Michael Ayres

Search for a word or phrase in this book …

Biographical note:  Michael Ayres was born in Chilwell, Nottingham on November 3 1958, and lived in Dorset, Leicestershire and Cleveland. He gained a degree in English from the University of Hull in 1982, and has lived in Cambridge since 1986. He is the author of Poems 1987–1992 (Odyssey Poets, 1994), and of two pamphlets in the Poetical Histories series – no. 44, 1976 Streets (1998), and no. 51, The Sky That Was Your Guide (2000).

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857288
ISBN-10:  1876857285
ISBN-13:  9781876857288
Author:  Michael Ayres
Title:  a.m.
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Apr-03
Extent:  288pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  16 mm
Weight:  432 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 14.99
Price:  USD 21.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  a.m. achieves something quite remarkable: a calm that is a sublimated urgency, a meditation on distance that opens into a habitat for human intimacy: ‘the emptiness that forms before love comes’. Distance here is a prerequisite for relation, and this writing is in relentless and passionate pursuit, courting ‘you’ for its extended family, placating ‘all of these things with their gaping beaks / of light and shape and weight, all asking / not to be left out’. One of the many joys of this artful construction is that it is a public building, at pains to resist ‘an outmoded binary opposition between luxury and necessity’. Mandelstam claimed ‘To read Pasternak’s poetry is to clear your throat, to fortify your breathing, to fill your lungs; surely such poetry could provide a cure for tuberculosis’. In a.m., Ayres has set his sights on the common cold.

Table of contents:
a.
My Little Alphabet
Der Turmbau zu Babel
Rock Garden
Pocket Rimbaud
1976 Streets
Transporter
Omega
α
β
χ
δ
Sine Umbra Nihil
m.
‘A great calm descends’
Detochka
St Petersburg
Ohm
Petrograd
Zzub
Pilgrim Eventual
Joseph
Ronin
Tort
Leningrad
Bridge of Sighs
Gemini
The Black Prince
Cuba
Lithography
Blizzard
Blackwaterside
Tsunami
The Fabled City of Atlantis
Azurite
Legend
Belshazzar
e = mc2
Samurai
26 Letters
Pacific Union
Galicia
Zeiss
Futura Bold
Equatorial/Equilateral
0°
Fireman Sam
Saturn’s Rings
Redcurrants
Black Light
Mayday
Small Poem for Hannah
Coupe du Monde
Walberswick
Pushkin
Jinta
Sleep Makes a Telephone Call to Hannah

View excerpt as PDF:

Click here to view a sample (64 KB)

Excerpt from book:  

St Petersburg

‘I wanted to save you from all the hurt of this world.’
‘But all the hurt of this world belongs to me.’
You were so proud, and you hated yourself.
Other people hated you. I hated them: and I still
hate them.

We can still make the night, if we run.
And perhaps I’ll be unafraid, but still breathing.
I wanted to give you all the tenderness in this world.
Tenderness? Tenderness? And you’d say, ‘Michael:
don’t be silly. You’re far too hard. You’re going to need
to take much more before the world will ever let you
be really tender’.

Santiago, though blind, was still afraid of the night.
I think of you in the barest prose, but it’s still not bare enough.
I need to be with you in poetry, in its coldness,
its utter loss of feeling, in its unearthly sterility
before the snow ever falls in the garden,
or before I have to watch you dying slowly.

You see, I come back to my work -
to what we may call St Petersburg.
I run back to it as if to your skirts.
And – it’s true – it does give me a form of peace.
It makes me feel my defeat is real,
and it makes me want to bless the sky
for the simple beauty of its surviving.

In Petersburg, Mandelstam spoke of a blessed word with no meaning.
Animals in an abattoir, and I love you,
these are words of meaning.
The abattoir is warm, and they hose it down regularly.
Every word is blessed with no meaning.

And this is the nature of the blessing -
you – you are the blessing.

You’ve always gone before my gaze arrives.
But you’re always there before my gaze sets out, anyway.
Santiago, blind Santiago, tell me, why are you afraid
of the night?
My mother is dead. A poem is living.
There will be meat on the table.
There will be snow in the garden.

And the poem will die, the one called St Petersburg -
what name is so tender it can resist?
Santiago, blind Santiago, don’t be afraid -
sometimes the night is long,
but it will end.

Review quote:  Human breadth and scope, surging long-term rhythm, like a Russian novel, not like British poetry. An ordinary self fighting through image-fields: personal and lyrical without any of the diminution those adjectives normally imply, rather balladic: muckle sangs, hymns to the imagination. It is a shock – we do not in Britain expect our poets to be such heroes, or the life of the powerless to be so full of genuinely grand substance.

Peter Riley

Review quote:  The poetry of Michael Ayres occupies that space where the world and language collide, and it illuminates both.

Tony Frazer