
Best Scottish Poems 2007 Introduction \| The Poems \| Acknowledgements

The poems

Richard Price

Source

Author's note

Editor's comment

Biography

As If A Song

She lends me sensual records –
I know she's not leading me on.
I started the lending library,
books and poems, off and on.
  I've loved her since
  I saw the hints
  of the planet I was living on,
  her planet.

Sharing songs is intimate,
it's hearing singing in the shower.
It's a voice and face,
it's lips and poise – and power.
  I hear her songs
  and sing along.
  I sing badly, but I bless the hour,
  I bless her planet.

She's half reluctant,
I hope she's not being kind.
She knows I'm trouble,
trouble I can't leave behind.
  I'm afraid
  one fine day
  she'll leave me behind,
  this silent blue planet.

Source

From Earliest Spring Yet (Landfill Press, 2006). Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Author's note

'As if a song' is a poem in a book of love poems where the speaking voice is sometimes, as here, trying to be a singing voice, or where the speaker is hearing a beautiful voice (also here). It's a book where the lyric, both in poetry and in popular song, is recognised and celebrated as part of the vocal imperative of love, a world the speaker knows self-consciously is nevertheless a world of codes and signs, the landscape described in Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse. At the same time the speaker strives to be as true to the physical force of being 'head over heels' as he can.

The book is patterned with the vocalising motif all the way through – different sleep states and the colour blue are other key elements – all recurring through the collection to give what I hope is its sometimes restless, sometimes dreamy atmosphere.

Editor's comment

There's nothing quite like popular songs for getting under your skin, tapping your own personal zeitgeist. When you're in love it all seems significant, the soundtrack-to-the-video of the relationship. Richard Price taps in to this sensibility beautifully, delineates the progress of an affair through the lending library, / books and poems, / off and on. This moves on to the particular intimacy of sharing songs. And of course the poem itself mimics the form of the songs - the rhythms and jingly rhymes - but is not bound by them. The title is perfect - it's as if this is a song though it's not - and there's the expectation in it too: as if a song could what? As if.

Biography

Richard Price was born in 1966 and grew up in Scotland. Lucky Day (Carcanet, 2004) was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize and was a Book of the Year in The Guardian and in Scotland on Sunday. His latest sequence is a group of love poems Earliest Spring Yet (Landfill Press) while his most recent larger collection is Greenfields (Carcanet). He is also a writer of fiction: A Boy in Summer was published in 2003 by Neil Wilson.