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    Grain
    Grain
    Grain
    Ebook57 pages23 minutes

    Grain

    By John Glenday

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    About this ebook

    Though John Glenday has long been admired for his lyrically delicate and emotionally powerful poetry, he has remained something of a well-kept secret. His third collection, Grain, makes his singular talent available to a wider audience. Sometimes Glenday’s poems are forcefully direct; sometimes they are so quiet they feel as if they were composed within a capacious listening, as a form of secular prayer. Glenday’s seamless lyric can also disguise some wild and surreal tales: the Beauty and the Beast told in reverse, a bizarre list of new saints, or a can of peaches waiting for the invention of the tin-opener. However, the lasting impression is of a genuinely spiritual poet, one with the ability to turn every earthly detail towards the same clear light. Grain announces Glenday as an essential voice in contemporary poetry.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPan Macmillan
    Release dateDec 17, 2010
    ISBN9780330540292
    Grain
    Author

    John Glenday

    John Glenday’s first collection, The Apple Ghost won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and his second, Undark, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Grain Picador, 2009), also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for both the Ted Hughes Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His fourth collection The Golden Mean, also published by Picador, was shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Poetry Book of the Year and won the 2015 Roehampton Poetry Prize.

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      Book preview

      Grain - John Glenday

      tune.

      Imagine You are Driving

      Imagine you are driving

      nowhere, with no one beside you;

      with the empty road unravelling and ravelling

      in sympathy as the wheel turns in your hands.

      On either side the wheatfields go shimmering

      past in an absence of birdsong, and the sky

      decants the shadows of the weather from itself.

      So you drive on, hopeful of a time

      when the ocean will rise up before you like dusk

      and you will make landfall at last –

      some ancient, long-forgotten mooring,

      which both of you, of course, will recognise;

      though as I said before, there is no one beside you

      and neither of you has anywhere to go.

      The River

      This is my formula for the fall of things:

      we come to a river we always knew we’d have to cross.

      It ferries the twilight down through fieldworks

      of corn and half-blown sunflowers.

      The only sounds, one lost cicada calling to itself

      and the piping of a bird that will never have a name.

      Now tell me there is a pause

      where we know there should be an end;

      then tell me you too imagined it this way

      with our shadows never quite touching the river

      and the river never quite reaching the sea.

      At Innernytie

      for Gail and Sandy Wylie

      All we can ever hear

      is the slipping by of things

      as another night comes down.

      Everything changes forever;

      everything remains.

      The elderflower moon

      the rapefield’s cadmium

      and the lark’s voice,

      widening into silence like a river.

      Listen:

      beyond the

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