New on Tues: 'Paradise', by Emma Jones
Every Tuesday I'll try to post a contemporary poem. I picked Tuesday so I could have that annoyingly assonantal title.
Up first is Australian poet Emma Jones, whose first collection The Striped World was published in 2009 by Big Deal publisher Faber & Faber. It promptly went on to win the Queensland Premier's Literary Award, and good thing too, because it is brilliant. The poems are particularly interested in place: places real and imaginary, places and the people that remember it. 'Paradise' has become one of my all-time favourite poems.
What you wanted was simple: What is your kind of paradise?
Paradise
Emma Jones
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| Faber & Faber |
What you wanted was simple:
a house with a fence and a kind of gulled
light arching up from it to shake in the poplars
or some other brand of European tree
(or was it American?) you'd plant
just for the birds to nest in and so
the crows who'd settle there
could settle like pilgrims.
a house with a fence and a kind of gulled
light arching up from it to shake in the poplars
or some other brand of European tree
(or was it American?) you'd plant
just for the birds to nest in and so
the crows who'd settle there
could settle like pilgrims.
Darling, all day I've
watched the garden make its way
down the road. It stops at the houses
where the lights are on and the hose reel is tidy
and climbs to the windows to look inside
like a child with its eyes of flared rhododendrons
and sunflowers that shutter the wind like bombs
so buttered and brave the sweet peas gallop
and the undergrowths fizz through the fences
and pause at some to shake into asters and weep.
down the road. It stops at the houses
where the lights are on and the hose reel is tidy
and climbs to the windows to look inside
like a child with its eyes of flared rhododendrons
and sunflowers that shutter the wind like bombs
so buttered and brave the sweet peas gallop
and the undergrowths fizz through the fences
and pause at some to shake into asters and weep.
The garden is a mythical
beast and a pilgrim.
And when the houses stroll out it eats up
their papers and screens their evangelical dogs.
And when the houses stroll out it eats up
their papers and screens their evangelical dogs.
Barbeque eater,
yankee doodle,
if the garden should leave
where would we age
and park our poodle?
yankee doodle,
if the garden should leave
where would we age
and park our poodle?
"This is
paradise," you said,
a young expansive American saint.
And widened your arms to take it in,
that suburb, spread, with seas in it.
a young expansive American saint.
And widened your arms to take it in,
that suburb, spread, with seas in it.
Source: Jones, Emma. The Striped World. (London: Faber & Faber), 2009.
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