David Morley, "Passion"

 

David Morley, photo by Graeme Oxby

David Morley’s last book FURY was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. David won the Ted Hughes Award for The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems. His other books from Carcanet Press include The Magic of What’s There, The Gypsy and the Poet, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Enchantment and The Invisible Kings, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and TLS Book of the Year. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at Warwick University and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature. 

About Passion, by David Morley 
Drawing on Romany language, storytelling and the speech of birds, award-winning poet David Morley offers a provocative and passionate invitation to reflect afresh on the ways in which the lives, stories and fate of humans – and the more than human – are twinned and entwined. In poems that crackle with verbal energy, he invokes a world where God is Salieri to Nature’s Mozart, in which hummingbirds hover like actors ‘in a theatre of flowers,’ pipistrelles become piccolos, swans swerve comets, and a Zyzzyx wasp is ‘a zugzwang of six legs and letters.’ There are exuberant celebrations of Romany language in the style of Edward Thomas; of how a Yellowhammer inspired Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; of the world-shaping discoveries of women scientists; and an autobiographical sequence, which roots this poet’s authority and reflects on how power shapes what may be said in public.

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

From Passion

Dialect

Evening froze to a night nailed with stars.
I watched a birdbox fill with flying words
fleeing the chill by bundling in on each other.

I took the box from its hook and prised its lid
and shook the lives of language out of it
festooning my table with wings and feathers,
writhing, fluttering, like a bird made of birds:

Bumbarrel, Hedge Mumruffin, Poke Pudding, 
Huggen-Muffin, Juffit, Jack-in-a-Bottle, 
Feather Poke, Hedge Jug, Prinpriddle,
Ragamuffin, Billy-featherpoke, Puddneypoke,
Bellringer, Nimble Tailor, French Pie, 
Long Pod, Bush Oven, and Miller’s Thumb.

I tucked them in this box before they woke.

We Make Manx Shearwaters Vomit Bottlecaps

‘Here is what a stomach full of plastic
looks like’, says the bird reserve warden. 
‘You can see it stretched so much that the shapes 
of plastic are visible. When I say we make 
shearwaters vomit bottle caps I’m not exaggerating.’ 
He twists the dead Manxie on its back, 
snipping the sac open. His forceps fossick 
into the dissected bird. Rubbish piles up 
by the body. I try to focus on the wing feathers.

Eye-bright and gliding over wave crests
the shearwater rides on updraught and jetstream. 
A placid sea is her unploughed field.
The bird bends on the blade of storm to turn 
the seabed over, drive deep swells to the surface.
The wind swings north, the moon’s gravity 
tilts the sea-surge. For phytoplankton this
is everything life needs, and they flicker 
and breed in that frenzy of crosscurrents
the fish following the glut of plankton
dumped on the surface like data 
from the dark. The shearwater’s compass 
stills, she stabs straight into the undertow 
where her fish-prey spiral in their bait-ball
like an underwater galaxy, a million stars 
spawning in a nebula of bioluminescence.

The warden stares up at me: ‘Don’t look away.’
  
This is what a poem full of plastic looks like.

David Morley, "FURY"

David Morley, photo © Graeme Oxby

David Morley was trained as an ecologist. He won the Ted Hughes Award for The Invisible Gift: Selected Poems. His books from Carcanet include The Magic of What’s There, The Gypsy and the Poet, Enchantment and The Invisible Kings. David wrote the bestselling The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing and teaches at Warwick University. He pioneered podcasting in Creative Writing through his Slow Poetry and Writing Challenges spoken word projects. His book Phoenix New Writing was an anthology of Coventry poetry and won the Raymond Williams Prize. His latest book FURY was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the Forward prize for Best Collection. David is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature. He is a professor of writing at Warwick University and Monash University.

 About FURY

FURY sees the Ted Hughes Award winner David Morley once more seeking to give imaginative voice to the natural world and to those silenced or overlooked in modern society, ranging from the Romany communities of past and present Britain, to Tyson Fury and Towfiq Bihani, one of the forgotten inmates of the Guantanamo bay detention centre. In poems that bristle with linguistic energy and that celebrate poetry's power to give arresting voice to the unspoken and the untold, in ourselves and our societies, FURY is David Morley's most powerfully political work. It is a passionate testament to poetry’s capacity to speak to, and for, us and our place in the world - its power to be an outreached hand, like the 'trembling hands' of the magician in 'The Thrown Voice' or the 'living hand' of the poets celebrated in 'Translations of a Stammerer.'

You can read a sample poem from the collection below. You can see more details about FURY on the publisher's website here.

From FURY

Romany Wounds Me

          after George Seferis’s ‘In the Manner of G.S.’
          for Damian Le Bas

Wherever I travel, Romany wounds me.
As I hoved into the horse fair at Stow-on-the-Wold 
between Cotswold chintz shops and the roving road
HGVs hunkered after our wagons on the Fosse Way
cursing us with airbrakes and grunting gearshifts.
At Kenilworth fair, with its tailbacks to Longbridge roundabout,
vardos bottle-necked behind ponies from Pershore, 
rocks rammed on verges of all the villages between
by Neighbourhood Watches with the policeman’s nod.
At Dereham fair I crow-barred the stern stones from the wayside
and flattened fat molehills under my 4 x 4
and snored under the stars of headlights flying across the bypass
and slung the crook of my kettle above an illegal blaze.
At Gressenhall, Swaffham, and Peterborough
the pubs were barred to me.
What do the Gentiles want, these polite people 
who curse us we’re Romanian or worse than? 
A copper pulls us over and barks for passports.
‘Mate, I come from Rotherham,’ laughs one Gypsy,
‘though it’s foreign country round these parts.’
And as we sleep Europe drifts away across the sea.
The cling-net of England closes. Our caravans are ships
with their engines flooded. Our lives are drowning. 
Strange people, the English. They say, ‘this land is ours’
but they don’t rove beyond their commutes or school runs.
Imagine the coppers rocking up at their caravan sites!
Meanwhile, England keeps on travelling, always travelling backwards.
In my dream, our flotilla of caravans sets sail from Dover’s chalk shore
as though the little boats of Dunkirk were our own Gypsy vardos,
as though we were machine-gunned by our own spitfires,
and those brothers on the beach were our own strafed kin,
which we were, when we were borderless and one.
Between the horse fairs of Horsmonden and Appleby 
at all the stopping places when I wake, and in every face I see,
wherever I travel, Romany wounds me.

Stow-on-the-Wold, Kenilworth, Dereham, Horsmonden and Appleby are traditional Traveller horse fairs.

© David Morley, Carcanet Press