David KennedyAlum Rapturesin memoriam Jack Beeching 1922–2001 |
I – A Renunciative Artifice
Turbid the chrism, my farded mascot, |
II – Stay Bitten
A quarry takes a bite out of a hill: |
III – Name Your Own
Blurred borderlands IV – Post Mortem Manifesto: How To Write Poems
Rehearse your own last rites. V – The Afterpoem
The afterpoem, |
NotesJack Beeching’s poetry probably received its widest readership via Penguin Modern Poets 16, first published 1970. Each section of ‘Alum Raptures’ therefore has sixteen lines and sixty-four words excluding titles. With the exception of the last three lines of section V which are taken from The Darkening Ecliptic by Ern Malley, the italicised words and phrases in ‘Alum Raptures’ are taken from Beeching’s poems in the Penguin volume. The reference in section IV to raising a stick against a fascist street recruiter refers to an encounter Beeching had in his early 70s with a recruiter for Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front.
Pieprzówka and Źubrówka are brands of Polish vodka, flavoured respectively with pepper and bison grass (hierochloe odorata). |
David Kennedy’s most recent publication is The President of Earth: New & Selected Poems (Salt, 2002). He lives in Sheffield where he works as a freelance writer and edits the poetry and poetics magazine The Paper. |
Jacket 26 — October 2004
Contents page |