Olivia Cole
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Still in her early twenties at the time of writing, Olivia Cole was born and raised in Kent, educated at Oxford, and now works as a journalist in London. A winner of the Eric Gregory Award, she quickly made her mark as a poet through the unforced romanticism of her conversational rhythms, as if she had found the most disarming possible way of going public with her diary. But there was an additional element that promised something else: an engagement with a history beyond her own. Figures from politics and the arts get into her poetry as characters, populating it with unexpected drama. This combination of a buttonholing personal voice and a curious engagement with a wider world gives her more recent poetry an unusually rich play of tone, a reportorial lyricism that many older poets would find it hard to match. Although the subtle shifts of register are all hers, however, her strategic approach to poetic narrative almost certainly owed something to the late Michael Donaghy, the American grey eminence behind so many of the more startling young poets in London now. His is the instructor’s voice to be heard echoing at the parade of talents in the little anthology Ask For It By Name, featuring, among other products of his boot-camp, Olivia Cole as the youngest in the squad
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A to Z
Just there in the park
is where we used to lie
and burn. The sun,
flecks of gold in your hair,
your head heavy in my lap,
face open to the sky,
eyes closed in a slow blink
that missed me
squinting to read you
like a timetable or map.
is where we used to lie
and burn. The sun,
flecks of gold in your hair,
your head heavy in my lap,
face open to the sky,
eyes closed in a slow blink
that missed me
squinting to read you
like a timetable or map.
Bathers at Asnières
Move in too close and this world could fall
apart — sit far enough away and let weekenders
float by, adding girls and wives to the stolen
Monday leisure of basking men and boys.
Let you and I remain convinced of the chase
and flirt of two punts, their slow dance, and
close call, of book and newspaper being read,
let the leather of boots seem hard enough, from here,
for walking. Forget the hand and eye of the puppeteer
who, sketch book and models abandoned somewhere
near Asnières, found the true false suppleness
of a girl in a pool, convinced that like a ballerina she
can stretch and fly, the ease and arrogance of weightlessness
letting him cast by once more from the other side
of the decade, world and river: re-finding a boy's hat
as red, and penciling out the discarded clothes of lovers.
apart — sit far enough away and let weekenders
float by, adding girls and wives to the stolen
Monday leisure of basking men and boys.
Let you and I remain convinced of the chase
and flirt of two punts, their slow dance, and
close call, of book and newspaper being read,
let the leather of boots seem hard enough, from here,
for walking. Forget the hand and eye of the puppeteer
who, sketch book and models abandoned somewhere
near Asnières, found the true false suppleness
of a girl in a pool, convinced that like a ballerina she
can stretch and fly, the ease and arrogance of weightlessness
letting him cast by once more from the other side
of the decade, world and river: re-finding a boy's hat
as red, and penciling out the discarded clothes of lovers.
Between Some Acts
Victor Emmanuel looks on at the gathering dusk
and crowd. Cast in iron he must be used, by now,
to this purpose in the air, to this sweep of pale sky --
when next I looked away from the arena's stage,
I found it dark. For each act the moon climbed higher.
Sporadic stars disappeared and reappeared through cloud
and bats or tiny birds in phosphorescent free fall, too small to see,
flickered — held, in the spotlight's beam. Moving
to track Carmen, as gently and intently as a lover,
it caught them too, their dark mechanics of flight,
suspended, beating, stagecraft exposed above
the candles and the crowd. All night they hovered before
that paper world, its painted dusk, and cigarette girls,
and later, with real light and another night not far away
she swept, alive, in a haze of bouquets and friends
past the square's cafes — her tiny puppet figure,
pin-holed, near, magnified to laughter, conversation, dawn,
cold wine, the lighting of another and another
cigarette. Unwound now, free for a few hours
till she wakes so late in the day — to the rustle
of cellophane, once more, and feels the day's heat rise
against the shutters, the hours, the wilting flowers.
Body taut as a lizard, her lips mouth lines.
Already in the wings she remembers how the light
must fade, and fearful as a lazy tourist, she waits
to make a break from shade, chased out into brightness.
and crowd. Cast in iron he must be used, by now,
to this purpose in the air, to this sweep of pale sky --
when next I looked away from the arena's stage,
I found it dark. For each act the moon climbed higher.
Sporadic stars disappeared and reappeared through cloud
and bats or tiny birds in phosphorescent free fall, too small to see,
flickered — held, in the spotlight's beam. Moving
to track Carmen, as gently and intently as a lover,
it caught them too, their dark mechanics of flight,
suspended, beating, stagecraft exposed above
the candles and the crowd. All night they hovered before
that paper world, its painted dusk, and cigarette girls,
and later, with real light and another night not far away
she swept, alive, in a haze of bouquets and friends
past the square's cafes — her tiny puppet figure,
pin-holed, near, magnified to laughter, conversation, dawn,
cold wine, the lighting of another and another
cigarette. Unwound now, free for a few hours
till she wakes so late in the day — to the rustle
of cellophane, once more, and feels the day's heat rise
against the shutters, the hours, the wilting flowers.
Body taut as a lizard, her lips mouth lines.
Already in the wings she remembers how the light
must fade, and fearful as a lazy tourist, she waits
to make a break from shade, chased out into brightness.
Cuba Libre
Huge jasmine flowers, bright white
as the clouds that hang around, high up,
will have dwindled to one or none — Wednesday,
Monday's Telegraph is the closest thing to home.
The street's quiet. Vendors sit.
An old man mans the internet café,
high up MUSIC SHOP -- Communication Centre
his sign, paint on tin, swings in the breeze.
He lays for hours flat out on the shop floor's cool,
at dusk, sits outside and gets up, now and then
to switch on one of the machines that groan
at the back of the room. I perch amidst piled up paintings --
large bad ones: sunsets, turbaned women
carry gaudy buckets; boys in shorts picking
unlikely looking fruit in English green fields,
flat as the one you see if you swim out
from the beach, thin board: heavy air and amber
dusk streaked in colour, heavy palms that stoop
to dip in water held more still than here, the north side
of the island where Atlantic waves grow recklessly high,
and soar and crash over American and Canadian
college kids who bodyboard— or boogyboard.
It's all the same — surfing but lying down, possible
on more rum than any pirate ever drank: flying fish,
legs disappearing inside the waves, a cocktail mix
of Margarita salt and coconut oil on sunburned lips,
burned and half drowned on their Easter break.
Out there, with them, I twist my neck. We wait
and wait, for catastrophe: the big one, it's brewing,
it's brewing they yell, leaving me thinking ridiculously of tea,
caught up in wave after wave too strong to have taken on,
gasping, wanting that flat green field, a lime green crease
in the land where there might almost be a cricket
or a baseball game below the rough line of the hills,
charcoal jagged, remember, a rushed first draft;
the short fat clustered palms and few restaurant shacks,
the rocks to the west and the stretched arm
of the bay and to the east, the new beach
last year's storm threw down like a towel,
wanting all this to reappear as easily as, each night,
the lights of the next town. Crusted jewels --
yellow, green, blue — the whole washed up place so small
that there's nothing there all day suddenly
pinned down, glittering, like sequins on the costumes
of the carnival our bus trailed on the way here. Only now
those houses catch the light, like the sea, with its calm,
fooling pools of opal green. The stars are smudged,
their edges taken off by mist or spray from the waves
on a sky as dark as when time after time after
time the lights fail and the room, like all the rest,
plunges into darkness. The whole island gone
for a second that becomes five or six or ten
and surfacing again: flickering, hesitating
the way I do, out there, never sure I'll get up
and run back for more, out where anyone
could disappear with as little oily spirit trace
as ice in a drink, pulled down to nothingness,
reaching up to be let back through to the heavy air,
the beach, the streets and corrugated tin bars
that could crumple easily as cans; the paintings
nobody takes home tacked up in rows; the jasmine
and the empty paper racks, sold out,
with no news due for days.
as the clouds that hang around, high up,
will have dwindled to one or none — Wednesday,
Monday's Telegraph is the closest thing to home.
The street's quiet. Vendors sit.
An old man mans the internet café,
high up MUSIC SHOP -- Communication Centre
his sign, paint on tin, swings in the breeze.
He lays for hours flat out on the shop floor's cool,
at dusk, sits outside and gets up, now and then
to switch on one of the machines that groan
at the back of the room. I perch amidst piled up paintings --
large bad ones: sunsets, turbaned women
carry gaudy buckets; boys in shorts picking
unlikely looking fruit in English green fields,
flat as the one you see if you swim out
from the beach, thin board: heavy air and amber
dusk streaked in colour, heavy palms that stoop
to dip in water held more still than here, the north side
of the island where Atlantic waves grow recklessly high,
and soar and crash over American and Canadian
college kids who bodyboard— or boogyboard.
It's all the same — surfing but lying down, possible
on more rum than any pirate ever drank: flying fish,
legs disappearing inside the waves, a cocktail mix
of Margarita salt and coconut oil on sunburned lips,
burned and half drowned on their Easter break.
Out there, with them, I twist my neck. We wait
and wait, for catastrophe: the big one, it's brewing,
it's brewing they yell, leaving me thinking ridiculously of tea,
caught up in wave after wave too strong to have taken on,
gasping, wanting that flat green field, a lime green crease
in the land where there might almost be a cricket
or a baseball game below the rough line of the hills,
charcoal jagged, remember, a rushed first draft;
the short fat clustered palms and few restaurant shacks,
the rocks to the west and the stretched arm
of the bay and to the east, the new beach
last year's storm threw down like a towel,
wanting all this to reappear as easily as, each night,
the lights of the next town. Crusted jewels --
yellow, green, blue — the whole washed up place so small
that there's nothing there all day suddenly
pinned down, glittering, like sequins on the costumes
of the carnival our bus trailed on the way here. Only now
those houses catch the light, like the sea, with its calm,
fooling pools of opal green. The stars are smudged,
their edges taken off by mist or spray from the waves
on a sky as dark as when time after time after
time the lights fail and the room, like all the rest,
plunges into darkness. The whole island gone
for a second that becomes five or six or ten
and surfacing again: flickering, hesitating
the way I do, out there, never sure I'll get up
and run back for more, out where anyone
could disappear with as little oily spirit trace
as ice in a drink, pulled down to nothingness,
reaching up to be let back through to the heavy air,
the beach, the streets and corrugated tin bars
that could crumple easily as cans; the paintings
nobody takes home tacked up in rows; the jasmine
and the empty paper racks, sold out,
with no news due for days.
Gossip Column
Hats off
to me, who have fallen
for you.
I've been seen,
holding hands,
looking glassy eyed,
with a big grin on my face.
Close to my
West London home,
I've been spotted, with
a real spring in her step
an onlooker said. But
this morning, when I telephoned
myself, I said I didn't want to say
any more, as yet.
to me, who have fallen
for you.
I've been seen,
holding hands,
looking glassy eyed,
with a big grin on my face.
Close to my
West London home,
I've been spotted, with
a real spring in her step
an onlooker said. But
this morning, when I telephoned
myself, I said I didn't want to say
any more, as yet.
Il Duce's Match
Your serve was never great – often out of control,
every other ball would soar so high and plummet
to the ground, whistling as quietly as a bomb,
the fatal one they say you hear or is it never hear . . .
before landing miles out. Second serve.
I remember how time after time, I willed it to go right,
for you to push ball over net with the softness
and precision of a kitten, the relief
of those occasional rallies. You small and hot
and reddening, as three turned into four o'clock,
flagging opposite streams of young diplomats –
all important friendships wooed across those warm weeks –
the need for an ally behind your struggle
to entertain the Yanks, to master tennis:
that summer's most popular and most fashionable
invented game. Our shaded court, the heavy air,
cut by laughter and fifteen love, il Duce,
applause on cue. Let. The ball splicing over,
as close a call as those I would wake to,
listening from our huge white bed, to you
in the bathroom, as you washed and shaved,
only your shadow visible on the cool of the black marble floor
as I resisted the start of each day – content to lie
and listen to the sound of your beauty regime:
the slow scraping of razor across skin, left to right,
straining to reach the very back of the head
you shaved entirely the day you blushed
to find your hair receding – a soft low curse
as occasionally the razor slipped
and caught flesh, those little red flecks of error
that in all those hundreds of posed pictures never
showed up. Prediletto, I think, even now, of how
when time began to run like sand through your hands,
you would wake worrying from the dream
in which you forgot to shave your head,
love fifteen, were late at your desk, and a headline
not penned by you slipped though the net, love thirty,
and you couldn't find an umpire to lie, love forty,
and make decisions, thirty love, at which those lithe American boys
would shake their heads, forty love, and frown, game, set, match,
and shrug, as I stood by waiting with lemonade, Coca Cola
and Pimms, all the latest, necessary fads,
looking from under my broad rimmed expensive hat,
on their gold tanned flesh . . .
I dream too, of those summer days, and wake convinced
even now of what you – dead, defeated
and gone – said you always knew:
that it's the details – piccolo, minuscolo –
that matter most in the end; the seconds
and the split seconds between serves, that shot
that you almost, but not quite, got,
the sun in your eyes, the all important present or absent
breeze in the trees; dreams, in which the world, amore,
is not black and white, but colour –
so that the blood shows up – those minute nicks that through
un-remembering sleep, some mornings, I still reach to kiss.
every other ball would soar so high and plummet
to the ground, whistling as quietly as a bomb,
the fatal one they say you hear or is it never hear . . .
before landing miles out. Second serve.
I remember how time after time, I willed it to go right,
for you to push ball over net with the softness
and precision of a kitten, the relief
of those occasional rallies. You small and hot
and reddening, as three turned into four o'clock,
flagging opposite streams of young diplomats –
all important friendships wooed across those warm weeks –
the need for an ally behind your struggle
to entertain the Yanks, to master tennis:
that summer's most popular and most fashionable
invented game. Our shaded court, the heavy air,
cut by laughter and fifteen love, il Duce,
applause on cue. Let. The ball splicing over,
as close a call as those I would wake to,
listening from our huge white bed, to you
in the bathroom, as you washed and shaved,
only your shadow visible on the cool of the black marble floor
as I resisted the start of each day – content to lie
and listen to the sound of your beauty regime:
the slow scraping of razor across skin, left to right,
straining to reach the very back of the head
you shaved entirely the day you blushed
to find your hair receding – a soft low curse
as occasionally the razor slipped
and caught flesh, those little red flecks of error
that in all those hundreds of posed pictures never
showed up. Prediletto, I think, even now, of how
when time began to run like sand through your hands,
you would wake worrying from the dream
in which you forgot to shave your head,
love fifteen, were late at your desk, and a headline
not penned by you slipped though the net, love thirty,
and you couldn't find an umpire to lie, love forty,
and make decisions, thirty love, at which those lithe American boys
would shake their heads, forty love, and frown, game, set, match,
and shrug, as I stood by waiting with lemonade, Coca Cola
and Pimms, all the latest, necessary fads,
looking from under my broad rimmed expensive hat,
on their gold tanned flesh . . .
I dream too, of those summer days, and wake convinced
even now of what you – dead, defeated
and gone – said you always knew:
that it's the details – piccolo, minuscolo –
that matter most in the end; the seconds
and the split seconds between serves, that shot
that you almost, but not quite, got,
the sun in your eyes, the all important present or absent
breeze in the trees; dreams, in which the world, amore,
is not black and white, but colour –
so that the blood shows up – those minute nicks that through
un-remembering sleep, some mornings, I still reach to kiss.
Julia
The art of loving?
Please — I taught him
all he could ever need to know.
The unmentioned dedicatee:
for Christ's sake Julia,
for Christ's sake. Think how,
the first time I was named,
each syllable must have been held,
tried out on my father's tongue,
un-politic consonants and vowels,
like runes or pebbles found
and clutched in a child's hand.
Even I like their weight and sound.
I was only ever free when safely loaded
with a husband's cargo,
so I loved with a beating heart
and a stomach stretched like a drum,
on the wall a concave shadow --
can't we lose the lights?
He'd pinch each flame, and never flinch,
and as the wicks still hissed,
relight them one by one.
Still — I'd rather have been, then,
something closer to this lithe,
lessening thing, my stomach caving in.
Hollow in the hollow days,
I walk on the beach, and on its edges,
stop to write my name — skinny slanting Js
and Ls and Is that slowly disappear.
I'll leave you with a vision
on which we can all agree:
a room by the river, a window open,
the snake-hipped Tiber slung across
the streets, lights that on this last night,
stay on for hours. And a treeful of birds,
not one with the courage to beg to differ --
fooled, they sing in the dawn, at one
and two and three, too soon, for Christ's sake,
not yet. If I could have kept anything,
it would have been the sight,
tight in his arms, I'd always
twist my neck to see: not yet, not yet,
again and again and never too soon,
the way his face would crumple,
a discarded page.
Please — I taught him
all he could ever need to know.
The unmentioned dedicatee:
for Christ's sake Julia,
for Christ's sake. Think how,
the first time I was named,
each syllable must have been held,
tried out on my father's tongue,
un-politic consonants and vowels,
like runes or pebbles found
and clutched in a child's hand.
Even I like their weight and sound.
I was only ever free when safely loaded
with a husband's cargo,
so I loved with a beating heart
and a stomach stretched like a drum,
on the wall a concave shadow --
can't we lose the lights?
He'd pinch each flame, and never flinch,
and as the wicks still hissed,
relight them one by one.
Still — I'd rather have been, then,
something closer to this lithe,
lessening thing, my stomach caving in.
Hollow in the hollow days,
I walk on the beach, and on its edges,
stop to write my name — skinny slanting Js
and Ls and Is that slowly disappear.
I'll leave you with a vision
on which we can all agree:
a room by the river, a window open,
the snake-hipped Tiber slung across
the streets, lights that on this last night,
stay on for hours. And a treeful of birds,
not one with the courage to beg to differ --
fooled, they sing in the dawn, at one
and two and three, too soon, for Christ's sake,
not yet. If I could have kept anything,
it would have been the sight,
tight in his arms, I'd always
twist my neck to see: not yet, not yet,
again and again and never too soon,
the way his face would crumple,
a discarded page.
Matinee Idol
I was seventeen, you're joking, Christ alive,
and you with all the worldliness
that comes of playing everyone,
were twenty eight or was it nine?
Remember Stratford's river lights,
strings of unlucky lucky pearls, the Dirty Duck,
and some other bar, red — a womb you said.
Remember darlin, how later,
in someone's rhododendron garden,
Mozart floated by candlelight over houses
and up to stars — you found us wine
and damp sun beds to sit whispering on,
until words slowed and eye to eye
my head was in your hands, my mouth
on yours; the empty theatre lying dark and low
on a tide that flowed all the way to winter.
and you with all the worldliness
that comes of playing everyone,
were twenty eight or was it nine?
Remember Stratford's river lights,
strings of unlucky lucky pearls, the Dirty Duck,
and some other bar, red — a womb you said.
Remember darlin, how later,
in someone's rhododendron garden,
Mozart floated by candlelight over houses
and up to stars — you found us wine
and damp sun beds to sit whispering on,
until words slowed and eye to eye
my head was in your hands, my mouth
on yours; the empty theatre lying dark and low
on a tide that flowed all the way to winter.
Matins
The stars are tin-foil bright
as long as the offices are dark; through
sheaves of the New York Times I try to read
my way back down. It's all as watchable
as someone who never says
how long they'll stay. On a Monday
like any other, too cold for snow,
without me, nothing's changed. In the gym
the hotel shares the pre-work work outs
will get going at five. Outside the library;
each head on a monolith paw,
the Aslan lions sleep on:
the fountains frozen, the park
pale with frost, my plane a trail of latte cloud to go …
Off their running machines, waking up,
they'll be walking to work -
the big-eyed goddess of Starbucks cups
the only face tilted up at the sky.
as long as the offices are dark; through
sheaves of the New York Times I try to read
my way back down. It's all as watchable
as someone who never says
how long they'll stay. On a Monday
like any other, too cold for snow,
without me, nothing's changed. In the gym
the hotel shares the pre-work work outs
will get going at five. Outside the library;
each head on a monolith paw,
the Aslan lions sleep on:
the fountains frozen, the park
pale with frost, my plane a trail of latte cloud to go …
Off their running machines, waking up,
they'll be walking to work -
the big-eyed goddess of Starbucks cups
the only face tilted up at the sky.
Moon Man
Midtown – the hotel windows
are narrow eyes, taking in
the high skies and the bare brown brick,
early, before the day time haze,
the almost ice, precise glint of the glass;
November, already
the wind and the cars and the honking
near misses are chasing each other
down the avenues. The moon's a wink.
At every traffic light, the same man,
pale neon, white blue:
held together, so many dots joined up, elusive
and dependable, waited for; half his life's
a blank: a dark transformer board
above square digit fingers, a red hand raised,
a ‘no’ no one ignores, falling away to
dayglo pearls, an angel without wings,
gelatin silver, an almost friend...
are narrow eyes, taking in
the high skies and the bare brown brick,
early, before the day time haze,
the almost ice, precise glint of the glass;
November, already
the wind and the cars and the honking
near misses are chasing each other
down the avenues. The moon's a wink.
At every traffic light, the same man,
pale neon, white blue:
held together, so many dots joined up, elusive
and dependable, waited for; half his life's
a blank: a dark transformer board
above square digit fingers, a red hand raised,
a ‘no’ no one ignores, falling away to
dayglo pearls, an angel without wings,
gelatin silver, an almost friend...