Graham Clifford

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Friday Poem – ‘Newborn’, Graham Clifford

Friday Poem 'Newborn' Graham Clifford

Our Friday Poem this week is ‘Newborn’ from The Hitting Game by Graham Clifford.

The Hitting Game, Graham Clifford

‘Newborn’ is a disarmingly intimate poem which tenderly describes the ‘unfurling’ of a precious new life,  the minute changes in her being, and her otherwordly fragility.
The Hitting Game is Graham Clifford’s debut collection, ‘inventive and grounded, witty and vulnerable’ (Michael Laskey). There is a gentleness and empathy, humour and pathos, with poems full of unexpected dramas and fresh enxhantments which provoke as well as delight.

 

 

Newborn

She nearly isn’t here. So soft
I have to watch to know
I’ve touched this pink steam
somehow holding her shape.

Dimmer switch screwed almost shut
we are stock-still
nocturnal desert-mammals, saucer-eyed,
cramping in thunder-struck poses.
Her spider-leg eyelashes
rest on a web that has us while she dreams
the leaf-edge of her country.

Unfurling by millimetres in spiked air,
anemone fingers splay then clench
as she tunes herself in,
becomes herself minutely, frost
fringing the shore of the cleanest puddle.

 

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Friday Poem – About my Daughter

This week’s poem is from Graham Clifford’s debut collection, The Hitting Game, published in 2014.

The Hitting Game is the first collection of poems by the London-based poet Graham Clifford. The vibrancy of the poet’s voice and the immediacy of his claims  upon our attention are clear.

Characters first appear as ‘you’ in ‘Obvious Constellations’, ‘Amazing’ and ‘Trying’, as if we’ve arrived in the middle of a conversation. Incidents are approached from disarmingly intimate and also entertainingly oblique angles, as in ‘Shorn’. These are urban poems where nature appears like a strange intrusion: a flock of swallows ‘flick about dusk like black flames’. There is also a gentleness and empathy, particularly in regards to children, as in ‘About my Daughter’ where the word ‘echoes: ‘the er-ing sound of doubt/mixed with ought.’ There is humour and pathos as in the poem about a chimp and her keeper.

These are poems full of unexpected dramas and fresh enchantments, they provoke as well as delight.

About my Daughter

How right the word seems,
so drawn out,
the er?-ing sound of doubt
abutting ought.

I stand in the dark
taking heat from you
spasming to slip my grip
full of voodoo, my daughter
a little scarecrow stuffed with eels
curling and flipping to get away.

Used light from cars
queasily slides across the wall,
shards and slices identically rearrange
with such recurring precision –
this long trapezoid, that misty rhombus
locked into the same move as tomorrow,
then its tomorrow.
A deadlocked endgame.

Doubt: ought; her. Daughter.
At last loose in my arms,
I lay you as if broken
into sleep’s black mouth.

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Friday Poem – Bitumen and Rust

The Hitting Game, Graham Clifford

This Friday, our poem Bitumen and Rust, comes from Graham Clifford’s collection The Hitting Game. The vibrancy of Clifford’s voice and the immediacy of his claims upon our attention are clear in this lively collection. Incidents are approached from disarmingly intimate and entertainingly oblique angles. These are urban poems where nature appears like a strange intrusion. There is gentleness and empathy, humour and pathos, with poems full of unexpected dramas and fresh enchantments, which provoke as well as delight.

Bitumen and Rust

In the end you didn’t buy an angle-poise light
called lack – it must mean something aspirational
in another language. Driving home, a green-brass prick

of a church wedged in-between semis began to glow
as if a prayer just got answered. As if. Polystyrene
tea in cup holders. Dirty little seas rich as slicks

of sewage-juice in ruts we trudged in a landscape
ruined with bitumen and rust, by slung piglet carcasses
still eyeing fly-tipped, shoddy white goods.

There is more than one disputed memory
We tug apart like foxes: under branches
Sweating out winter, the colder, wet side of freezing

I found clay pigeon shrapnel like smashed, thick 45s.
You first saw the sun drown in two ponds at the outskirts
Where, where we know turned in to where we don’t.

Spuds and beet surfaced from dirt, sick bits;
it was me that bit an onion like an apple. Barbed wire –
you slam on the brake so as not to kill

a man selling premature roses in the road.
Everyone is full of music to make it better.
Jittery clouds scarper to the margin like bath foam,

soap-touched. Suddenly, above us is baby blue.
You won’t be around forever; laugh: tea –
barbed wire that disappeared into tree bark.

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