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Roger Elkin
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ROGER ELKINMARKING TIMEISBN 978-0-9568101-1-3
Roger Elkin is one of the finest poets of our time. His poems come alive with powerful, insightful observations and detail beautifully captured in a soaring language of song, in a way that only a fully matured hand can.
Marking Time is packed with several prize-winning poems that surprise and delight with their range of subjects and the sensitivity with which he tackles them.
Wickenstone Rocks
We could never really own them, those glacier-scraped outcrops their animalness long since recognized in the naming of one – Lion Stone.
Even in dreams my eight-year old mind framed them as animal: fat slugs – huge, ominous - squatting on skylines – grim silhouettes black against furnaces of evening suns.
Night after night, I dreamt they ringed our house, coming to revenge the guts of brothers that my Dad had culled, their thick black tyre-treads, slow, still, as silent as Gods, and bigger, patrolling after summer rains; the slipping silk of mica-grit their litter trail glistening.
Surely, no-one would want to own them…
And in the surety of mornings was relieved they were glued still to the land.
And more relieved when we moved to Nettlebeds with its sibilance of weeds, their rippled shiftings, their ease.
The Family Has Been Informed
not of the salt-mill of stars in the bleak night skies
not of the chill mists slipping from hillsides, and the eerie stillness that falls over village, over road, over goat and sheep trail, the look-out posts
not of the taste of grit dust, of sand on fear-dry lips, or the way it clogs nostrils and places veilings over eyes so you understand why faces of locals are swathed in scarves
not of the fact that there is not ever the slightest chance you’d catch a glance of a sniper’s profile, only fire flash barking through darkness from distant Kalashnikovs
not of the wide open faces of mates collapsing to caricatures of string-puppets sliding – slowly, slowly – out of action, heads lolloping forward, and limbs slithering as when bullets bring into flower their fleshy wounds, startling, blood-fresh
no, not any of this: all that goes without saying, is part of the job
but of the fact that last night on patrol in Helmand Province, their son became the one hundredth serviceman so far this year
Blue Hyacinths
Like bruises, she remembers thinking as she fingered the bulbs, their paper-wafery skins tinged with the shifting iridescence she’d last seen on mussel-shells.
That was six weeks to a day before the grim diagnosis. She’d chanced on them – three firm orbs peeking through a Woolworth’s bag her husband had stashed at the back of her utility drawer - a temporary forgetfulness.
Sensing time was running out, and as surprise for him she’d taken them, firming them in fresh compost, and recalling his sermoning - Water, then forget them. Best let the roots put out their filaments - had placed the crazed porcelain bowl below the dark stair-well.
By the time the X-ray came, their tips had nippled through, with stems pushing to fulness the next few months on the kitchen window-sill. He was thrilled. But, the bruises puddling hungrily to mulberry down his leg, hadn’t had chance to see, or smell, or touch the blossoms’ waxy handsomeness.
Now back from the crem under angling sun and the mist of sherry glasses – her family long gone, Father Dykes sliding benignly away – she catches mirror-glimpses of herself finger-tracing their bell-shapes, their deaths already settling in.
Suddenly shudders at palls of heady fragrances, and, repelled by their Our-Lady-blueness gaping, that bruising insolence of living, confesses she cannot understand why for the life of her he so cherished them, year on year on year.
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CATALOGUE
The poetry collection by Afam Akeh
The poetry collection by Mandy Pannett
Poems for the Road by Nnorom Azuonye
Sentinel Annual Literature Anthology (2011) Editors: Unoma Azuah, Amanda Sington-Williams, Nnorom Azuonye.
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