Go Giants

Poetry, they’re pretty sure you’re not worth knowing,

fit for nothing, broken; that any mystery in language

perfected by its music’s just a mockery, a joke;

outmoded as the nose flute; desperate as spite;

a series of temples raised to pretexts or a pimped-

out souped-up pussy-magnet; is anyway soaked

as a bandage and see-through; a piece of plastic

crap or encrypted chat, some intimate nightmare,

and they want you put to a phone-in vote . . . I don’t.

One time I found you mooching round the back

of the loading dock at the meat factory, smoking

a rollie and eyeing the maggots writhing below

like disco rice, and recognized you from the fist

as work done by the soul’s hands, sympathetic

magic that if profitless could still outstrip each

calculated want: and at the Moment of Death as

Described by the Upanishads, or in the lift of

pressure as you shift to third and open it up on

the last bend west out the Orritor Road, what

you offer is a juncture of the two kinds of real,

the act caught in the act, as the fingertips pressed

hard against their mirrored selves establish an

ambiguous exactitude – and if it so happens that

you are the flawed compensation for our having

just the one go, it does for me, or very nearly.

by the same author

poetry

TO A FAULT

ON PURPOSE

fiction

UTTERLY MONKEY

GLOVER’S MISTAKE

NICK LAIRD

Go Giants

______

W. W. Norton & Company

New York • London

If I were to describe reality as I found it, I would have to include my arm.

Acknowledgements

The book is dedicated to Carol Laird.

Thanks to the editors of the following publications where these poems or versions of them first appeared: Dark Matter, Edinburgh Review, Guardian, Hear Here!, Literary Imagination, London Review of Books, Magma, Manchester Review, New York Review of Books, New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland, Poetry London and The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation.

Thanks to Matthew Hollis, Paul Keegan and Don Paterson. And thanks to Julian Barnes for the loan of two lines. And thanks unlimited to Z.

In the frontispiece poem, a ‘series of temples raised to pretexts’ is one of E. M. Cioran’s descriptions of history. ‘Envy’ borrows from Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness, and the book’s epigraph is a quotation from Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy. The first stanza of ‘The Effects’ makes use of a line of Wallace Stevens’s prose. ‘A Blessing for the Big Men’ borrows from Lady Gregory’s translations of Raftery. The title headings in ‘Progress’ are taken from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, as is its epigraph.

‘Epithalamium’: for Sarah Manguso and Adam Chapman.

‘The Effects’: for Paul Murdin.

‘Progress’: for Lorcan O’Neill.

Contents

Epithalamium

Condolence

Santa Maddelena

Go Giants

The Mark

Cabochon

Envy

Pershing

The Mission

The Workshop

Women in Antiquity

The Effects

Tuesday