Unaccompanied
Desmond Graham’s third publication from the Villa Vic Press, Newcastle, available in Limited and Special Editions, ‘Unaccompanied’, brings together poems on kindred spirits, other writers, acquaintances and friends whose presence has nourished his work. These little tales of the unexpected reveal how the imagination finds creative impetus from absence as much as presence, from coincidence as much as good fortune, and from its ability to adapt creatively, the vagaries of chance. The great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, Rainer Maria Rilke, Geoffrey Hill and Tony Harrison; the invisible yet famous editor Catharine Carver; Osip Mandelstam and Walter Benjamin all are given roles, however fleeting, but never silent.
Launched in Germany in 2014, poems from the collection are also available in Polish translation in Graham’s ‘Nowe wierze’ (Gdańsk 2014). The Villa Vic publication is available now and will be launched in the UK in 2015.
There are those minds
which have a beauty of movement
a fascination of choice
of direction –
they are not seductive
they do not tempt us to fall
for them – they are not like
someone whose every word
and gesture we would catch and follow
as a child in infatuation –
it is not a charm or even a charisma
though it could be closer to an angelic form
of that – it is certainly not like
the known and unknown scents
which through memory mostly
captivate us – and not like
a person always completing
our wishes by settling beside us
without even talking
these minds – Montaigne has it
and Benjamin and in music
it is perhaps most there in Haydn –
you will know
your own examples –
these minds
in the nature of themselves
and so very different
have a movement
not as a clock has movement
but a creature –
a movement you find
new and familiar
like being at home
not your real being at home
but what ‘being at home’
would be like
if you found it
it is like finding
even without working anything out
that you have been moving with them
as a fish would know
from the first time
it is in a shoal –
a bird
in a flock
a little flock perhaps
like a goldfinch
with its flutter and
looping glide
a few others beside it –
as of course in a play
of Shakespeare’s well done
we may live like a starling
in a long twilight
swirling and changing in shapes
and undefined patterns right
through the story –
but this can be no more
or less than a mouse
thinking it is alone
coming out and finding
another mouse there too –
creatures of a kind –
growing up elephant
to find you are elephant
growing up person
to find you are person
in the flow of syntax
the word in its place
the twist and surprise and endless pleasing
of moving through the sentence
the whole page
the chapter the book
and knowing
without so much as a pause or question
we too are here right now
in our own time
and welcome
Recording: from Unaccompanied
