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I shall come backTo say, ‘I’m drunk on idleness,’ To breathe the scent of rain-dripped wallsAnd watch the restless sunflower’s growth.I shall come backTo say, ‘I’m drunk on the shadeOf the mulberries that overhang our glasses.’I shall come backTo sing of those who drank with me.And it is enoughTo mourn my father’s house;To mourn for us - who abandoned it -And, for the slain,A shadow is enough;As a frightened shadow’s kohl-touched lookIs enough to feed the acheOf those Iraqis who forget to ache;Those who will never come back;To say, ‘It’s here,The hillside where my growing-up expressed itself.’And it is enough to express my impatience. . . Everything in ruins. . . I shall come backTo sink my nails in your sorrows,Use your silt to stain my handsAnd say, ‘I’m drunk on your bitter Baghdad coffee.’I can be drunk on hope as well. . . . . . once in a while.

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Irregulars This time around the Irregulars sec-tion have decided to bring you some poems published by Carcanet -the best Poetry

press in the UK, in my rather biased but still credible opinion. So enjoy this delicious po-etic treat and if you’re craving for more go visit Carcanet’s website: www.carcanet.

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”The LaST Song

by Fawzi Karim

Some horses are caves; you catch that by the way they flicker and shy

at shadow. You can walk inside horses and sense their walls trembling around you. Camargues are air-delvers, the pile-driver

we’re gripping on our reins, chiselling granite miles. We caught their backs like luck

then held on. Camargues are not cave, but they passed through like wraiths slamming silently through the walls.

Thug-faced, hog-necked, anvil-hoofed Camargues - necking the paint’s hay £on cave walls of Niaux and Lascaux; cantering behind the wasted warriors

of Rome, Persia and Greece. We rode them here - or they rode us, chests thumped

out like wagons heaving our wagons; warmed to our genius grandfathers

because they whispered to them in horse and only in horse.

We should as well cremate ourselves alongside our Camargues, riding them through heaven’s walls, hoofed pyres

to our Saints Mary Jacobe and Mary Salome. We might have fired our horses ;

on our deaths as we fired our houses; burnt ourselves upon the deaths

of our horses since we were their houses. All horses are spells, but Camargues

are myth. You catch that on horseback.

CamargUeSby David Morley

from Plague Lands and other poems by Fawzi Karim, published by Carcanet in February 2011. Reprinted with permission from Carcanet Press.www.carcanet.co.ukhttp://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/ indexer?product=9781847770639

from Enchantment by David Morley, published by Carcanet in November 2010. Reprinted with permission from Carcanet Press.http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781847770622

I will wake up in a world that hooves have led to -Les Murray for Fiona Sampson

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Irregulars

by Les Murray

BUTTreSS on a hIgh CUTTIng

Angophora, rusty-shelled tree without a deep hold

but when its hill split, this side root, jutting out into the sun glare

bent and flowed down, tight as a mailbag wax, rain year by drought year

to the new ground level buttressing its trunk still in high bush overhead

far above blue roadbed a

nd palm-tree eruptions, this pirouette of wood-

coated trouserleg, taller than its many-buckled man.

from Taller When Prone by Les Murray, published by Carcanet in November 2010. Reprinted with permission from Carcanet Press.http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781847771230

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Part 3 from 'a Life'by Iain Crichton Smith

Our landmark is the island, complex thing. A rock, a death, a house in which were made

our narrow global seaward-going wings, the rings of blue, the cloth both fine and frayed.

It sails within us, as one poet said, its empty shelves are resonant. A scant religion drives us to our vague tremens. We drag it at our heels, as iron chains.

A winsome boyhood among glens and bens casts, later, double images and shades.

And ceilidhs in the cities are the lensthrough which we see ourselves, unmade, remade,

by music and by grief. The island sails within us and around us.

Startled we see it in Glasgow, hulk of the humming dead, and of the girls in cornfields disarrayed.

from New Collected Poems by Iain Crichton Smith, published by Carcanet in January 2011. Reprinted with permission from Carcanet Press.http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781857549607

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by Toon Tellegen

My fatherpromised everything, pledged everything -'even love?' my mother asked -'everything' -'even, even. . .' she searched for a wordthat was greater than happiness -'everything!' my father cried, 'or don't you knowwhat everything is?'and he gave her everythingand my mother burnt down then my father walked across seas and oceans,his voice echoed by the earth's aversion,the stiffness of the years he was still thinking, he criedabout dissolution and syrup!'patience! patience!' and he promised a golden spider in a golden weband billions of golden flies of a devastating short-sightednessin the radiant dawn of insanity my father was so alone. . .

from Raptors by Toon Tellegen, published by Carcanet in February 2011. Reprinted with permission from Carcanet Press.http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781847770837

Irregulars