Nigel Pantling, "A Foreign Country"

Nigel Pantling served as an officer in the British Army of the Rhine during the Cold War and in Northern Ireland during "The Troubles," as private secretary to Home Office Ministers under the Thatcher Government, and as a merchant banker in the years of rampant mergers and acquisitions of the 1990s. For the 25 years since he has been a strategic adviser to company chief executives. Nigel lives in north London and Somerset. A Foreign Country is his fifth poetry collection. 

About A Foreign Country, by Nigel Pantling
A Foreign Country takes us to some strange places - the exotic, the imaginary and the rediscovered past - and each serves up a heady local brew, equal parts memory, invention, wit and menace. Here, North Korean tourists rub shoulders with Syrian adventurers, the newly dead with a City lothario, Popeye and Olive Oyl with Cold War warriors. Surprising and unsettling by turns, these poems are a whistle-stop journey through different times, countries and customs, enriched by deep personal experience.  

You can read more about A Foreign Country on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From A Foreign Country

Meeting the General

He’s waiting for me at a reinforced bunker,

a few miles west of Panmunjon.

His arm round my shoulder,

he leads me to the border viewpoint.

He sets out the geography and the history, 

adjusting my perspective along with my binoculars, 

and enlightens me on American imperialism.

We get on well.

Later, his gold tooth glints

when he smiles for the one permitted photograph.

He hopes that I will return soon 

to visit a unified country.

He shakes my hand for the second time,

lights another American cigarette, glints again.

Bosra 

I’m up in the gods, not literally, 

not with Bel or belligerent Baalshamin, 

or Astarte or Atargatis, givers of fertility, 

but theatrically, on the fifty-first tier 

of a semicircle of black basalt blocks. 

I’m sitting quite alone under the sun, 

without benefit of the cloth shading 

or misty spray of perfumed water 

that cooled second century patrons, 

so all I can manage is to stay still 

and watch tourists from a waiting bus 

walk purposefully on from the wings, 

and imagining themselves unseen 

hurtle through some Shaw or Wilde 

or mangle “all the world’s a stage”, 

and thanks to the acoustic skills of 

Roman architects I hear each word. 

Until the heat becomes too much 

and I make my way down to give 

my one-man rendering of Godot.