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The Lost Notebook

Jennie Feldman

No Text
Imprint: Anvil Press Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (72 pages)
(Pub. Oct 2005)
9780856463815
Out of Stock
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  • Excerpt
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    Sea Daffodils

    First line of poem

    Because the book that has your photo
    says you’ll die tomorrow, here I am
    hooked on your single day’s extravagance.
    For this is the way we ride the dune,
    bareback with tilted trumpets, lost for music
    and knowing we’ll never hear it again
    that pale arpeggio of geese pulling south
    to one long note diminuendo. Because
    there’s broken glass left and right, and ants
    are heading my way over the sand,
    I lean into your cool white space and breathe
    a faint kindness. So it is, once again,
    the immensity of existing things
    rooted here in an exclamation,
    six girlish sepals leaning back to laugh.
    There’s hardly time to understand
    the hilarity; already yesterday’s has trailed off
    to meet its shadow. And something irrepressible
    is bulging at the base of withered stems,
    the risqué joke I’ll never get
    though no doubt it’s to do with tiny headstones
    thrusting through your bleached sprawl of leaves.
    Busy being born, busy dying,
    fugitive perfection on a barren shore, you
    wrench from the guts an answering cry,
    autumn, autumn, autumn.
     

    These visually arresting and subtly musical poems range from Scotland and the Hebrides to Paris, the Mediterranean and Israel, capturing resonant details and moments and shaping them into a quizzical coherence. Like the small ghost that circles into lamplight in ‘Moth’, the poems are on the wing, ‘sourcing the radiance of things’ in response to the dark. A lost notebook inspires a sequence that interweaves themes of sea, music, memory, love and the charge of language. This is a distinguished first collection.

    Jennie Feldman was born in South Africa, grew up in London and studied French at Oxford. A former award-winning radio producer and presenter, she is married with two children and lives in Jerusalem and Oxford. Her first collection of poems, The Lost Notebook, was published in 2005, as was her ... read more
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