Z is for Ziety

Ann Ziety seems to be a bit of an enigma. She seems to be most well known for a book of children's poems entitled 'Bumwigs and Earbeetles and Other Unspeakable Delights' (which sounds like something that would delight small children and is available very cheap second hand), but I cannot find a photo let alone a website. I found this poem by her in 'The Virago Book of Wicked Verse'.

One Day He's Gonna Cook Me A Meal

one day he's gonna cook me a meal
a big meal
a big monster of a meal
with perfectly roasted crispy potatoes
and succulent garden-grown baby carrots
nesting like sneaky little surprises
beneath some richly flavoured sauce

one day he's gonna cook me a meal
and for once his timing will be perfect

he will go to all that trouble
of scraping and slicing and peeling and dicing
of reaching boiling point
and taking care not to burn
and taking time over all those little details
and stirring and blending and caring and worrying
breaking down over the creme caramel
and not wanting any help or instructions
and never, no never
giving up and instead making pilchard sandwich
with stale bread

he will arrange everything
like an exuberant Egon Ronay
on a willow-pattern dinner plate
swirling with dancing tongues of curling steam
and offer it to me like some long lost treasure

and I'm not going to say thank you
I'm not going to say aren't you having some
I will eat it, insatiable
sucking it up like an empty whale
my head stuck right in there
cramming my mouth with a vegetable paradise
grunting over the creamy white horseradish
gobbling like some hysterical piglet
slopping it everywhere
my face mottled with dark ripples of gravy
which run unstoppable down my chin
my neck my breasts
and congeal
in a brown solid stain
right where my heart is

one day he's gonna cook me a meal
and I'm gonna run my hands through it
feel the squelch of steaming mash
squeeze those pretty little peas till they pop
cram my ears full of pulpy swede
burrow into the thick nest of buttered cabbage
gorge and wallow and swim around
in the sweet-smelling juices
till the cows come home
till I burst with red
till I can't breathe any more

I'll probably die
but it'll be worth it
cos hell
I've been waiting for this meal
a long time

Linking also to one called My Knickers that Dunk found that is just brilliant.

(Linking back for the final time to the A to Z Challenge)

Y is for Young

Poetry Foundation

I was going to post something by W. B. Yeats but when I went browsing the Poetry Foundation website I found Kevin Young, and I rather liked this one because it contrasted so beautifully with Aunt Julia from day M.

Aunties

There's a way a woman
          will not
relinquish

her pocketbook
          even pulled
onstage, or called up

to the pulpit -
          there's a way only
your Auntie can make it

taste right -
          rice & gravy
is a meal

if my late Great Aunt
          Toota makes it -
Aunts cook like

there's no tomorrow
          & they're right.
Too hot

is how my Aunt Tuddie
           peppers everything
her name given

by my father, four, seeing
           her smiling in her crib.
There's a barrel

full of rainwater
          beside the house
that my infant father will fall

into, trying to see
          himself - the bottom -
& there's his sister

Margie yanking him out
          by his hair grown long
as superstition. Never mind

the flyswatter they chase you
          round the house
& into the yard with

ready to whup the daylight
          out of you -
that's only a threat -

Aunties will fix you
           potato salad
& save

you some. Godmothers,
           godsends,
Aunts smoke like

it's going out of style -
           & it is -
make even gold

teeth look right. Shining
          saying I'll be
John, with a sigh. Make way

out of no way -
          keep the key
to the scale that weighed

the cotton, the cane
          we raised more
than our share of -

If not them, then who
          will win heaven?
holding tight

to their pocketbooks
           at the pearly gates
just in case.

And, because I had intended to have more videos during the challenge and not really looked, here he is reading the poem:

(Linking back to the A to Z challenge)

X is for xxxxx

Cut me some slack on this one, I decided to give you a couple of anonymous poems. Anonymity in writing is sometimes used, to hide behind, when saying something you know will be disapproved of, socially or politically, but these I guess are just really old. 

From 'The Virago Book of Wicked Verse', labelled 12th century AD, translated from Sanskrit by Willis Barnstone:

I like sleeping with somebody different

often

It's nicest when my husband is in a foreign country

and there's rain in the streets at night
and wind

and nobody


And the second one I read about somewhere on my travels through the poetry universe and found it, coincidentally, in 'The Rattle Bag', titled The Seven, translated from Sumerian by Jerome K. Rothenberg:

They are 7 in number, just 7
In the terrible depths they are 7
Bow down, in the sky they are 7

In the terrible depths, the dark houses
They swell, they grow tall
They are neither female nor male
They are a silence heavy with seastorms
They bear off no women their loins are empty of children
They are strangers to pity, compassion is far from them
They are deaf to men's prayers, entreaties can't reach them
They are horses that grow to great size that feed on mountains
They are the enemies of our friends
They feed on the gods
They tear up the highways they spread out over the roads
They are the faces of evil they are the faces of evil

They are 7 they are 7 they are 7 times 7
In the name of Heaven let them be torn from our sight
In the name of Earth let them be torn from our sight

(Linking back to the A to Z Challenge)

W is for Williams

Turning away from the weighty tomes today's poem comes from 'Short and Sweet: 101 very short poems' edited by Simon Armitage, and is by the American poet William Carlos Williams. I love particularly poems which capture something very tiny about life, and express it exquisitely.

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold


(Linking back to the A to Z Challenge) 

The Yellow Wallpaper, The Lighthouse and all that (not an A to Z post)

Dewey's 24 hour Read-A-Thon was a low key affair with no Monkey for company but I did have a nice long evening of uninterrupted reading, which is quite a rare thing for me. I joined a read-along of Charlotte Perkins Gilman 'The Yellow Wallpaper' but could not find any discussion of the story on the host blogs. I was expecting it to be a novella, but it is quite a brief short story, and maybe all the more intense for it. Told first person it charts a young woman's descent from a "temporary nervous depression" into the depth of psychosis. It is the kind of tale that leaves you angry and frustrated, at the treatment and attitudes that women had to endure at that time (written well over 100 years ago), but also at their seeming inability to resist them. The word 'hysteria' is used to silence women, to explain their emotions and behaviour in terms of their femaleness, something that must be kept under control.
Early on she says, of her husband: "He is very careful and loving, hardly lets me stir without special direction. I have a schedule prescription for each hour of the day; he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more."(p.5), and it just makes me fume; she is being patronisingly told to be a good girl and do as she is told, and she ends up feeling it is her fault that she does not want to abide by the prescribed 'treatment'. She spends so much time staring at the vile wallpaper she begins to see things in the pattern: "But in the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so - I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design." (p.10) The presence of this skulking figure begins to dominate here days: "Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through." (p.19) Until gradually, she herself becomes the trapped figure: "If only the top pattern could be gotten off from the under one! I mean to try it, little by little. I have found out another funny thing, but I shan't tell it this time! It does not do to trust people too much. There are only two more days to get this paper off, and I believe John is beginning to notice. I don't like the look in his eyes." (p.20) It is very subtle and low key, a rising tension and suspicion of the people around her. A very disturbing and disconcerting tale. 
All the stories in the book are about women's experiences, how they manage life both with and without men. Many of them tell of women who must charm and win over reluctant husbands so that they can make something more of their lives. The next quote now comes from one entitled 'Turned' about a couple who take in a naive young woman as a servant. When the husband goes away on business the wife discovers that the girl is pregnant, and reacts angrily when she discovers the truth of the situation, but then on further intelligent reflection she makes a wonderfully argued case for the defence of the young girl who in this situation would be viewed by society as a fallen woman:
"Gerta might have done better in resisting the grocer's clerk; had, indeed, with Mrs Marroner's advice, resisted several. But where respect was due, how could she criticise? Where obedience was due, how could she refuse - with ignorance to hold her blinded - until too late?
As the older, wiser woman forced herself to understand and extenuate the girl's misdeed and foresee her ruined future, a new feeling rose in her heart, strong, clear, and overmastering; a sense of the measureless condemnation for the man who had done this thing. He knew. He understood. He could foresee and measure the consequences of his act. He appreciated to the full the innocence, the ignorance, the grateful affection, the habitual docility, of which he deliberately took advantage." (p.145-6)
I have not read all the stories yet but some very interesting insights into the early days of feminist thinking.

The other book I tackled yesterday was 'The Lighthouse' by Alison Moore, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012. (It won the McKittrick Prize, which was interestingly also won by 'Dirty Work' by Gabriel Weston, that I reviewed a few months ago.) Oh, I hated this book ... but in a good way. I hated some of the characters, which is a pretty strong reaction for me. And then I hated the fact that she left the reader in the lurch at the end, though in retrospect it was the right ending, because sometimes, like Carl, you just won't ever know what happened. 
Futh is very mundane kind of bloke, and you almost like him for it, but maybe pity is closer to what I came to feel. He is taking a walking tour in Germany, to escape the reality of separating from his wife. The sad story of his life unfolds gradually as he watch him stagger wearily through the countryside along the Rhine. He seems to inadvertently miss out on a lot of meals, this was what struck me most about the story. It seemed somehow symbolic. The parallel story of Esther, the owner of the first guesthouse he stays in, is an equally sad one; a woman trapped with a cruel man who's affection she still craves, but who has taken to tormenting him just to get his attention. And the fate of a tiny silver lighthouse hangs in the balance throughout the book. 
First is this quote, because it reminded me of something I wrote on another blog:

"The mooring ropes are dropped into the water and Futh, like a disconcerted train passenger unable to tell whether it is his or the neighbouring train which is pulling out of the station, sees the untethered land drawing away from him. The engine chugs and the water turns white between the dock and the outward bound ferry." (p.3)

In this second Esther is contemplating romantic memories of her courtship with Bernard. It is poignant, but I found her nostalgia cloying because of how hard, and how unrealistically, she clings to it:

"She still has these thing. She keeps them in the drawer of her bedside table and looks through them sometimes, putting the dry flower to her nose. She handles the envelope's contents reverently as if these were the memorabilia of a dead pop star rather than the man she married, the man she still lives with.
Bernard, she thinks, would not recall now which film they saw on their first date, might not even remember that they went to the cinema on that occasion." (p.113)

The story lingers repeatedly over the final days on Futh's childhood, before his mother leaves them. Each time little details are added to the telling. It works beautifully as a repeated memory, the way you mind will go over and over significant events, searching for meaning, wishing, if only, things could have happened differently. I think it was these scenes which sucked me in the most, the mundanity of the moment, that then in hindsight takes on this huge significance:

"Futh, deciding to take a walk, stood up and ambled away. He felt his mother watching him go, but when he glanced back she was not looking at him. He wandered further, until he could no longer hear the drone of his father's voice. He was holding the perfume case which he had taken out of his mother's handbag, the silver lighthouse which his granddad had given to his father. His mother called it 'Uncle Ernst's perfume' as if she were just keeping it safe for him, but she wore it a lot of the time. Futh took the glass vial out of its case. He wanted to smell his mother's scent but he did not remove the stopper."(p.145)

And later that evening:

"That night, back in his own bed, Futh heard his mother in the shower. When she came to his room, standing by his pillow in her dressing gown, her face hanging over him like the moon in the night sky, she no longer smelled of violets or sun cream, or the oranges they had eaten on the way home. She smelled of the cigarettes she liked to smoke when she finished something." (p.148)

Smells feature significantly throughout the telling, good smells and bad ones, smells that turn bitter with the passing of time. Both the characters are yearning, Futh for his lost childhood, Esther for her lost marriage, and the crossing of their paths has fateful consequences. What an unexpectedly excellent book (not that I had low expectations, just that the story description is not very promising), easily short enough to read in one sitting, and well worth seeking out. 

V is for Vajdi

Wiki commons

Illiterate

I know a man
who reads all inscriptions on ancient stones
and who knows
the grammars of all languages, dead or alive,
but who cannot read
the eyes of a woman
whom he thinks he loves.

Shadab Vajdi

From the Virago Book of Love Poetry edited by Wendy Mulford.

(Linking back to the A to Z Challenge)

U is for Un

Mariusz Kubik

I returned for today's post to the Poetry Foundation website and found Ko Un, a Korean poet. He has been both a Buddhist monk and a political prisoner, and now works for peace and reunification of his homeland. 






Asking The Way

You fools who ask what god is
should ask what life is instead.
Find a port where lemon trees bloom.
Ask about places to drink in the port.
Ask about the drinkers. 
Ask about the lemon trees.
Ask and ask until nothing's left to ask.


(Linking back to the A to Z Challenge)