He is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Edge Hill University, Lancashire, and edits Pages as a blogzine. He can be heard reading poems on The Archive of the Now. Sheppard's writing - of the left, and engaged with the ethics of poetics, questions, through his critical and literary works - the conservatism of much of British poetry - and is one of the key ouevres, in the last thirty years, of the UK "other" community of poets and writers, sometimes known as linguistically innovative.
Erotic Elegy
After Sigismunds Vidbergs’ Revolution (1925)
You thrash open the thick
Curtain interrupted we see
The troops bayonets
Fixed for entry they howl
For your sacks of gold
I moan for your reserves
Of desire both buried
I pillow against you breasts
Plumped in my shift
Brutal daylight
Shafts the length of my smooth
Legs from cool thigh
To bejewelled heel as I
Touch your arm I feel
You’re ready to split and
Spill but we tremble as one
Providential storks on
The drapery shake
A pane crashes somewhere
I know they’ll crack open
My curves like a shell
They’re weak with war my
Enriched lips captive on
Your captured plush will
Offer full account in
The speech of the Phoenix
That now I see is what smoulders
Upon the auspicious drape
August/October 2007
---
from ‘Out of Nowhere’
from Warrant Error
You build from song
an architecture of tumbles
a dance of stumbles on a shelf of air.
You name this the space left by the human.
You excavate Babylon
and the ribbons of tight ink on Pinkas Synagogue wall
with the surnames’ bejewelled rubrication
(Whenever erased they’re re-written
the act of their scrubbing
inscribed anew)
Stones leaning splinter through time
for those with no names
possess no death. You ex-
hume the ex-human in human unfinish
After the Last Word
of the dead text necrophliles come
our next words
which yet survive
as reasons
for living happily out
of nowhere and now
and then on to multitopia bearing
the stories so far
whose passions read as co-
eval becomings
geographies of affect in
capital Isness where
human unfinish is all about
‘… comme l’aube l’azur timide…’
She hangs heavy from her corset for this story
so far. She raises the arc of one red-dotted brow
and flutters firework lashes at her fist-headed vamp
They scowl into each other’s dark eyes but see only
nipples espying their true love through peepholes
The boy loves their leather fronds their clamped chokers.
He licks along twisted seams across buckled tattoos
through the purple mesh on their big legs swinging.
They mould themselves with man-maid passions.
She pushes her sex through his clench of meat
until her blind phallus drops as its straps sag.
Chained cuffs cover his un-pouched cock-ring.
She shrinks his gaze she bites her fake nails
while her lover’s glove kisses his lips, and he swoons
The poem sends itself from anywhere
to your little box there it replays it
over and over. No redial no recall.
Dead ears drop in your lap. Pause.
No reply possible skip onto Message Two
I see the twin cathedrals they’re twisting below
terror has been hijacked by artifice. Commas cower
along Hope St
spluttering towards the radio tower full stop
That was your fake captain speaking
through me printing fear backwards
through his script. Out of nowhere
poems by Robert Sheppard
Comments