The new collection is now available, please scroll down to buy it directly from The Rialto.
The latest in the series of Rialto Bridge Pamphlets, designed to cross the gap between magazine and book publication for new writers or, for established writers, that between collections. Twenty-one poems by a master craftsman.
Peter Sansom has made ‘a sort of living’ from poetry for over twenty years. His Carcanet books are ‘witty, realistic and imaginative’ – Observer, winning awards and a loyal readership, while his Writing Poems, Bloodaxe 1994, is still said to change writing lives.
Peter Sansom has been Fellow in Poetry at both Leeds and Manchester Universities, and company poet for M&S and the Prudential. He is a director with Ann Sansom of The Poetry Business in Sheffield, where they edit The North magazine and Smith/Doorstop Books.
THE NIGHT IS YOUNG
I have drunk
a highland malt that took my head off
to show willing at two in the morning,
the odd glass of red with a meal for my heart
and a pint of shandy at the quiz,
but not
let my hair down sick as a dog
hair of the dog, not drunk drunk,
not for years, and even then, hormones
everywhere, never lost it completely
brought back a curry in a taxi
on a girlfriend, not said
what I didn’t know I meant it was
the drink talking
not Friday night drunk or office party
drunk in charge of a photocopier
let’s have some fun
as Jane Austen said
on this reckless planet.
God help me to get to this age
and never what a great night that was
if only I could remember it
completely and utterly
drunk? Me? Not ever,
not yet.
Paperback 32 Pages Price: £5.50
ISBN: 978-0-955127-34-2
This beautiful and delicious new pamphlet (£5.50) is available directly from The Rialto.
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August 2009
Here’s something for the long Bank Holiday weekend. This poem by William Morris, (from his Poems By The Way, New Edition 1910, First Published 1891), was going to be the page one poem for the new edition of The Rialto, No. 67, out now. But it was a bit too long to fit comfortably onto the page.
There’s clearly something important going on in this poem but it’s a bit circumlocutory in its path. Readers are invited to translate it into Twenty-First Century idiom, and into as few lines as possible. Sonnet length, perhaps?
This is not a competition, but the best (in the editor’s opinion) versions, or at least one of them, will be published in this blog – may even be published in the magazine. Please send your versions by post, and mark the envelope Summer Thunder.
THUNDER IN THE GARDEN
When the boughs of the garden hang heavy with rain
And the blackbird reneweth his song,
And the thunder departing yet rolleth again,
I remember the ending of wrong.
When the day that was dusk while his death was aloof
Is ending wide-gleaming and strange
For the clearness of all things beneath the world’s roof,
I call back the wild chance and change.
For once we twain sat through the hot afternoon
While the rain held aloof for awhile,
Till she, the soft-clad, for the glory of June
Changed all with the change of her smile.
For her smile was of longing, no longer of glee,
And her fingers, entwined with my own,
With caresses unquiet sought kindness of me
For the gift that I never had known.
Then down rushed the rain, and the voice of the thunder
Smote dumb all the sound of the street,
And I to myself was grown nought but a wonder,
As she leaned down my kisses to meet.
That she craved for my lips that had craved her so often,
And the hand that had trembled to touch,
That the tears filled her eyes I had hoped not to soften
In this world was a marvel too much.
It was dusk ’mid the thunder, dusk e’en as the night,
When first brake out our love like the storm,
But no night-hour was it and back came the light
While our hands with each other were warm.
And her smile killed with kisses, came back as at first
As she rose up and led me along,
And out to the garden, where nought was athirst,
And the blackbird renewing his song.
Earth’s fragrance went with her, as in the wet grass,
Her feet little hidden were set;
She bent down her head,’neath the roses to pass,
And her arm with the lily was wet.
In the garden we wandered while the day waned apace
And the thunder was dying aloof;
Till the moon o’er the minster-wall lifted his face,
And grey gleamed out the lead of the roof.
Then we turned from the blossoms, and cold were they grown:
In the trees the wind westering moved;
Till over the threshold back fluttered her gown,
And in the dark house I was loved.
