Against Gravity: the title alludes to our struggle with mortality as we age and, by contrast, the pleasures of play, imagination, creativity. Robert Saxton’s latest poetry book is dedicated to a friend whose heart gave out on a Scottish mountain. But in counterpoint to the elegaic, it offers humour too, often with dark overtones.

The subject matter is wide-ranging – from the late Queen Elizabeth II to the pitfalls of indexing, from Nero’s state theatre to trouser suits for modern brides, from a bat roost in a Portuguese library to the Hollywood Sign.

The book concludes with a visit to Vita Sackville-West’s garden at Sissinghurst, Kent, exploring intergenerational friendship as well as Vita’s visionary genius and unconventional love life. Wherever his focus falls, Saxton shows accomplished craftsmanship and an eye for telling detail, with surprises on every page.

CONTENTS

An asterisk indicates that the poem is published in full after the Contents listing.

The Lie Detector Telephone

Everywhere She Goes*

Safe House

Lost and Found

On Resistance

Travelling Light*

Sky Song

The Murmur*

The Lie Detector Telephone

Observations on an Index

Transcendence

The School of Athens

The Gospels of Saint Augustine

Transcendence

Guardian Angels

The Hori-Hori Trowel

Against Gravity

Abstracts

Amidst Her Ruins

Strange Meeting

The Nightwatchman

War and Probate

Valley of Horses

Some Endings*

The Oxford Comma*

The Hamlet

The Hori-Hori Trowel

On Not Climbing Ben More

The Pilgrimage

The Bodyline Bride

The Row over Nero’s Theatre

The Knowledge

The Sign

Anchors Aweigh!

The Aylesbury Lads*

Against Animation

Majuscules

Nature Party

Small Talk

The Invisible Man

The Egg Problem

The Bodyline Bride*

Sailing to Mixolydia

Of Dawn and Dew

Hawthorn Tea

The Broad Walk

Pissard’s Plum

Larch Avenue*

Of Dawn and Dew

The Rise and Fall of the Elm

Orlando

The Ice Cream Van*

Orlando: Annika in Vita’s Garden

SELECTED POEMS

EVERYWHERE SHE GOES

Money is coarse. Her subjects take the taint.

The humble glow. They smile their Sunday best.

And everywhere she goes the Queen smells paint.

She’s there for them that is and them that ain’t.

Toffs drop their aitches in the jabberfest.

Money is coarse. Her subjects take the taint.

Some pilgrims sell their souls to view the saint,

her crown more halo than its jewels attest.

And everywhere she goes the Queen smells paint.

Jewels outshine cash – imperially quaint,

like stars, the wearer’s heavenly worth unguessed.

Money is coarse. Her subjects take the taint.

Having paid her prince’s ransom in restraint,

she pales, as shame starts rising in the west.

And everywhere she goes the Queen smells paint.

Her haughty steeds clop fictional and faint.

One groom is sacked before he’s even dressed.

Money is coarse. Her subjects take the taint.

And everywhere she goes the Queen smells paint.

TRAVELLING LIGHT

Unawakened loving

is nourished by needing –

egoscope roving,

collecting, stampeding.

Unawakened living

is your view while speeding –

to love without giving,

to write without reading.

THE MURMUR

Om – OMG!

The cosmos sings! A few can hear

     its soft wild background murmur,

its love song from the wild frontier.

     Then wonder shades to worry,

     as Earth, distressed, gets warmer.

We share forebodings with our friends.

     We start to say we’re sorry,

     we say we’ll make amends.

Diehards dismiss the cosmic sphere,

     the sound comes from inside us,

dark twisted throbs inside the ear

     that seal us in our sorrow.

     The cosmos can’t abide us.

We’re just its awful waking dream,

     the murmur of tomorrow,

     tomorrow’s pent-up scream.

SOME ENDINGS

Some endings have such richness in their flow,

the night taking its temper from the day.

You sport a smile when love gets up to go.

Housefuls of time hold all you need to know,

the momentary stars sustaining casual clay.

Some endings have such richness in their flow.

Far-off appointments, comet-like, will grow

into your week-to-view, pointing your way.

You sport a smile when love gets up to go.

Sweet long goodbyes precede the strict hello,

foreseen, embraced and prompting one to say

some endings have such richness in their flow.

Your hearth and home’s an archipelago,

wild oceans calling all the while you stay.

You sport a smile when love gets up to go.

Resting, you relish teeming tides below,

a gathering of kin, a quietening of play.

Some endings have such richness in their flow

you sport a smile when love gets up to go.

THE OXFORD COMMA

I,

The comma, fluttering, settles on a leaf –

a restful pause, a promise for the eye.

Then off it flits, its kingdom folded back

into the lunacy of darting haste.

Briefly, just now, the moment made more sense,

with reassuring logic, thought by thought.

The comma, like a breath, swung on our trust

in natural rhythms working hearts forget.

II,

We live, love, lose. What next? The comma knows

as much as we could guess if we were weak

enough to fall into our fears and fail.

One slip might catch the moment like a sail

and take us farther than we’re safe to go,

deep into empty space where nothing feels

quite like the world our humble hands caressed.

The comma, free, goes dancing down a stream.

And III.

When sometimes sad things happen, loss on loss,

there’s no corrupt intention, only luck,

the parasite of time. We used to thank

the sun for each new glint in our parade,

our serial consequence. The archive drifts,

like summer leaves brought down before their day,

whispers that never stop, telling of all

our harms, regrets, anxieties, and hopes.

THE AYLESBURY LADS

A Wessex jet washing song

[ADVERTORIAL]

The Aylesbury lads if they had their own way

would get sauced in the snug of The King’s Head all day

but the sauce soaks up cash and their sole income stream

is our chicken shed high-pressure jet washing team.

For a purge of your shed with an almighty spray

that will magic your shit, muck and feathers away

between flocks in a rigorous cleaning regime,

make a call to our high-pressure jet washing team.

If you do and we come and you watch us at work,

you’ll see that we don’t know the meaning of shirk –

those pasty-faced lads may turn out to be pants

but we don’t let them handle the high-pressure lance.

They’ll sometimes turn green, double up and be sick –

then we’re there with our high-pressure hose, double quick,

to sluice out their puke from the floor we’ve just washed.

Guess what? They’re hungover … or maybe still sloshed.

In Aylesbury, a town that wins prizes for gloom,

John lives in the pub in the landlord’s spare room

and James in a bedsit as damp as a drain.

They’re both young offenders we’re trying to retrain.

But they’re pickling their organs in rivers of drink

and they’re deaf to our pleas to step back from the brink.

And they’re done for – so don’t expect top workmanship.

Just cut them some slack and Christ! leave them a tip.

For a purge of your shed with an almighty spray

that will magic your shit, muck and feathers away

between flocks in a rigorous cleaning regime,

you can bank on our high-pressure jet washing team.

THE BODYLINE BRIDE

A new trend’s caught the fashion police off guard.

The recent British Vogue ‘Modern Bridal

Edit’ features three trouser options – hard

for die-hards to believe. Sometimes the tidal

wave of change will wash up the wildest card!

Marrying maids this year have not been idle:

web searches for ‘white suits’ have hit the roof

as mindful brides aspire to be future-proof.

Revolution has reached the shopping plaza too.

Several high street wedding collections boast

trouser and jump suits. You can pledge ‘I do’

in a cropped-leg two-piece of the utmost

sophistication, in white or power blue,

with sequins and beads – buy now from Ivory Coast!

Styles range from Downtown Moll to Shepherdess.

The modern bride has gamely divorced the dress.

The catwalk makes the perfect practice aisle

(one fashion house sat all its guests in pews).

Trousers will gracefully take you the extra mile.

The jump-suited heroine storms the fashion news.

Satin trousers paired with a gossamer veil,

and similar groovy garb, get great reviews.

Add train, cape and gloves for a retro bridal feel,

channelling Mum to spice up the appeal.

This trend suits Western tastes, Christian or non-

religious. For a registry do, any bride

will gleefully experiment, just for fun,

with radical attire, worn with defiant pride.

One rock star took her vows dressed as a nun.

Even church can take a leg show in its stride,

for what’s impious in seeking to cause a stir?

Think of the East, where trousers are de rigueur.

There’s another, social factor to bear in mind.

A modern wedding can be a gala spread

over several days, and brides will be inclined

to ring the changes often – staying ahead

of the curve’s hardwired in womankind.

One outfit for the pre-nup party, one to wed,

one for the dance floor, all worn with panache.

Legs make good sense for the three-day wedding bash.

The fashion’s optimal habitat is the island

wedding – jump suits and trousers being even more

at ease with tropical sun, sea and sand

than with an indoor aisle. On a palm-fringed shore,

wave-cooled, breeze-ruffled, jump-suited and tanned,

the island bride defies the ocean’s roar

to pose for a sunset photo, contre jour,

with fill-in flash to flaunt her hot couture.

LARCH AVENUE

Kew Gardens, March

In frosty dawns the larches start to sing

their conjurings of bright green coronets

like miniature elvish party hats strung

along hanging shoots in sheets of song,

emoji-like – loose staves of morning notes.

And then you see scarlet-and-green mitres,

miracles of meticulous enamel

artistry, as the mist of your breath clears –

cabinet of a devout midwife’s tears

for the exiled female pope, turned crystal-

line. But your tears flow, since winter scarcely

hurt for once: already spring has brought

its tragic joy, the lengthening days that slow

the fierce arithmetic of life below

stairs or stars, in kitchen or papal court.

All beauty needs its nearby monument.

Each worn-out rose in dense dull clusters keens

along bare twigs, the soul-like seeds all spent,

soft flesh bewitched to wood’s die-hard lament,

like heads suspended from a bridge: proud cones.

THE ICE CREAM VAN

Emerson College, Forest Row, East Sussex; one Saturday in May,

with Anna and Andrew

A friendly giant, the farmland’s half-asleep,

tucked up, dreaming her miniature empire.

Only her subjects count, then dream of, sheep:

she likes her animals less like clouds, happier

in mud. Leaning on a five-bar gate, we admire,

in their transit camp of tin, enormous pigs.

Two-tone-headed jackdaws take to the air,

up to no good, in ragged glides and jigs.

There’s a broad swathe of tall, thick grass between

our gate and the bare, sodden, mashed-up ground

of the piggery. And here, till now unseen,

a piglet parts the grasses, briefly revealed,

but lost again no sooner than it’s found.

Then look! – seven siblings, all in retreat

from the dangers of an exotic field,

wild veldt, drawn back to mamma’s teat.

And while one sucks, the cut-price siren call

of an ice cream van punctures the rustic dream,

touting a much less primal treat to enthral

invisible children, all but those told

the music means it’s run out of ice cream,

sounding the alarm as the invisible vehicle

speeds back to the dairy. Good-as-gold

kids, even in dark times, remain agreeable.

The racket has touched our sensibilities

only lightly, like a gnat on a bare arm.

The distant woods, immune to the surprise

of these insistent, tiresome doorbell chimes,

absorb stray noises into their fertile charm.

Tensioned in time, in layer on layer they’re stacked,

in echoing shapes, and blue-green shades, like rhymes,

abused for centuries yet still intact.

..................

Some thematic/structural connections

The Lie Detector Telephone ] social contact / humanity and the cosmos

Everywhere She Goes ] royal life villanelle

Safe House ] suburban life villanelle

Lost and Found

On Resistance

Travelling Light

Sky Song ] both poems address

The Murmur ] our relationship with nature - - ‘Sky Song’ is also a coded break-up poem

The Lie Detector Telephone ] rhymes and lineation borrowed from George Herbert, 'The Collar’

Observations on an Index ] end of section: natural place for an index

Transcendence ] nature / spirit

The School of Athens ] interpretation of Raphael’s Sistine Chapel painting: transcendence and nature

The Gospels of Saint Augustine ] intimations of transcendence

Transcendence ] one theory of transcendence

Guardian Angels ] animal/human symbiosis

The Hori-Hori Trowel ] mortality / transience

Against Gravity ] loss of father

Abstracts ] loss of father

Amidst Her Ruins ] loss of mother / brain flakes

Strange Meeting ] ‘You’ve mourned your parents with sufficient grief’ / menacing apparition / brain flakes

The Nightwatchman ] menacing apparition

War and Probate ] impact of war

Valley of Horses ] premonition of war

Some Endings ] peaceful passing, surrounded by family

The Oxford Comma ] ‘our serial consequence’

The Hamlet ] ‘some die on the way’

The Hori-Hori Trowel ] loss of friend / form borrowed from George Herbert

On Not Climbing Ben More ] loss of friend

The Pilgrimage ] loss of friend is, for his daughter, loss of father

The Bodyline Bride ] imagination / transgression / people in groups

The Row over Nero’s Theatre ] culture wars

The Knowledge ] culture wars / communal pacifism vs activism - ‘our Athenian hill’

The Sign ] another city hill

Anchors Aweigh! ] leisure

The Aylesbury Lads ] labour

Against Animation

Majuscules

Nature Party

Small Talk ] low self-esteem

The Invisible Man ] low self-esteem / cultural intelligence

The Egg Problem ] cultural intelligence / arrogance / ottava rima

The Bodyline Bride ] ottava rima / prospective couples

Sailing to Mixolydia ] prospective couple?

Of Dawn and Dew ] poems about trees

Hawthorn Tea ] poem for Anna

The Broad Walk

Pissard’s Plum ] a poem with imperial (Moslem) overtones

Larch Avenue ] two poems with

Of Dawn and Dew ] papal overtones

The Rise and Fall of the Elm ] imperial overtones (Roman)

Orlando ] poems for Anna

The Ice Cream Van ] two southeast England

Orlando: Annika in Vita’s Garden ] poems

A note on Orlando: three layers of identity

This poem is a celebration of intergenerational friendship. It was written for Anna’s birthday - she was 31, I was 68. I inhabit the character of the younger friend, Anna/Annika, while also being the older friend, me/Mr Frome. As the giver of a book (actually pamphlet) I’ve written for her, I’m also Virginia Woolf to Anna’s Vita: hence the title, Orlando. Annika’s binoculars (a gift from Mr Frome), her veganism and her difficult childhood all have real-life parallels.