ABOUT THE POEMS In these poems by Anna Selby, human beings are always gravitating from earth and air towards water. It is as if the transcendence they seek (the desire to “leap/hot out of your own life”) requires a physical departure from the very medium they inhabit. Selby’s ringing titles evoke not just a subject but a sensibility, and her versatile forms and deftly run-on lines very persuasively reenact the thrill of sense experience and the shape of thought. We see how the lyric poem works both to slow down our world, teasing out the many disparate elements of our experience, and to reorient it, by exposing an entire universe of instincts, paradoxes, and mysteries beneath all that we know, or think we know.
Swimming in the Abandoned Quarry
It’s like dying, you shout,
then leap
hot out of your own life.
But such a short death:
your feet barely down
before your head crowns,
so the pool seems confused:
a blue-skinned creature
trembling at its own dream.
When we dive,
we dive with our hands
and legs bound—
dead meat
hung upside down.
The water wakes.
Watch it choke.
Feel a beast-heart bloat,
swell,
then settle,
like a parachute
in the night trees.
Is it Too Late for the Bath
given that all the car doors
have shut and the last foot rang
the drain cover—our gong—
and the foxes
imitating dogs
are lapping the dark tennis court,
where only leaves dry as rice
roll over the sidelines
and back across
in a slumbering waltz?
We are no use if we can’t see
the boundaries’ white marks.
Given this, and the ominous
shapes anointing the sink,
it is too late to turn the tap
East in a shared house
where the old Estonian sleeps,
and the heavy German
wakes at the flinch
of a match.
How Sundays Would Sound if People Described Them
A fly dies on a windowsill. It rains
a lot in a small town. A man thinks he’s seen
his dead father in the shed again. The crux is
there’s a fox in the garden, where there’s never
been one before. Someone has a rambunctious dream.
Sussex horticultural show—nobody knows who’s won.
A girl runs through a wood, wet, then sits. A couple
have sex on the worktop, it’s the last time, afterwards
they discover there isn’t enough bread. A man
summarises a year’s Sundays, as if they were
lift-pitches for uncommissioned films.