Hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica

Matt Merritt

• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781911027577
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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Matt Merritt's second collection, Hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica, is alive with a rare frequency all of its own – it is a precise and rewarding music for the soul, the heart, and the head.

These are poems that take a distinctive route through landscapes rich with legend and wildlife, finding elegies written in the night sky on the way home from the pub, or quiet epics raging in the pages of memories and neglected histories. Matt Merritt has an ear for the exact notes, be they in a major or a minor key, and these gently insistent poems continue to resound long after their first reading.

"In Matt Merritt's finely honed new collection, lives are lived in liminal spaces, shadow selves are reconstructing history and time is no time at all. These are quick-witted poems, made of toughened glass and ground-down clocks."
Helen Ivory

"Matt Merritt's new book is a cracker – technically adventurous and thematically cohesive. His work is based on a close attention to the world and a scrupulous approach to getting that world into verse. His subject is landscape, the rural and urban landscapes of the Midlands, which he uses as a cipher to talk about personal and community life. We see the surfaces of the contemporary, but also the deep presence of the historical poking through – the planning of new towns and the persistence of floodplains. This is the psychogeography of modern Leicestershire. Reading these poems I felt my own consciousness calming and concentrating – which is as good a way as any of saying that they are beautiful."
Tony Williams

Matt Merritt 's debut full collection, Troy Town, was published by Arrowhead Press in 2008, and a chapbook, Making The Most Of The Light, by HappenStance in 2005. He studied history at Newcastle University and counts Anglo-Saxon and medieval Welsh poetry among his influences, as well as the likes of R.S. Thomas, Ted Hughes and John Ash. He was born in Leicester and lives nearby, works as a wildlife journalist and is an editor of Poets On Fire.

Maps & Legends

Dreams From The Anchor Church

“There, beside the former course of the Trent near Ingleby, is a cave carved out of the low cliffs. Local tradition has it as an anchorite’s cell, the abode of one of the more obscure Anglo-Saxon solitaries, and it still bears the colloquial name Anker Church.”

Rev Richard Kirke, A Derbyshire Itinerary (1778)

“Hope is the dream of the waking man.”

French proverb

After teetering long on the edge of the leap

I made my home in the mean cell beneath.

Behind me rose the bluff of chances missed

and plantings failed of their promise.

A thin pallet of leaves and moss for a bed,

and the rising waters, close about my head,

I fell asleep with the full moon in my eyes,

nursing a child’s desire to hide

and saw every cape, baye, creke and pere,

river, breche, washe, lake and mere,

woode, cytie, castel and monasterye,

fenn, mountayn, valley, more and hethe,

and played both sides at Brunanburh

for the sake of the perfect elegy,

and made light of what’s most prized,

waged war on the terror of knowledge,

and watched the grass fall and rise like the tide,

or the slow, deep breathing of a sleeping god,

and struck out with my face to the future

to find myself walking through the past,

and started out a man of no great means

but ended up weighted by wealth,

and served my apprenticeship of silence,

learned the skill of leaving no trace,

exhausted the childish desire to hide,

and am finally ready to talk.

1984

but we were stuck in 2000AD,

dystopia being no more

than a half-mark in Friday’s spelling test.

Half the Met were camped behind the chapel

at Battleflat, their riot shields and batons

scattered on the scorched grass,

waiting for flying pickets who never showed,

while the Dirty Thirty settled for awkward silence

and the vindication of history,

but we were talking Judge Dredd

and future shocks. The coming apocalypse

was inevitable, but not without its attractions.

If we were scared, it was by what

Malcolm Marshall could do to an unprotected skull

on a late-season flyer. If we had questions,

they were about hosepipe bans, average rainfall,

the type of temperatures you’ll never see again.

About what Frankie said, and why the girls cared.

The sea at Ashby de la Zouch

is every artist’s dream. The muted blues

of distant Charnwood are (just ask

Sir Walter Scott) as nothing

to its azure depths, the mescaline

textures of its shifting surface a gift

to all who ever flirted with the muse.

Civic-minded townsfolk work to maintain

the beached hulk of the castle

as a serviceable metaphor, while the littoral

is a rich seam of inspiration, where present

and future mingle to lap against

the petrified forests of the past.

Along the front the pubs are full

and in The Lamb two youths

beat themselves up over the words to the old song

but draw only a glance from the landlord,

a character, who spent his best years

working the treacherous coast of Bohemia

and still can’t believe he ran aground here.

The Archaeologist

He arrived by National Express, though

the railway remained a sporadic

possibility. Or disappointment.

Delete as appropriate.

He showed us maps and legends,

histories to explain how

we’d happened. The decades fell away

like ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Prelude for Glass Harmonica
• Uchronie
• Maps & Legends
• Goose Summer