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round 1, poll 230
click for better quality & to see the full image. sometimes they get cut off weirdly!
which cover do you like best?
Regaining Unconsciousness: Poems by Harryette Mullen
Rupert Brooke: Selected Poems by Rupert Brooke
*with introduction by Jon Stallworthy and illustrations by Ed Kluz
remember, you're voting for the cover, not the author or the book!
Jon Stallworthy, The Poet as Archaeologist: W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney
She glides with a stone jar high on her head and not a ripple in her tread. - Watching her cross erect stones, garbage, excrement, and crumbs of glass in the Karachi slums, I, with my stoop, reflect they stand most straight who learn to walk beneath a weight.
from “Sindhi Woman” by Jon Stallworthy, full poem here: http://academicsstuff.blogspot.com/2013/07/sindhi-woman-jon-stallworthy_4758.html
A poem by Jon Stallworthy
The Almond Tree
I
All the way to the hospital The lights were green as peppermints. Trees of black iron broke into leaf ahead of me, as if I were the lucky prince in an enchanted wood summoning summer with my whistle, banishing winter with a nod.
Swung by the road from bend to bend, I was aware that blood was running down through the delta of my wrist and under arches of bright bone. Centuries, continents it had crossed; from an undisclosed beginning spiralling to an unmapped end.
II
Crossing (at sixty) Magdalen Bridge Let it be a son, a son, said the man in the driving mirror, Let it be a son. The tower held up its hand: the college bells shook their blessings on his head.
III
I parked in an almond's shadow blossom, for the tree was waving, waving at me upstairs with a child's hands.
IV
Up the spinal stair and at the top along a bone-white corridor the blood tide swung me swung me to a room whose walls shuddered with the shuddering womb. Under the sheet wave after wave, wave after wave beat on the bone coast, bringing ashore - whom? New- minted, my bright farthing! Coined by our love, stamped With our images, how you Enrich us! Both you make one. Welcome to your white sheet, my best poem.
V
At seven-thirty the visitors' bell scissored the calm of the corridors. The doctor walked with to the slicing doors. His hand is upon my arm, his voice - I have to tell you - set another bell beating in my head: your son is a mongol the doctor said.
VI
How easily the word went in - clean as a bullet leaving no mark on the skin, stopping the heart within it.
This was my first death. The 'I ' ascending on a slow Last thermal breath studied the man below
as a pilot treading air might the buckled shell of his plane - boot, glove and helmet feeling no pain
from the snapped wires' radiant ends. Looking down from a thousand feet I held four walls in the lens of an eye; wall, window, the street
a torrent of windscreens, my own car under its almond tree, and the almond waving me down. I wrestled against gravity,
but light was melting and the gulf cracked open. Unfamiliar the body of my late self I carried to the car.
VII
The hospital - its heavy freight lashed down ship-shape ward over ward - steamed into night with some on board soon to be lost if the desperate
charts were known. Others would come altered to land or find the land altered. At their voyage's end some would be added to, some
diminished. In a numbered cot my son sailed from me; never to come ashore into my kingdom speaking my language. Better not
look that way. The almond tree was beautiful in labour. Blood- dark, quickening, bud after bud split, flower after flower shook free.
On the darkening wind a pale face floated. Out of reach. Only when the buds, all the buds were broken would the tree be in full sail.
In labour the tree was becoming itself. I, too, rooted in earth and ringed by darkness, from the death of myself saw myself blossoming,
wrenched from the caul of my thirty years' growing, fathered by my son, unkindly in a kind season by love shattered and set free.
Jon Stallworthy
1935-2014
Sindhi Woman
Barefoot through the bazaar, and with the same undulant grace as the cloth blown back from her face, she glides with a stone jar high on her head and not a ripple in her tread. Watching her cross erect stones, garbage, excrement, and crumbs of glass in the Karachi slums, I, with my stoop, reflect they stand most straight who learn to walk beneath a weight.
Jon Stallworthy
(Source: http://mckinleypugh.blogspot.com/)
Burning the Stubble - Jon Stallworthy
Another harvest gathered in Worse than the last; only a bin of rotten grain for all our trouble. But there is a time for the plough, a time for harvesting, and now a time for burning the stubble.
Flames snap at the wind, and it etches the eye with a bitter mirage of summer. Returning I looked for the dip in the ground, the nest, the unfurled poppy; found nothing but stubble burning
and charred ground hardening towards frost. Fire before ice; and the ground must be ploughed after burning the stubble, the ground must be broken again. There can be no new grain without, first, burning the stubble.
Sindhi Woman Barefoot through the bazaar, and with the same undulant grace as the cloth blown back from her face, she glides with a stone jar high on her head and not a ripple in her tread. Watching her cross erect stones, garbage, excrement, and crumbs of glass in the Karachi slums, I, with my stoop, reflect they stand most striaght who learn to walk beneath a weight.
Jon Stallworthy
