The Neighbourhood

Hannah Lowe

• Publisher: Out Spoken Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781916046832
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

What is a neighbour? What makes a community? In this themed collection, Hannah Lowe focuses on the urban places she knows and loves, and finds a rich complexity of neighbourliness under the extreme pressure. These poems look urgently into the future, into communities bearing the weight of austerity and gentrification, where global struggles manifest in the local. Nowhere is more at stake than the circle of home the author draws around her infant son, who must learn the fragile meanings of the neighbourhood.

Total Body Conditioning

Before Pilates and Bikram and Zumba,

there was you, Mark, aerobics instructor

with a side-line in Kung Fu

and in that sprung-floored glass room

high over Brixton, the steam crept across the mirror

to frame us around you like backing singers –

on one side the black women

in their Jamaica colours, the white girls

in their pastels on the other

but when you kicked, we kicked, when you punched,

so we did too, punching no-one but ourselves,

left jab, right hook, uppercut.

The lycra you wore looked peel on, peel of,

not cloth but a second meniscal skin

you worked a sweat up in, the gleam

of gold on your wrists, a thick chain around

your thick strong neck. You shouted our names

like you owned us – Latisha, Angela, Hannah!

*

You played the same track over

and over: Sandy Rivera singing

And now my life is going through some changes

though nothing ever changed in that hour –

always the same zealous routine.

Mark, when that squelchy bassline kicked in

and we got to leaping and spinning,

I felt the same heart furry

I’d felt twenty years before –

an elation both communal and solitary,

amphetamines rushing through me

in a warehouse behind Kings Cross,

a thousand hands in a rainbow strobe,

a boy pulling his top of,

that needle drop, that dance.

*

I carried the class timetable like a bible

because I couldn’t stop smoking,

because I’d watched my father dying

and my mother’s body failing her

so completely, I believed exercise

could stave of the thug who lurked

in my daily thoughts. When I bused

down the hill on Sunday mornings,

past the lush-eyed ravers of George IV

I felt some virtue or redemption

and besides, you made me laugh, Mark –

wheeler-dealer of the martial arts.

Patrizia of Body Pump was good but dour,

Donna’s choreography was better, but you

were the best, making us scissor-kick

the air, squat and pump until our thighs

shook, then a hundred star jumps

*

My niece, who’s moved to Brixton,

tells me of a fitness class she’s found –

a killer, she says, all punches and kicks

and this crazy guy who shouts at us –

whic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• The Blue Door
• The Fence
• The Golden Thread
• Wood Green Stories
• Skirting
• Total Body Conditioning
• The Garden is Not for Everyone
• Balconies
• Multi-Storey
• The River
• The Dice
• Deportation Blues
• Paper Work
• The Trucks
• Scooting