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    Sound Houses
    Sound Houses
    Sound Houses
    Ebook78 pages1 hour

    Sound Houses

    By Will Eaves

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Well-loved authors and books appear suddenly; hair-raising anecdotes and football matches become occasions for elegiac comedy; and music and domestic ritual raise ghosts. This emotionally intense poetry collection explores several continents, moods, and stages of lifeincluding the common experiences of growing up, growing older, losing a parent, being in love, and enjoying the natural world. Both formal and informal, funny and sad, these lyrical poems seek out a strangeness in the everyday.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCarcanet Press Ltd.
    Release dateOct 1, 2011
    ISBN9781847779113
    Sound Houses
    Author

    Will Eaves

    Will Eaves was born in Bath in 1967. He is the author of two other novels, The Oversight (2001) and Nothing To Be Afraid Of (2005), and a collection of poems, Sound Houses (2011). For many years he was the arts editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He now teaches at the University of Warwick.

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      Book preview

      Sound Houses - Will Eaves

      Copyright

      I

      Evening Lesson

      Filling the slant, suburban lawn

      A cybernaut with ducts for arms

      Ponders before the sun goes down

      If it will ever come to life.

      The afternoon departed’s been

      Immoderately hot, the pets’

      Tails curled like clefs, reptilian

      On a bituminous pavement.

      A kid, playing, knows for a fact

      However long he waits he won’t

      Surprise the robot in the act

      Of scooping up the puddled cat

      Because the proof of what things are

      When we’re too busy not looking’s

      Obviously non-ocular.

      His hands trip over rising scales.

      He makes a sound the instrument

      Alone cannot, and everything

      In this setting is strangely lent

      Purpose by dappled accident:

      The chance note of definite shade

      Beneath a Monkey Puzzle’s knots,

      The cat full-stretch and music spread

      Across stillness to make it stop.

      Small Hours

      Temperature, night.

      An air current, the

      bunting they drag

      across the forecast,

      hides in an oak.

      Up and down the street

      a spectral army gathers

      taking a leaf count.

      Late cyclists skitter

      through phantom ranks.

      The sky is blown away.

      I feel comforted.

      Minutely lost to me

      in the small hours,

      your smile breaks.

      Demonstration Day

      Fifteen and short, I strode the cobbles

      of Carnaby Street in August ’83, and bought

      a lemon-yellow tie there to the tune of ‘ABC’,

      music no longer of its time but new to me,

      as was the sleazy caff where I had lunch

      (a peanut-butter, cheese and celery sandwich)

      before tea and a doze, posing in Green Park,

      stretched out like I came there every day to be

      one of the crowd and nobody’s fool. Really.

      The hours inched by. I thought they’d fly

      if I raced through the shops and galleries until,

      hobbled by growing pains, blinded by genius art,

      begged by a battery of nuns not to proliferate,

      I escalated Underground and out of sight. But

      I thought wrong: you cannot walk away from it,

      refine the wait, hear bones stretch, set, say why

      to lemon-yellow youth the style is not original. I

      surfaced somewhere on the Northern Line with trees

      and spent the weekend there. The details I forget,

      like who spoke first, or first realised we’d met.

      English

      Ramadan means fewer taxis in the rain

      so I run to the old Custard Factory

      where no one knows how I knew you

      and I explain in tribute that I hardly did:

      for two years you read Persuasion aloud,

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