Michael Schmidt: Selected Poems

Michael Schmidt

• Publisher: Smith|Doorstop Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781910367148
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

The Selected Poem ebooks are a new 'digitalonly' series drawn from the works of smith|doorstop poets published during the last 26 years. Michael Schmidt was born in Mexico in 1947. He studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford. He is Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University and a Writer in Residence at St John's College, Cambridge. He is a founder (1969) and editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press Limited, and a founder (1972) and general editor of PN Review. An anthologist, translator, critic and literary historian, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and received an O.B.E. in 2006 for services to poetry.

Choosing a Guest: Selected Poems (1987)

Faith

When I cannot believe,

The brown herds still move across green fields

Into the tufty hills, and I was born

Higher, where I could watch them as a bird might.

When even memory seems imagined, what

Can I bring to prayer? A pair of knees.

The great faith that built a stair to heaven

As now my memory tries to climb a hill,

Becomes an old stone building, a deaf priest

Whose hand is in the pockets of his parish,

Who longs to buy a bell he’ll never hear.

The water in the font is cold, I trace

A circle on my brow and not a cross.

The Road

The road is long and flat.

Where does it intend?

To where the sky’s blue lip

Seals with the darkening ground.

Here a milestone names

A town before nightfall.

And the name! The name of the town

Is like the name of a girl.

I fall in love with the name

And with the speck of a spire

That at each footfall grows

Out of the plain expanse.

It focuses the eye,

Makes vacancy a scene.

Before the roofs appear

I people the unknown streets --

There moves every desire

A lonely walker owns.

I mouth the name like a prayer.

Milestones answer for her.

Perspective is reduced

Until both earth and sky

Are lost in the approach.

I see the first pale lamps.

It is the name I love,

And seeds I plant in the name.

A spangled silhouette,

The first smells of the town.

Here is the outer gate,

A dog, a beggar, and small

The houses are, and the spire

Sounds one clanking bell.

Brisk with certainty,

I choose the principal street

Looking for the heart

And still obtuse with love.

And that was the town. Ahead

The road is long and flat

To where the sky’s dark lip

Seals with the darkening ground.

The Pond

There were no willows but there was a pond

Steep at the edges where I sat and stared

Past my reflection, deep into seeming light.

As I grew older, so the carp grew large,

Green among weed or gold, or turned

A silver belly up; in autumn brisk,

While in the summer they lay stunned, inert.

A child might drown in such a pond, I heard.

Watching there, for a time I was a child.

One summer it was hot for days and days.

Green skin spread on the water, water-weed

Broke through the surface, and at last the bed

Began to parch, what little damp remained

Was stagnant and then mud in which the fish

Pulsed gracelessly, snared like wingless birds.

No more reflections then: I walked among

The large fish that for years had drawn my eye

And saw them take the air to heart, and how

They urged their bodies under the wilted weeds

And died. Incurious birds

Dropped from the air among them, finding food.

Too late the rain came, and I saw my face

Again on water, rippled by a breeze

Or on calm days whole and staring deep

Where wat...

Table of contents

• from Desert of the Lions (1972)
• from My Brother Gloucester (1976)
• A Change of Affairs (1978)
• Choosing a Guest: Selected Poems (1987)