Pan
My Childhood in Ireland
The Sick Son
The Ruin
The Oral Tradition
After Class
Acknowledgements
Notes
I
The Cave
We found bones at the back of the cave.
I wanted to walk towards you,
to part your hair where I think the grey starts,
but I am not the man who marches,
I am the man who writes with a twig.
Under the bones, there are always more bones,
and always above them the puzzled heart
so that we hover like hunters above confusing earth,
for the quarry has gone in many directions,
and after a while we both stop digging.
Creatures around us are frightened now.
They watch how we stand and face away.
They see we have thoughts, that we are big.
Creatures around us are frightened.
Always these words come out of our heads.
The Victims of Lightning
A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.
Randall Jarrell
Often they are naked; clothing is scattered
across a field; or trousers and shirt
appear in some nearby village –
a little tattered, waiting to be folded.
Sometimes with women the chemise is scorched,
yet – strange – the dress and petticoats are spared.
As in war, men are in extremest danger.
‘His shoes remain on his feet!’ cries the wife,
who then begins to weep; and yes, there are boots
at the end of the man’s pale body. Height
is always there at the heart of peril:
a shepherd with staff moving among his sheep,
the tall fisherman lifting his rod, those boys
who huddle beneath a tree …
all in their way supply attraction. Even a raised umbrella,
black in the sky, means danger.
And lightning will boast about its work.
It likes to leave an illustration.
On one man’s trunk,
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