LIVERPOOL POETS 2008
Scott Thurston
Scott Thurston’s most recent book is Hold, published by Shearsman in 2006. Previous works include Poems (Writers Forum, 1991), State(s)walk(s) (Writers Forum, 1994) and Turns (with Robert Sheppard) (Ship of Fools/Radiator, 2003). Scott lectures in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Salford. He has published widely on Linguistically Innovative Poetry covering the work of Allen Fisher, Adrian Clarke, John Wilkinson, Maggie O’Sullivan, Ulli Freer, Ira Lightman, Geraldine Monk and Tony Lopez. He edits The Radiator, a little magazine of poetry and poetics and is has just completed editing The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk. A new sequence of ninety poems called Momentum, is due out with Shearsman in 2008. See Scott’s pages at www.archiveofthenow.com/ for photo, reviews, poetics, recordings and more.
THE SCRATCH
There are truths that even poetry is not decent for:
A language of brittle accents written in the dark against
The shutters. My self spun out a thin thread between
Two posts that dare to imagine a life more easily lived
Without you but which I know could not be better. The truth
Is that I simply find myself fragile, beaten-thin – make a virtue
of that. Within it are small shapes that denote a person and the
fact that your greatest sadness was experienced as a reaction to
an imagined, universal horror does not just leave you nowhere.
Gold to aery thinness beat but not down nor out: traverse
a steep gully or construct a lean to. These poor materials
Are enough because the provisional construction is only
Ever a necessity and not an affected choice. I cannot read
The words I am writing nor see the flowers beneath my feet,
But I can hear the sounds of the night and they are human
And animal and a big black cosmic nothing. It’s just the noise
Of a car passing and stopping somewhere nearby.
© Scott Thurston 2005
Anyone wishing to contact Scott can do so through emma.jackson@linuxmail.org
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