Name: Stairwell
ISBN: 9780224101684

Michael Longley

Stairwell

Gavin

Flickers between the Classical general and the wattle-byre specific. All really personal – but not in the universally interesting melodramatic way. It is personal in the way that hanging around the vestibule of a friend of a friend of a friend’s house when one didn’t know they were dropping past and one quite needs the toilet is personal. Also, it’s full up with the (apparently haute Irish?) obsession with Attic Greece. One or two amazing ones – see “Amelia’s Poem” : 

 Amelia, your newborn name
 Combines with the midwife’s word
 And, like smoke from driftwood fires
 Wafts over the lochside road
 Past the wattle byre – hay bales
 For ponies, Silver and Whisper –
 Between drystone walls’ river-
 Rounded moss-clad ferny stones,
 Through the fenceless gate and gorse
 To the flat erratic boulder
 Where otters and your mother rest,
 Spraints black as your meconium,
 Fish bones, fish scales, shitty sequins
 Reflecting what light remains.

Stairwell

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