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    Clean and Well Lit
    Clean and Well Lit
    Clean and Well Lit
    Ebook110 pages34 minutes

    Clean and Well Lit

    By Tom Raworth

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    About this ebook

    Poetry. "For more than thirty years, Tom Raworth has been at the forefront of English language writing. With the fastest line in the west, Raworth's flickering, disconsolate, syntactically restless, lilting, often angry, almost balletic poems resist habitual thought at every break, rekindling animate social consciousness. There is no better introduction to Raworth than CLEAN & WELL LIT."—Charles Bernstein. Tom Raworth was born and grew up in London. During the 1970s he traveled and worked in the United states and Mexico, returning to England in 1977 to be Resident Poet at King's College, Cambridge, in which city he lived for many years. Since 1966 he has published more than 40 books and pamphlets of poetry, prose and translations, in several countries. His graphic work has been shown in France, Italy, and the United States, and he has collaborated and performed with musicians (Steve Lacy, Joëlle Léandre, Steve Nelson-Raney, Esther Roth, Nino Locatelli), painters (Giovanni D'Agostino, Micaëla Henich), and other poets (Franco Beltrametti, Corrado Costa, Dario Villa). In 1991 he was invited to teach at the University of Cape Town: the first European writer to visit there for thirty years. Raworth now lives in Brighton, Sussex. 
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRoof Books
    Release dateJan 1, 1996
    ISBN9780937804643
    Clean and Well Lit
    Author

    Tom Raworth

    John F. Deane was born on Achill Island in 1943. He founded Poetry Ireland – the National Poetry Society – and The Poetry Ireland Review in 1978, and is the founder of The Dedalus Press, of which he was editor from 1985 until 2006. In 2008 he was visiting scholar in the Burns Library of Boston College. John F. Deane’s poetry has been translated and published in France, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania, Italy, Slovakia, Sweden and other countries. His poems in Italian won the 2002 Premio Internazionale di Poesia Città di Marineo. His fiction has been published by Blackstaff Press in Belfast; his most recent novel Where No Storms Come was published by Blackstaff in 2011. He is the recipient of the O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry and the Marten Toonder Award for Literature. John F. Deane is a member of Aosdána, the body established by the Arts Council to honour artists ‘whose work has made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland’. His poetry has been shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2007 he was made Chevalier en l’ordre des arts et des lettres by the French government. In October 2011 Deane was awarded the Serbian prize the Golden Key of Smederevo, as well as the Laudomia Bonanni prize from L’Aquila, Italy.

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      Book preview

      Clean and Well Lit - Tom Raworth

      SUDDEN

      OUT OF THE PICTURE

      the obsolete ammunition depot

      unmissed and unreported

      put it in categories

      still glistened with dampness

      suits seemed to be identical

      through the window behind him

      a battered cardboard box

      won somewhere gambling

      dim bell in his memory

      was making a duplicate

      to see if that needed explanation

      sharply, and then, more gently

      the door opened

      three thousand miles east of home

      we avoid old bones

      conscious that their territory

      enlarges the room

      by removing a partition

      in the mirror

      disharmony seeped out

      surrounded by a strange culture

      message and hung up

      its heavy coating of dust

      whispering just loud enough

      to create a disturbance

      finding words for sorrow

      still locked in combat

      in the expanding silence

      ties with wild designs

      printed on them suited me

      to be places, camouflaged

      against the cult of personality

      panning over rough walls

      overshadowed modifications

      into missing construction

      the remote camera

      revealed a huge space

      a kind of coma

      the last gasp of civil protest

      he could not sleep, above

      starless and dark

      the cloudy sky

      was relieved only

      by electric blue traces

      shivering with more than cold

      a tumbled slope of stones

      flexed and straightened

      warping space

      into a dozen planes

      two total strangers

      retreated in panic

      without letting it appear

      the instrument of a secret

      attached to this procedure

      by a sudden doubt

      pretending he was a robot

      respectable looking

      legs hot and itchy

      faces indistinct behind windows

      look from all angles

      scornfully as

      wandering among dogs

      he is politely relieved of his wallet

      the corner of his mouth

      under a white moustache

      pried off

      with an effective tool

      giving her the illusion

      of a small, dimly lit

      parking lot

      set well back from the road

      looking at a calendar

      he realised the image of a falling body

      came from film

      a slightly altered version

      connected to these bombings

      the smell of wood burning

      should be in a museum

      thought probably was

      displayed on costumed models

      back in the car then

      slumped down in the seat

      accompanied only by printed legends

      his thoughts elsewhere

      with the thousands of dead

      each wrapped in newspaper

      he wasn’t intending to dig up more

      someone high on the power ladder

      meant nothing else would matter

      before the call came

      rain streaked the glass

      preventing identification

      between drizzle and mist

      through a labyrinth of corridors

      good feeling left

      closing the door

      fires that lined both sides

      collapsed in sparks

      riffled in the gusty breeze

      remembered from previous days

      nothing unusual on the street

      not a word in the papers

      nobody was interested

      it didn’t happen

      in the taxi heading back

      to avoid hysterical screaming

      there was not one question

      felt through thin black leather

      after stretching his muscles

      towards that cone of white light

      with little jerky movements

      spreading a cool odour

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