10 July Day 27

For Vasilena

This evening, squabbles on the bridge,

contested rights of way:

wheels locked, one cyclist

mouthes off at another,

a pram’s slewed across the pedestrian lane.

Tempers quickened by seasonable heat

disperse in complaints, muttered protests,

fading after-thoughts. Outgoing,

the tide inches back from algae’d banks.

*

No news again, but photographs online

are reminders of the elsewhere

which friends can see as making good ...

in whose name they have marched:

that much might be deciphered

from mechanical translations.

This evening, boulevards and plane trees,

the hushed rally’s footsteps:

so little for us to go on

in our own “wild country, far away” ...

*

But this evening, the belief,

reparation, an ordinary square

with tables, coffees, laptops,

and, in diminishing light,

the first sound of voices

and bird flocks startled upwards –

unfamiliar words, Facebook updates,

and then, settling in, a rain of doves.

*

In this, my own wild country, far away,

backgarden laughter, this evening,

and those easily forgotten complaints.

Tom Phillips

The girl from the belle époque

 Draft of a poem of sorts

Sometime into a half-hearted summer,

we're still pinning our hopes

on showers clearing

and redemptive sunshine after rain.

Umbrellas flex along the waterfront –

or, collapsed, poke from a bin.

Across Europe, cities are loud with protest,

though you’d hardly know it here.

Sporadic wi-fi connections bring

stray hints, old news, a photograph.

On edge amongst the package tours,

we’re looking down into

perfect reflections of day-trip boats

moored at the quayside,

seeming ghosts of sunk ships.

Or overlooking the city

from a flat warehouse roof.

It’s temptation back to days –

those days – when, stalled

in this same, familiar light,

you were halfway up the garden path

and she was in shade,

arguing the politics,

a few exotic steps across the grass.

Tom Phillips 2013

Reading Poetry Festival 5-9 June

The first Reading Poetry Festival takes place this week, with an Italian poetry day, a children's poetry day, readings, conversations, workshops and exhibitions at the Museum of English Rural Life. The line-up includes Iain Sinclair, John Hegley, Carrie Etter, Peter Robinson, Zoe Skoulding, Mark Ford and poets published by Two Rivers Press. Full details, poems and an online magazine here: http://readingpoetryfestival.com/

On Sunday (9 June), I'll be running a workshop in the morning (10am-12noon) and reading from Recreation Ground (Two Rivers Press, 2013, http://tworiverspress.com/wp/category/people/tom-phillips-poet/) as part of the Two Rivers event in the early evening (5-6.30pm). Again there are more details here: http://readingpoetryfestival.com/

Poem: To the Northern Station

They come at me – and pass

like missed trains, failing

to stop on schedule, trailing

a line of lamp-lit heads.

I used to know them as faces

in remembered scenery,

and how the light fell, or rain

held off, and what was said.

       *

At the fag-end of a long haul

I’m looking out on what’s expected:

mountainous horizon,

boys kicking hard against shale

to swing up and onto

empty carriage stairwells,

while sun glints on minarets,

wrecking yards, apartment blocks.

In the aloof vacancy of a ticket hall

puddled with water, nothing moves.

We push at the door, step outside –

and then everything does.

Tom Phillips

Taken from the e-pamphlet The Dream Library & Other Poems (Various Artists 2013, variousartists986@gmail.com)

London Magazine review

Recreation Ground (the book) is reviewed by David Cooke in the latest London Magazine alongside new collections from James Brookes and Conor Carville - in an issue which also includes Michael Horovitz on Soho Bohemia/the Beat Generation in London, new poems by Helen Dunmore and Philip Gross, Edward Lucie-Smith on Jamil Naqsh and Tom Sykes on Dervla Murphy. Ffi here: http://thelondonmagazine.org/

Philip Glass in Bristol

St George’s Bristol (Tue 14 May)

He may have taken inspiration from Ravi Shankar, but there’s no mistaking the modernist Americana which lies at the heart of Philip Glass’s so-called ‘systems’ music. That’s Americana as in subways, escalators, Time Square, planes, trains and automobiles rather than backwoods Cajun rave-ups and duelling banjos, but there’s an engagement there with both what Don DeLillo called the ‘Cosmopolis’ and the great open spaces of a Beatnik road trip. There’s also an awful lot of ‘aura’ – Glass, after all, has worked with the likes of Martin Scorsese, Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith, Woody Allen. He is, in short, the business, a composer and musician whose career has spanned the outer reaches of the avant-garde and Hollywood commissions. Unsurprisingly, his appearance at St George’s sold out months ago.

In person, Glass is engagingly diffident – more Allen than Scorsese. He might have had another life playing misplaced intellectual teachers in films of John Irving novels. For the first half of tonight’s concert, he assaults – and that’s probably precisely the word – his own ‘Etudes’, twenty pieces which, almost inevitably, echo Chopin’s equivalent suite of technique-stretching piano works. We get eight of them, a 40-minute set of exploratory mood-swings, culminating in one of the most recent, which has late-night, whistle-blowing trains written all over it: a Jim Jarmusch movie in less than five minutes.

After the break, it’s pretty much a straight run-through of the 1989 album ‘Solo Piano’, beginning with the utterly beautiful ‘Mad Rush’ (written in 1979 as a welcome gesture to the Dalai Lama on his first visit to New York) and three out of five pieces from the Kafka-inspired ‘Metamorphosis’ (‘The first and last pieces are actually the same,’ admits Glass) before the impeccably Beatnik ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’. With words by Ginsberg, in particularly bonkers mode, played on tape, this last is a jolt, a reminder, that while Glass has effortlessly eased into the mainstream, his origins remain in the American counter-culture scene – more at home with Patti Smith and Steve Reich than others who’ve whipped his ideas and turned them into Classical FM fodder. (Tom Phillips)

Copyright Tom Phillips 2013

Cassettes

For Tom Shakespeare

Did you have a record player in that room?
I had a Sanyo radio-cassette
with aerial, dial, grey plastic keys
for play, rewind, fast forward, record.
Our neighbour was none too pleased,
thought music threatened industry,
complained in his low Canadian drawl,
distraction from serious business.

He wasn't home when we assumed
that her desire disguised despair -
her footsteps receding outside
down that architectural trench -
and couldn't have been more wrong.

Half a shelf of cassettes:
The Fall, The Cure, Red Army Choir,
homemade compilations.
They're in a drawer now,
the one in the dresser I painted blue.
The Sanyo went to the dump.

On the staircase leading down
from a castle's cobbled precinct,
a busker's singing 'No Woman No Cry'.
You did, you played that on vinyl.

Tom Phillips, May 2013