... I tasted what the eyes said, heard
hands that were strangers talk as twins with no
word spoken. Incandescent, the word
was flesh, no longer the shadow
of what it signified.
        from 'A Foreign Tongue'

Body language and the body of language - from the first words in the first garden to the last words of last night's lovers - are the entwined themes of Jon Stallworthy's new collection of poems, his first since 1995. The centrepiece is 'Skyhorse', an ambitious poem for voices that finds in the White Horse on the Berkshire Downs an enduring presence through the turbulence of three millennia of English history. The book's second part is a candid, passionate sequence of elegies and love poems.

Table of Contents

Language

In the Beginning

Skyhorse

1 The first priest of the White Horse, c.1000 BC

2 Priest and poet, c.970 BC

3 Poet of the shield-wall, AD 871

4 Wandering Scholar, 13th century

5 Antiquary, 18th century

6 Rifleman (discharged), 52nd Regiment, 18 June 1832

7 Mother, 1899

8 Colonel and others, 1905

9 Homeguard, 1940

lOEx-homeguard, 1946

11 Wandering Scholar, 1999/2000

Dreamhorse

Body

Before Setting Out

A Ferry for Bishop Jim

The White Cloud

Handiwork

The Motor Vessel Anichka

Le Violon D'Ingres

A Foreign Tongue

Lioness

Taking Breath

Libation

Hers

Clasp

What's in a Name?

Exorcism

Hunting the Lark

Osip Mandelstam Proposes a Toast

A Word with History

A Round

Edward Thomas's Fob Watch

In the House of the Poet



Notes