Allison McVety: Selected Poems

Allison McVety

• Publisher: Smith|Doorstop Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781910367117
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Allison McVety's first collection, The Night Trotsky Came to Stay (Smith/Doorstop, 2007), was the overall winner of the 2006 Book & Pamphlet Competition, and was shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection Prize 2008. Her poems have appeared in The Times, The Guardian, Poetry Review and Poetry London, have been broadcast on BBC radio and anthologised in the Forward Poems of the Decade 20022011 and The Best British Poetry 2013. A second collection, Miming Happiness, was published in 2010 and a third, Lighthouses in 2014. In 2011 Allison won the National Poetry Competition and in 2013 was recorded at the Southbank Centre for the Poetry Library's 60th anniversary.

from Lighthouses (2014)

To the Lighthouse

i The Window

It was Virginia’s charcoaled stare

that put me off: her disappointment

in me, the reader, before I even started.

So I walked in to the exam without her:

without the easel, the skull or the shawl,

the well-turned stocking, Minta’s

missing brooch. In the hall I watched

the future show its pulse and all the girls,

the girls who’d read the book, set off

together, lined up at desks and rowing.

ii Time Passes

You need a daubière and too much time –

three days’ absence from the plot. Rump

bathed overnight in brandy, a stout red

brought back from France. The liquor’s

boiled once, added back to beef, calf’s foot,

lardons, les legumes. For six hours – or more –

it idles. It can’t be over-cooked. It will not

spoil. At table, a stream of consciousness

breaks out. And it rains. It rains. If not

the stew what was this woman on about.

iii The Lighthouse

The year I gave the book another go,

[the year my mother died], I learned

everything big happens in parenthesis –

marriage, birth, the War. Poetry. Is it the full

manuscript or just the bits in the middle

that count. Is it the woman at the window,

marking the hours, from cover to cover –

or these few lines: that as she eased out from

the bank and in to the water the brackets

of it opened and closed about her.

Finlandia

What I know about death is Sibelius

on the high-fidelity music centre, dad

listening in the dark, gas off, still

in his wind cheater with corduroy trim;

Sibelius so high it distorts the angles of the day;

Sibelius until the street light’s eye

is replaced by a cold sun’s watch,

by which time my dad has remade my mother

into a living woman, so that we are

not driving the three hundred miles north –

through a slurry of questions with two dogs,

no answers and the wrong clothes for the weather –

just to be with him, and, my sisters similarly,

are not made small again by her absence –

not lost on a day out in Cleethorpes,

waiting at school gates or serving endless

PG Tips and fig biscuits that no one’s

going to touch; no, my dad plays Sibelius

with the windows wide, so unfathomably loud

that the neighbours hear it the length of the street;

unaware of this remaking of the day’s events

they don’t hammer the walls with their shoes

or come to the door to reason or try even

to blot it out with Nat King Cole,

Deanna Durban or Manuel’s Music of the Mountains,

instead they listen, mourn in their living rooms,

perhaps with a small port or Mackeson’s...

Table of contents

• from The Night Trotsky Came to Stay (2007)
• from Miming Happiness (2010)
• from Lighthouses (2014)
• Notes