Voluntary Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Adam Thorpe

  Dedication

  Title page

  Impression

  Sutton Hoo

  Home Videos

  Sighting

  Fuel

  Power

  Spring Class

  Elsewhere

  Disaster

  Niagara

  Jäääär

  Badger

  Mythos

  In the Park Again

  Writer

  Holbein

  Underground

  Second Homers

  Via

  Interior with a Young Man Reading

  Alcalá

  Vessel

  Summing Up

  Clearing Your Study

  Extreme Unction

  Unfinished

  Remembering my Father

  Full Moon in Summer

  Telling You About Kribi

  The Gift

  Posy

  Flaubert’s Drafts

  Neighbour

  Dry Stone Walling

  Subtraction

  In York Minster

  The Swimming Pool

  Half Century

  On a Photo of a Wainwright’s Shop

  Reprieve

  In Bed

  Panic

  Checking Blood Pressure

  Marginalia

  In Court

  Punctured

  Roads Themselves Are Silent

  Voluntary

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  From an abandoned rowing boat in Estonia full of wild flowers to a swimming pool in the Congo full of drowned insects, Adam Thorpe’s new collection takes us on a wide-ranging journey through states of gain and loss, alienation and belonging. In the title poem, the poet disturbs a flock of geese by his mere presence, and one goose takes the wrong direction, away from the flock, as a ‘voluntary exile’. A bid for freedom, or a mistake?

  These poems explore our chances, record our traces – in the marks on skin, home movies, stone walls, the pressure of our blood, or the clearing of a dying father’s study: ‘foraging backwards’ until something is revealed, however tentative. As always in Thorpe’s work, history’s violence lurks in the margins: in the silent oppression of Roman roads, a polluting pipeline in Africa or the bombing of the Alcala train, he takes the gauge of our wider compulsions, of all that decides things for us. Against this he sets what, through the other meaning of ‘voluntary’, suggests chance’s extempore music: the gleeful play of a sea-otter, the extraordinary gift of a passing gull to his small daughter, or poetry itself.

  Adam Thorpe is now celebrated as a novelist, but he began as a poet. Voluntary, his sixth collection, is a timely reminder of the elegance, skill and remarkable range of this most gifted English writer.

  About the Author

  Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956. His first novel, Ulverton, was published in 1992, and he has written nine others – most recently Flight – and two collections of stories. His new translation of Madame Bovary has just been published by Vintage. He lives in France with his wife and family.

  ALSO BY ADAM THORPE

  FICTION

  Ulverton

  Still

  Pieces of Light

  Shifts

  Nineteen Twenty-One

  No Telling

  The Rules of Perspective

  Is This The Way You Said?

  Between Each Breath

  The Standing Pool

  Hodd

  POETRY

  Mornings in the Baltic

  Meeting Montaigne

  From the Neanderthal

  Nine Lessons from the Dark

  Birds with a Broken Wing

  TRANSLATION

  Madame Bovary

  in memory of John Fairfax

  VOLUNTARY

  Adam Thorpe

  IMPRESSION

  The pawprint, bedded on the Roman tile

  our late neighbour bequeathed us,

  is deep enough, even on a roof’s pitch,

  to pool rain as petals do

  or to take a cast from, revive

  the rough pads that time would have tossed away

  if the dog had never trotted across

  those flat, glistening squares of clay

  laid to dry on the sun-bright turf

  at the back of the works …

  or hopped rather, for the paw’s impress

  is unaccompanied, its claw-dots risen

  at the sides like fork pricks in dough.

  I like the back of the tegula, too, those arrested

  shadows of grass and grit: the earth’s muddle

  just as it was, two thousand years ago –

  the shabby mongrel, lamish, yelled at;

  the jobsworth muttering as he crouches down,

  It’ll still keep the rain off. It’ll do.

  SUTTON HOO

  The Overflow Car Park’s empty,

  the light a lustrous grey on birch.

  The local farmer’s cut his turf

  right to the ligeance, so it’s just this corner,

  discreetly fenced in wire. A spellbound

  darkness of firs at the field’s edge.

  Several shaggy swells: which one?

  With history’s mood-swings it’s hard

  to tell. There’s gold for some, though;

  while my sense of nation’s less a buried crown

  than a stain of post-hole, or this viewing

  rostrum I try to work things out from.

  HOME VIDEOS

  We run them all through in a glut

  on the veteran machine, wincing and laughing

  at what never resembles who we think we are

  or thought we were, for everything is chafing

  not to remain, not to get caught in the rut

  we’d quite like to stay in, now we are here.

  And everyone is still alive;

  it’s all a lie, death is. The shock of the young,

  although we did not feel young then. Our wonder

  that the boys could ever not have been strong

  men accompanies our surprise at their five-

  year-old sister sticking her tongue out, stealing their thunder

  over ten years off from where we are,

  like a nearby star. Explorers of the Amazon

  in a garden we hardly recognise (their cabane

  of sticks and fruit crates long in oblivion),

  these children were definitely ours, turn and stare

  and make faces, as if we’re the ones that should run

  away in pretend fright,

  seeing how fast the passing birthdays go,

  so resembling each other – the off-camera burst

  at a joke that has vanished forever, the slow

  lighting of the candles that refuse to light,

  the pinned donkey’s tail in focus at last.

  It keeps the detail, unlike

  memory. Whole swathes obliterated in between

  cannot be loaded and screened, we know. This

  is the only stake that’s held, and time is mean,

  and it always stops mid-show, like a lightning strike

  followed by a blizzard – and this triumphant hiss.

  SIGHTING

  Of course we were always meant

  to watch its slicked-down head

  appear and reappear in the Sound’s

  rocky inlet beyond the lane’s

  verge at dusk; but whether

  it feeds or plays or is simply

  luxuriating in the violet

  gloom and glitter of the sea


  after its den’s blind room

  we have no idea, knowing

  next to nothing about any creature.

  It vanishes only to be

  repeatedly spotted – allotted

  half-an-hour of our lives

  before the excitement palls

  and the binoculars are left

  on the sill, no longer fought for. What

  doesn’t, in the end, become familiar

  all round, however strange or fine?

  I wish that sea-otter’s amazement was mine.

  FUEL

  She has to store five tons

  to see through winter. I offer

  her a hand, but she waves her own.

  She’s carrying just a few a day

  from where they were delivered

  to the shed: twenty yards. It’s early May.

  That’s a lot of holm-oak

  (heavy, slow to combust). She’s seventy-odd.

  It keeps her young, she jokes.

  The next time we go past,

  cep-hunting in November, there’s

  no dog, no greeting, just

  a sheer cliff of logs in the shed

  and a few scattered on the grass.

  She never used a wheelbarrow, I said.

  Two years on and the stack’s

  still there, along with the dropped

  ones, now furred with moss, and black.

  Millennia ago they’d have made

  a pyre against the greater cold

  or carried the lot to her tomb’s shade

  for time to consume.

  Sufficient for the life after.

  Or enough to resume:

  this was the pith

  of her, always ahead of the first frost.

  This was her faith.

  POWER

  The worst done for the best reasons,

  and vice-versa: they’ll stick out

  a mile, bigger than your standard pylon,

  the north coast’s sea-swell

  wired to Edinburgh’s glare

  down glen after glen, looping over braes.

  It’s an ailment, someone said,

  in a different context: this need

  for power. A necessary

  shot in the arm, says Scottish Cabinet:

  yes, like the silken skin of that girl

  punctured by needles to the wrist,

  catching her blood on a terry towel.

  SPRING CLASS

  My students gaze soporifically as I fillet Plath,

  intent on enthusing – like a star chef courting

  the suspicion that an inch below the froth

  he can barely fry an egg: un ignare, a fraud.

  The cobbled court of the old Vauban fort

  turns southerly with sunlight, enough to permeate

  a long skirt. Inside it’s that winter in Fitzroy Road,

  her avalanche of poems through inadequate heating

  and the long freeze of ’63 that I

  recall as a bout of sledging … being old enough,

  at six. I see their fingers subliminally

  summing my age, drawn by this MacGuffin;

  their mouths now open in surprise – much more

  than when I lift the lid on her suicide

  (the kids asleep, the milks, the new au-pair).

  Or that is my impression. And what’s really hiding

  behind the steam of words is a lost reference

  to my brother and I as we squeal down the track’s

  schillerised slope … to swerve into the fence,

  snapping a runner, the snow sharp as axes

  under its feathery asbestos fluff: look,

  it’s spotting with the excitement of my cut chin, my red

  smudge of courage. Amazing, after the earthquake

  of it all, to find I am here in class, instead.

  ELSEWHERE

  Käsmu, Estonia

  The thunderous jet-sigh of coastal pines,

  the midnight length of wolves, grandmothers

  buried the far side of those massive boulders

  geologists term ‘erratic’, brought there

  as they were by a grinding of ice, left behind

  like pebbles: here, I feel strangely at home –

  right from the first time, when I came with the others.

  And rather than settling in your northern folds,

  the author of erratic, long-vowelled lines,

  learning your secretive language to clear my mind,

  tramping your woods, I’ll keep you as an elsewhere:

  sidled up to now and again; always torn from.

  DISASTER

  We carried out an impact assessment

  on their people’s grief;

  flexed its brittleness,

  broke it. Their sorrows were sorted,

  its underlying causes mapped, made

  respondent to emergent needs.

  Tears were seen to leave lines

  on their dusty faces

  by our front-line team; we were not there

  to invent the wheel, but to work

  in collaboration with the necessary forces

  for change, then move

  the change forwards to another peg.

  Carts rumbled over ruts

  as we embedded behaviours,

  made results tangible in the crowds

  running like a wash of water in front of our bonnets.

  The occasional spill led to a change

  strategy, that sustainable and measurable solution

  already described. When the phones went

  it was only the phones – feedback

  leaving its legacy, an effective

  listening through the swarms of flies.

  The magnitude of it all was a challenge

  to our proven methodologies: they wept

  when we left – buzzed and energised

  by driving that evolution

  for so many days, so many nights,

  glad of home and of our own cries.

  NIAGARA

  1

  It was not the infinite kilowattage

  in the falling of the falls themselves

  that most impressed, but the bouncing

  top edge watched from the railed-off side:

  that strange green water-dance

  ledged against the sky, all that river-enthusiasm

  colliding on the surprise of a vista of air –

  as if God was suddenly to come across

  His own absence, or that human trick

  He’s never quite fathomed

  called letting your hair down,

  called letting everything go.

  2

  That industrial, uroboric roar

  drowned our lines as we shouted in macs

  behind a door of water in the rock,

  preferring the litotes of not bad, hey?

  to open amazement. The tunnels

  hacked out of the cliff, puddled,

  were like Dante’s Malebolge … while a single rock-fern

  nodded outside on a slicked ledge, its garden-green

  warded by the unbarrelling itself

  from whatever lies beyond perpetual storm.

  JÄÄÄÄR

  That, in Estonian, it means ‘the edge of ice’

  seems hardly a surprise:

  the melting away of consonants,

  the freezing of vowels into a howl. Once

  the entire bay would be tundra from November;

  now it’s slush, and snow something to remember.

  I see that final r retreat to the ‘yuh’ sound

  with less and less of that ice-bound

  middle part I am incapable of pronouncing right

  (the skater toppling, the fledgling’s first flight

  too soon after winter), as if the Baltic’s lapping higher

  till all that’s left’s a last, fish-hook cry.

  BADGER

  Each night at the
same time his shadow

  crosses over below Verdeilles, glimpsed white

  like a stripe of snow on a black bough:

  lumbering unworried, with a vicious bite.

  It’s the road that crosses the badger, you say –

  his ancestry deep, the behaviour tied

  to custom; the ancient setts concealed from the day,

  each night’s an echo of the previous night

  where we are the ones who interfere:

  he just stands his ground. Were a car to appear,

  all death and dazzle, he wouldn’t swerve, or wait:

  his commitment’s grown in his blood, like fate.

  Where his front paws go his back ones follow

  in a visa’s double stamp, those claws’ high fives.

  Droppings glisten in the small hollows

  he digs here and there, so long from our lives.

  He’d despise (if he could) the parasitic dogs

  who behave as if we matter; or the surrendering rabbit;

  or the others that use us, like the cat, the fox.

  But only we can despise – out of long habit.

  MYTHOS

  In memory of Fred and Judy Busch

  ‘I hear mythos padding in the underbrush’

  The brownstones still prop the wrought-iron gate

  on Morton Street, 44A

  no doubt the same old porcelain plaque

  you’d pass with Judy

  in those early Greenwich Village days

  to reach your one-room, wooden,

  eighty-four-dollars-a-month flat

  back in ’63; you writing nights

  on the edge of the bath, typewriter

  poised on the toilet seat, icy air

  and endless ‘heartbreak in the mails’.

  And now you’re both passed away –

  so abruptly gone I can’t help thinking

  of that note you slipped

  under my hotel door in Deauville

  after we’d planned to drive to Omaha

  Beach: The trip is too long. Fred.

  It seems like only yesterday, of course,

  that the machinery of friendship was oiled

  and running – that we cared how

  the other was and what they were doing

  and where the goddamn books were going to

  (‘The third Armagnac ought

  to get it out of you …’), with our lives