Song
Toby Martinez De Las Rivas
faber new poets 2
An ‘arrogant little tool,’ that was Migdale.
All five foot four of him.
Always scratching his head and looking pained and adjusting himself.
The last time I saw him, it was his well-fed silhouette
straddling the gate in half-light,
‘too busy’ to come in good time for the birth, and ‘too poor’ for the vet,
instead he came like a thief in the night,
shooing the crows and draping an inverse, eyeless thing
over his shoulder with disdain like a soiled boa.
As he sloped away, his back grew dark with burst caul, the slipped halo
of that ‘poor fellow.’
Goodbye, little song.
Goodbye, Migdale.
They said in the village you were an absentee landlord, a shirker, a fool.
But nightfall and sun-up wait at your beck and call.
Toby Martinez de las Rivas was born in 1978. He grew up in Somerset, then moved to the north east of England after studying history and archaeology at Durham where he began writing. He won an Eric Gregory award in 2005 and the Andrew Waterhouse award from New Writing North in 2008. His poems have appeared in a number of magazines.
He currently lives in Gateshead where he teaches English to asylum seekers and refugees.
German Phenomenology Makes Me Want
to Strip and Run through North London
Heather Phillipson
faber new poets 3
Page seven – I’ve had enough of Being and Time
and of clothing. Many streakers seek quieter locations
and Marlborough Road’s unreasonably quiet tonight.
If it were winter I’d be intellectual, but it’s Tuesday
and I’d rather be outside, naked, than learned –
rather lap the tarmac escarpment of Archway Roundabout
wearing only a rucksack. It might come in useful.
I can’t take any more of Heidegger’s dasein-diction,
I say as I jettison my slippers.
When I speak of my ambition
it is not to be a Doctor of Letters
or to marry Friedrich Nietzsche, it turns out,
or to think better.
It is to give up this fashion for dressing.
It is to drop my robe on the communal stairs
and open the front door onto the commuter hour,
my neighbour, his Labrador, and say nothing
of what I know or do not know, except what my body announces.
Heather Phillipson was brought up in London and Wales. She has received commissions and awards for her writing, including the Michael Donaghy Poetry Prize in 2007 and an Eric Gregory Award in 2008. She is also an artist and exhibits nationally and internationally, with recent shows in London, Paris and New York. She has a PhD in Fine Art practice and received the Sir Leslie Joseph Young Artist Award 2009.
