| |
Lookout
Nothing in sight but water's deferrals,
deflections, its million-galloned grief;
though sometimes, when the light is angled so
as to prism inside the waves' tips,
it seems we're actually anchored in fields:
that we could drop off and land on our feet
in a rich plough-land confected with frost,
in mud flats, or sand dunes. We could forget
dry land is a dream in the dream of it
Source
From The Red Wheelbarrow 14 (St Andrews, 2007).
Reprinted with permission of the author.
Author's note
When I began to write 'Lookout', I wanted to capture
something about water – about the endless variety of its movements
and appearances. I was also thinking about the possibility of saying something,
anything, true. Watching water and listening to water always makes me
think about speech: it sounds like a debate, a dissent, a vast crowd talking
amongst its selves. In the end, however, I think the poem became more
general.
It seems to me that it says something about uncertainty:
how sometimes in order to act, or to be, we have to make ourselves believe
things that are dubious, and in this sense we live by dreaming. It's a
strange poem, but one which goes almost to the heart of the collection,
Public Dream, in which it appears.
Editor's comment
Another poet whose work is new to me, Frances Leviston
is another remarkable talent. 'Lookout' has all the quality of a great
sonnet, packed into even fewer lines. It's formally elegant, line-lengths
controlled but fluid, the line-endings and flow-through just right, never
obvious. There's a real sense of being in the midst of actual seas,
the shift and movement, the flux all around. Then there's the last, arresting,
line-and-a-half, the change of perspective, opening out, expanding your
consciousness so you see things new.
Biography
Frances Leviston was born in Edinburgh in 1982, and
grew up in Sheffield. She read English at St Hilda's College, Oxford,
and has an MA in Writing from Sheffield Hallam University. Her poems have
appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, British Council/Granta
New Writing 14, Poetry London and Poetry Review. She
received an Eric Gregory Award in 2006. Public Dream (Picador,
2007) was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize.
Related
links
|
