I never thought I would come all this way
to come all this way.
My first book of poems, The Strange
Years of My Life, was published in April 2015 by Peepal
Tree Press. The fifty-seven poems
collected here were written during a period of more than a
decade, in starts and (mostly) stops.
The troupe of “friends” and “strangers”
whom the reader encounters in these poems are sometimes
alter egos, sometimes aliases, sometimes adversaries. They
inhabit a milieu of mistaken identity and deliberate
disguise, where “there are too many wrong countries” and
“already no one remembers you at home.”
Despite the book’s title, these poems
are rarely autobiographical, and have few straightforward
stories to tell. They puzzle over accidents, coincidences,
and codes, as they describe journeys and wonders, edging
towards a sense of the world’s curious strangeness, the
complications of what we call history, the contretemps of
geography.
The poems belong to a hemisphere of the imagination that
encompasses the narratives of nineteenth-century travellers
and twentieth-century anthropologists, spy movies,
astronomical lore, the writings of Saint-John Perse and
Henri Michaux, and the music of Erik Satie. They balance on
the edge between concealment and revelation, between bemused
fascination and tentative comprehension. Every sentence is a
kind of translation, and language is a series of riddles
with no solutions, subtly humorous at one turn, sinister at
another, heartbroken at the next.
86 pp • ISBN 9781845232924
Image above:
Comparative View of the Heights of the Principal Mountains
&c. in the World, published by C. Smith, London,
1816. Courtesy the
David Rumsey Map Collection.
•
CONTENTS
1
Species the maps don’t know
Everything Went Wrong
Les Rendezvous
Villa-Lobos Among the Cannibals
El Sur
Lamps, Clocks, Mirrors, Maps
The Gambler’s Song
Reading History
2
Because I have a hard time sitting still
My Traitors
All This Way
Gringo Toujours
Self-Portrait in the Neotropics
Chinese Whispers
My Beautiful Friends
Je Vous Écris du Bout du Monde
Enough Is Enough
3
Your accent is wrong
Bon Courage
A Place to Start
Self-Portrait as Last Citizen of the Island
Sub Rosa
Further Mistakes
Mr. Keats Has Left Hampstead
News from Rome
Longtemps
Ars Poetica
4
The answer is strange
Botany
Rain
I Discover I Am Russian
Clues
After Eight Days
I Think I Am Becoming Myself
When I Said “My Heart”
Riddle
If You Came Here Looking for the News
The Waker’s Song
5
Birds do not yet have names
Bodies of the Saints
Rufus
Deux Lapins
The Mysteries
Les Argotiers
The Diver’s Song
Strange Currencies
Salvaterra
A Legend
The Dreamers
Accident of Birds
6
Small Husband
Self-Portrait at the
Start of the Rainy Season
My Prey, My Twin
Small
Husband: Mercy on My Small Husband
My Little King and His Armies
My Head Was Too Big
Hardly Bargained
Wordless as a Surgeon
Famous for My Hunger
Something on the Governor’s Head
Your Alias, Small Husband
Roitelet
His Magnitudes
•
Lagniappes
A series of small printed objects intended to hover near, or
be inserted into the pages of, The Strange Years of My
Life; outtakes, extras, interruptions,
distractions. (Because I find myself bored with the idea of
the book as a finished enterprise, a closed system; and
because there are still so many bits and pieces in my
notebooks.)
How I Do My Days
Barbados
Masseur to Mr. Keats
Something We Stumbled On
I Am Not Who You Take Me For
Friends and Strangers
When I Am a Bird
Memoranda
Form of Agreement
Errata