Over this weekend I have been preparing my poetry collections for publication. It is a satisfying practice to make these words of mine into an attractive and well presented book. I have been emulating as much as I can the styles of the old Faber and Faber collections, from which I learnt to be part of the literary culture which I seek to lovest well.
From my collection, After the Pills, here is one of my earlier poems, Dream in Terza Rima.
Dream in Terza Rima
he wants to say some things about dreams
some things that divide him in images
which play where he cannot act free
forlorn nights
without dreams
where he marches lost troopers through the day
anticipating beheaded certainties
arrange and cut and
then display
a writer is driven mad in his words
like dreams to condense and displace
he forgets the
meanings of words
which have become not sounds but texts
which live now only through encyclopaedias
words stir rebels
against life a pretext
to dream of derrida as the homeless one
and antonin making meaning a paranoia
you are divine unreadable or does he mean
incomprehensible that cannot be packaged
inside a page outside a session
Jeff Rich