Collected Poems (Salt Modern Poets) - Tapa blanda

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Kenneth Allott (1912-1973) was a leading poet of the Thirties generation, publishing two collections of poetry: Poems (1938) and The Ventriloquist's Doll (1943). He was also the editor of the highly influential Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse (1950, rev. 1962). His Collected Poems has been out of print for a number of years, and this updated and revised new edition includes a significant number of poems either previously unpublished or not reprinted.

Michael Murphy is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Allottments (2008), and his poems are included in The New Irish Poets. He is the author of a number of critical studies, including Writing Liverpool?:?Essays and Interviews (edited with Deryn Rees-Jones, 2007) and Proust and America (2007). He teaches at Nottingham Trent University and lives in Liverpool. He died in 2009.

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Lament for a Cricket Eleven

For S. T.

Beyond the edge of the sepia

Rises the weak photographer

With the moist moustaches and the made-up tie.

He looked with his mechanical eye,

And the upshot was that they had to die.

Portrait of the Eleven nineteen-o-five

To show when these missing persons were last alive.

Two sit in Threadneedle Street like gnomes.

One is a careless schoolmaster

Busy with carved desks, honour and lines.

He is eaten by a wicked cancer.

They have detectives to watch their homes.

From the camera hood he looks at the faces

Like the spectral pose of the praying mantis.

Watch for the dicky-bird. But, O my dear,

That bird will not migrate this year.

Oh for a parasol, oh for a fan

To hide my weak chin from the little man.

One climbs mountains in a storm of fear,

Begs to be unroped and left alone.

One went mad by a tape-machine.

One laughed for a fortnight and went to sea.

Like a sun one follows the jeunesse doree.

With his hand on the bulb he looks at them.

The smiles on their faces are upside down.

‘I’ll turn my head and spoil the plate.’

‘Thank you, gentlemen.’ Too late. Too late.

One greyhead was beaten in a prison riot.

He needs injections to keep him quiet.

Another was a handsome clergyman,

But mortification has long set in.

One keeps six dogs in an unlit cellar.

The last is a randy bachelor.

The photographer in the norfolk jacket

Sits upstairs in his darkroom attic.

His hand is expert at scissors and pin.

The shadows lengthen, the days draw in,

And the mice come out round the iron stove.

‘What I am doing, I am doing for love.

When shall I burn this negative

And hang the receiver up on grief?’