Nick Laird, Go Giants
My friend Nick has a new collection of poetry, Go Giants – just released by Faber & Faber in the UK. I haven’t read it yet, but The Guardian gave it a rave review last week and says this collection is “easily his most accomplished to date.” That bar was already high. I’m thinking of one of Nick’s poems from his debut collection, To A Fault, that I love especially. It’s about insomnia and, as he says, “the leaps the mind makes when you can’t get to sleep.”
You can hear him read it at this link.
The Evening Forecast for The Region by Nick Laird.
The weatherman for Boston ponders whether, I’d bet not,
the snowstorm coming north will come to town tonight.
I swim around in bed. My head’s attempting to begin
its routine shift down through the old transmission
to let me make the slope and slip the gearstick into neutral at the crown
before freewheeling down the ocean road descent into the ghost town,
there, the coastal one, with a stone pier bare as skin, familiar
seafront houses hunched and boarded-over for the winter,
and beside the tattered nets a rowing boat lies upturned on the beach.
Aside from a mongrel, inside, asleep at someone’s slippered feet,
everything faces the sea. But the plumbing’s sighs are almost human.
Airlocks collect and slide from duct to duct so the radiators whine.
The hiding places grow further hidden. A priesthole’s given over
to a spider’s architecture. A well tries on a grassy manhole cover,
threaded, dangerous as fingers. An ivied sycamore in the forest at Drum Manor,
resonant and upright and empty as an organ pipe, where for a panicked hour
a boy will not be found. I arch one foot to scratch the other.
I would shed myself to segue into sleep. I would enter
but the opening is of a new off-Broadway Hamlet. The gulf is war.
This hiatus, my father’s hernia. The cleft’s a treble on the score
of Scott Joplin’s Entertainer. This respite is a care home,
the recess a playground. This division I slither into is a complicated sum:
thirteen over seven. I give in. I turn the television on.
The weatherman for Boston is discussing how, Thank Heaven,
the snowstorm missed, and turned, and headed out to sea.
Is it particularly human, this, to lie awake? To touch the papery
encircling bark but watch through a knot, and wait?
Everyone on earth is sleeping. I am the keel-scrape
beneath their tidal breathing which is shifting down through tempo
to the waveform of the sea. The gathered even draw and lift of air.
Further east a blizzard of homogenous decisions breathes above
the folding and unfolding pane and counterpane of waves
as if the white so loves the world it tries to make a map of it,
exact and blank to start again, but the sea will not stay under it.
The ricepaper wafers are melting. Millions of babynails cling
to the wind lifting hoarsely off the Atlantic. The whole thing
is mesmeric. For hours the snow will fall like rhythm.
Listen.
