Cliff Ashcroft

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Biographical note:  Born in Blackpool, England in 1963, Cliff Ashcroft studied at the University of Sheffield and completed a research degree on the poetry of Peter Redgrove. He has written one previous collection of poems, Faithful (1996). He lives in Hertfordshire.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844711123
ISBN-10:  1844711129
ISBN-13:  9781844711123
Author:  Cliff Ashcroft
Title:  Dreaming of Still Water
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Sep-05
Extent:  108pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  162 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Faithful, Cliff Ashcroft’s ‘mesmerising first collection’ (New Statesman) was described by Kathleen Raine as “an impressive collection of poems … ambitious and remarkable … a recall to serious issues long evaded by poets writing in English.” His equally ambitious second book, Dreaming of Still Water, maintains Ashcroft’s “characteristic tone … of reserved epiphanies, a stillness within process.” (Penelope Shuttle) These intimate and graceful poems range widely in time and location, from the arenas of Carthage to the eighteenth century forests of Aveyron, from biblical landscapes to our own contemporary interiors. Beginning with the unanswerable queries of the bereaved and isolated, the book moves on to unexpected discoveries, strange arrivals, dream-like transfigurations.

Cliff Ashcroft’s work is highly regarded for its measured, calm atmosphere, “the lucid civilisation and grace of [his] poetry.” (Michael Hulse). He is a “consistently impressive poet … [his] simple, natural vocabulary and a careful level tone reminds us that small objects contain infinite possibilities.” (John Redmond, Times Literary Supplement)

Table of contents:
1. Lost
Pioneers
Wants
Two Men
Lost
The Drive
Sea Weed
Hopi Doll
Client
Antigone
Guilty
Invalid
Sick
Cured
Poems for Perpetua
1. Official
2. Comforter
3. Burning Man
4. Fathers
5. Martyr’s Scroll
2. Waiting
Horse
Insular Greeks*
Fresco (1)
Visitor
Woas Nit
Kamala
Runaway
Door
Fresco (2)
Leper Colony
Supper at Bethany
Waiting Room
Retreat
Virgin
Translator
Pliny’s Complaint
Each Other
Coda
The Free Heart Fairy Tale
Two Poems for the Wild Boy
1. Water Boy
2. Adolescent
3. Arrival
Kindness
Lamp
Answer
Arrival
Revolution: Barcelona
Coin Case
Pool
Seal
Hylas
Her Vision
The White House
Dreaming of Waiting
Dreaming of Still Water

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Excerpt from book:  

Visitor

I smell the salt of bacon frying.
A woman pieces out the fat
to her son, her daughter, and herself.
They sit and pour the water
from a tall, cream jug.
No grace is said.
I join them on their stools,
a guest unexpectedly arrived
without gifts. To my surprise
I had trimmed my wick, brought extra oil
and arrived at night bearing a flame
I lifted to my woken host
yawning in the small glow.
Our forks tap the tin plates.
I do not speak their language,
and they do not speak to me,
so we rock in silence, chewing.
One tears the bread and passes the plate.
I raise it to my weathered face
for the moist and fragrant heat.
When we finish we sit in quiet,
the mother turning her bracelets,
the daughter smoothing the sweat in her palms,
the son meeting my flinching eye
in the window’s cold reflection.
I search the soft manila sachets
I keep in my canvas bag
acting on a recollection
I fake and then surrender.
I search the bare kitchen walls
for icons, slips of yellow palm.
There’s nothing but the stove’s soot
and islands of broken plaster.
Taking a few unfamiliar coins
so brown and coarse I can’t make out
the stiff and regal faces
I push them to the mother
who looks up quickly to her daughter.
The son picks out one or two
of the larger, dirtier pieces,
turns them about his thick fingers
and drops them in a tin.
They clatter like an insult.
I slowly lay out my folds of paper.
My chair squeals on the flags.

Unpublished endorsement :  Mysterious, mesmerising but above all moving, Cliff Ashcroft’s poetry offers a rare mix of the learned and the lyrical, poetry in which the past is just a heart’s beat away from the present, shimmering beneath the surface, an ancient fresco about to be restored. Like Ashcroft’s Cavafy – one of the many ghosts who haunt this affecting work – here are poems ‘learning the pleasantries/ of custom and culture, the language, the art.’

Josephine Balmer

Unpublished endorsement :  Cliff Ashcroft’s poems arise from a sensibility which is enviable in its calm. They have been composed with an almost liturgical care and attention for the things of this world. The deliberate pacing and deceptive simplicity of these poems make Dreaming of Still Water an unusually attractive collection.

John Redmond

Unpublished endorsement :  Like his master-poet Cavafy, Cliff Ashcroft speaks from and of the margins. His new collection is divided into three parts; ‘Lost’ (lost souls), ‘Waiting’ (personae), and ‘Arrivals’ (revelations, home-comings). Haunted by figures from far-history such as the early Christian martyrs, Perpetua and Pionius; by Lazarus, Antigone, by lepers, refugees, and by the wild children Kaspar Hauser, the wolf-girl Kamala, and the Wild Boy of Aveyron, he explores the multifarious strands of history and myth from which our times are woven. The beauty and originality of his quietism is singularly striking amid the look-at-me fake-daring of many of his contemporaries.

Penelope Shuttle

Review quote:  While Dreaming of Still Water shares many thematic concerns with its predecessor, it also represents an exciting progression, more assured, more confident, more mysterious; private moments of epiphany, quivering just out of reach on the horizon’s edge, even more intensified.

Josephine Balmer
Modern Poetry in Translation