The Uncertain Land and Other Poems. Patrick O’Brian

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ read a poem

       The uncertain land

       Silver-haired charm and urbanity

       Winter in Foreign Parts

       Obsèques

       The dark figures

       ‘Is true the rat’

       The duty of pleasure

       Poulp: or, the Medusa a Toy

       Grey and white

       No smoking: the second day

       Pray, Luv, forgive me my sourness

       The Mandrake

       For Louise’s visitors’ book

       ‘Clouds over clouds’

       ‘Walking on the high mountain’

       ‘Help my understanding, Lady’

       ‘Down through the vines’

       Collioure

       ‘Long, straight, the steel lines’

       ‘If I could go back into my dream’

       ‘Loose-bellied, grey’

       Old Men

       ‘When your lance fails’

       Part II: Drafts

       The Sardana for the First Time

       ‘Yesterday an old husband’

       ‘Whereas in Jewry came a star’

       ‘Not that a hard-roed herring should presume’

       ‘The pattering of rain’

       ‘The cry of buzzards in the sky’

       ‘Vicious intromission’

       Forbear O Venus pray forbear

       A halt on the Trans-Siberian

       ‘When my Muse and Chian Veins vie’

       The sorrow & woe

       Boars

       Night walking

       ‘On the mountain I have quite a good sense of direction’

       The True-born Englishman

       ‘Sun sloping through the cypresses’

       Labuntur anni (The advancing years)

       ‘Peace; a great lawn that small, fat feet’

       The hard winter

       ‘An old thin tall man’

       What the hell do you know about poverty?

       ‘The north wind low over the house’

       ‘High on the cold mountain road’

       ‘I went out in a night of tearing wind’

       ‘A wheeling buzzard lifting to the sun’

       ‘Thoughts that range from anger and revenge’

       ‘Of France and of the knowledge of that land’

       Captivity

       ‘When a dry heart sets a bleeding’

       Loud-mouthed neighbours through the floor

       ‘For Jojo’s livre d’or 85’

       Footnotes

       Acknowledgements

       Index of first lines

       The Works of Patrick O’Brian

       About the Publisher

       Foreword

      I do not know when Patrick first began composing poetry. However, I strongly suspect that it was during his frequently lonely adolescence, when he was cooped up largely alone in his father’s successive homes. He was from an early age a voracious reader. He was also a passionate devotee of the natural world, and during the three years he lived as an adolescent boy at Lewes in Sussex he spent long happy hours wandering along the banks of the nearby river Ouse, and along the sands of the beach below the towering white cliffs at Seaford. Much of his poetry is concerned with limpid depictions of animals, especially birds, and delicate descriptions of the landscape with which he was familiar.

      The earliest specimens of his poetry to have survived are, in contrast, robustly humorous (even mildly erotic) – which will come as no surprise to readers of the Aubrey-Maturin epic. During the Blitz in 1940–41 he and my mother drove ambulances in Chelsea, which was heavily bombed by Luftwaffe aeroplanes offloading their remaining bombs before returning homeward above the moonlit Thames. Patrick entertained his fellow workers in the ambulance station at 18 Danvers Street by acting as unofficial bard of the unit. There he composed a lively anthem for the denizens of number 22 Station of the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service. He also concocted a poetic narrative recounting the nocturnal adventures of my mother’s faithful dachshund, Miss Patz, who sneaks out of her lodgings to join the regulars at the Black Lion pub around the corner from the ambulance station, and moves on to one of the many shady little drinking clubs which characterised the perilous Chelsea of those days. I suspect that Miss Patz’s exploits reflected in some degree those of her adventurous owner. My mother, in addition, assisted with the fluent German and French sections of the poem, being fluent in both languages.

      For four years after the War my parents lived in a tiny cottage in the mountains of Snowdonia, where their fare depended in large part on Patrick’s skill with rod and gun. They were also avid followers of the local foxhounds, a hunt conducted on foot amid wildly dramatic mountain scenery. There, as Patrick’s novel Three Bear Witness^fn1 attests, he paid minute attention to landscape and wildlife. I find it hard to believe that he did not also commemorate them in poetry at the same time, although all of his muse that survives is his cheerful ode to a generous American lady who sent them tins of marmalade СКАЧАТЬ