This
year’s National Poetry
Day on 4th October 2007 celebrates
the theme of dreams.
Visit the National
Poetry Day Web
site at the Poetry Society
now to find out more.
Grab some more
dreams from around
the world
National
Poetry Day at Salt
“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”
Dreams
Many of Salt’s
poets explore themes of dreams,
this page offers some pointers
into our poetry list, highighting
books and poems which deal explicitly
with pipe dreams, daydreams,
reveries and nightmares.
Discover more
about our poets and their titles
by searching Google here: Read
more …
Below, we’ve
listed some poems which offer a
taste of the wide approaches our
writers take in tackling dreams.
But don’t stop here, explore
our site and discover a world of
new writers, you can search them
all here: Contemporary
Writers at Salt.
Enjoy your visit
and enjoy National Poetry
Day 2007.
This
collection of “dream” poems
crosses many times, places
and cultural spaces. It is
a collection of different
poetic responses to the subject
of “dreams”,
but also to how dreams affect
what poets write, and why
they write. The poems range
from the deeply sincere to
the mystical, the ironic
to the horrifying. They go
deep into the places of dreams,
and they examine how dreams
talk through broader society.
Most relevantly, many of
these poems look at how we
live with our dreams, how
diverse in nature a dream
might be, and how our dreams
affect our decisions and
behaviours in our waking
lives. As W.B. Yeats wrote, “In
dreams begin responsibilities”.
Dreamhoard goes
on sale on National
Poetry Day. Read
more …
Tom
Shapcott
Tom
Shapcott: Tom
Shapcott (born 1935)
is a well known Australian
poet who has been published
in a number of countries.
Translations of major
selections of his work
have been published in
Hungary, Romania and
the Republic of Macedonia.
He has published fifteen
collections of poems
in Australia, as well
as six novels and other
prose works. He was the
inaugural Professor of
Creative Writing at the
University of Adelaide
?1997–2005, in
South Australia.
Deposition of
the Dream
Why are dreams always so cruel?
Even in telling them, and laughing,
freshening them up so as to fool
the shiver out of them, we are
saving
some part for our own torment,
later.
“I had this dream”—and
at once we back
away, if we are listeners. We’ve
been caught
before, and not by you, or our
own lack
of preparedness. You do not have
to be taught
to flinch, it arrives sooner before
later.
I had this dream and it was not
cruel,
it was beautiful. The dream was
of love
and protection, of us as we once
were, full
of our very first sharing. Dove.
Dove.
You get the glint in it? The knife
comes later.
In my dream, she was worn and
alone
and she clung to me (as she once
had to cling)
so that I closed her eyes with
kisses. Not one
sob went uncomforted. My arms were
strong
as if this had been their condition
forever.
Did those people die? Did they
recover?
The deposition, once lodged, keeps
the matter
open. Even to laugh is to finger
such dusty files you must sneeze,
or utter
denials, complicity, a further
complication. Why do old deceptions
return?
Is it true : to stay silent is
better?
Life is not dry, it is no deposition.
Dreams are the comfort of sucking
what’s bitter.
Once lodged, dream evidence files
you forever.
Deborah
A. Miranda: Deborah
A. Miranda is of Esselen,
Chumash, French and Jewish
ancestry. She is enrolled
with the Ohlone-Costanoan
Esselen Nation of California.
Her collection Indian
Cartography won the Diane
Decorah First Book Award.
Her poetry is widely
published in such anthologies
as The Dirt is Red Here:
Art and Poetry from Native
California (HeyDay Books,
2002) and The Eye of
the Deer: An Anthology
of Native American Women
Writers (Aunt Lute, 1999).
Currently, Deborah is
Assistant Professor of
English at Washington
and Lee University, where
she teaches Creative
Writing, Composition,
and Native American Literatures.
Chianti
Dreams
creep along the rocky caverns of
my night.
Long sleek tentacles prod empty
husks, flow into each crevice
and abyss, extract sweet meat
from a small, shelled fantasy.
They like transgressive ones best,
taboo spirals of denial.
Dreams spew out inky surprise
when interrupted by rude
lights or the slow echo of bedrock
cracking 40 years ago.
Other dreams change color when
pursued, flash red, indigo,
at last a ghostly green, eluding
leviathans of the past.
The slyest dreams don’t
stalk but stroke the wet skin of
my legs,
bend my naked bones like a contortionist’s
flight of fancy.
My dreams roam unbridled in the
blasphemous depths
of one a.m., babble in a world
with no language, no alphabet.
The truth I knew before birth
luring me back again,
down again. It breaks my heart
to surface for a breath of air.
David
Kennedy: David
Kennedy was born in Leicester
in 1959. He co-edited
The New Poetry and is
the author of New Relations:
The Refashioning of British
Poetry 1980-1994. He
edited the magazine of
innovative poetry and
poetics The Paper from
2000 to 2004 and publishes
widely on contemporary
British and Irish poetry.
His publications include
The President of Earth:
New and Selected Poems;
The Dice Cup, translations
of Max Jacob’s
prose poems with Christopher
Pilling; and the collaboration
Eight Excursions with
Rupert Loydell. Monographs
on Douglas Dunn and on
elegy are forthcoming,
respectively, in the
Northcote House series
Writers and Their Work
and in Routledge’s
New Critical Idiom. David
lives in Sheffield with
his wife Christine.
Red Horse
In the town
by the wide river
all the lovers are asleep.
Their dreams rise up chimneys
and emerge, distending slowly
like inverted drops of water,
then expanding to their full size
and falling upwards.
Up, up they float until the earth
begins to curve beneath them;
up, up where the moon hangs off
a rack
at the top of night’s big
shed
watching the small hours fossick
and scurry furtively between deep
blue shadows
on the banks of the wide river.
What big dreams some people have,
the moon thinks, and what strange
ones!
What is a unicorn doing
with all that flat pack furniture?
And whose granny is that
going into a wardrobe with Stalin
and coming out again with a bag
of mushrooms?
The dream that pops out
of our chimney is about a red horse.
Red horse, where are you taking
us, red horse,
on your back as wide as the wide
river?
The stars tinkle in his bridle
as he tosses his head and neighs
a giant horsey laugh.
His teeth are lighted windows in
the night.
He carries us, sleeping, on his
back until morning.
Carter
Revard: Carter
Revard, Osage on his
father’s side,
grew up on the Osage
Reservation in Oklahoma.
After work as farm hand
and greyhound trainer,
he took B.A.s from the
University of Tulsa and
Oxford (Rhodes Scholarship,
Oklahoma and Merton 1952),
was given his Osage name
and a Yale Ph.D., then
taught medieval and American
Indian literatures before
retiring in 1997. He
has published Ponca War
Dancers; Cowboys and
Indians, Christmas Shopping;
An Eagle Nation; Family
Matters, Tribal Affairs;
and Winning the Dust
Bowl.
Geode
I still
remember ocean, how
she came in with all I wanted,
how we opened
the hard shell we had made
of what she gave me and painted
into
that lodge’s white walls
the shifting
rainbows of wave-spray—
I remember even the vague drifting
before the shell was made, my slow
swimming
amidst the manna until I sank
down into stone, married, rooted
there, joined
its stillness where the moving
waters
would serve us as the moon would
bring them by.
Growing, I remember how softness
of pale flesh secreted the smooth
hardness
of shell, how the gritty pain
was healed with rainbow tears
of pearl,
I remember dreaming
of the new creatures flying through
air
as the sharks swam through ocean
hallucinating feathers and dinosaurs,
pterodactyls and archaeopteryxes,
great turquoise dragonflies
hovering, shimmering, hawking after
the huge
mosquitoes fat with brontosaurus
blood. And when
I died and the softness vanished
inside
my shell and the sea flowed in
I watched
it drying as the waters ebbed,
saw how my bony whiteness held
at its heart the salty gel whose
desire swelled
and grew and globed against the
limey mud,
chalcedony selving edged and spiked
its way
through dreams of being flowers
trembling
against the wind, snowflakes falling
into a desert spring. But the rain
of limestone hardened round us
and my walls
grew full of holes, I waked into
a continent of caves, a karst-land
where
sweet water chuckled and trickled,
siliceated through
my crevices as once the salty ocean
had, and I felt
purple quartz-crystals blossom
where
my pale flesh had been.
Then I knew my dream
was true, and I waited for
the soft hands to come down like
a dream
and lift me into sunlight, give
me there to diamond
saws that sliced me in two, to
diamond dust that polished
my new selves of banded agate,
I let them separate and shelve
them heavy
on either side of a word-hoard
whose light leaves
held heavy thoughts between
the heavier, wiser, older lines
of all
my mirrored selves, the wave-marks
left
by snowflake-feathery amethyst
ways of being,
by all those words,
by the Word, made slowly,
slowly, in-
to Stone.
Cliff
Ashcroft: 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.
Guilty
I cook eggs and bread,
keep milk, pale onions.
The knives sleep
in their quiet ranks.
The pans declare
their bland faces.
No one visits.
I come to them
in my ghost clothes
offering water.
I am the presence
of the still house
like a fresh soul
promising health
and the further journey.
You cannot doubt me.
Doubt is the stain
in the closed larder,
the boot trail over
my immaculate flags.
When you ask of dreams
I cannot remember,
only the tangle
of puzzling images
that scatter like wings
as I wake.
Tamar
Yoseloff: Tamar
Yoseloff was born in
the U.S. in 1965. Her
first collection, Sweetheart
(Slow Dancer Press, 1998)
was a Poetry Book Society
Special Commendation
and the winner of the
Aldeburgh Festival Prize.
She received a New Writers’ Award
from London Arts for
her second collection,
Barnard’s Star
(Enitharmon Press, 2004).
In 2005 she was Writer
in Residence at Magdalene
College, Cambridge, as
part of their Year in
Literature Festival.
She is the Programme
Co-ordinator and a tutor
for The Poetry School.
She divides her time
between London and Suffolk,
and is currently working
on her first novel.
Black Water
I emerge from sleep, my tongue
puddled.
You stand against the door, the
light
behind you. You could be clay or
iron,
I know your shape—
you
were in my dream,
how clear you were — I could
feel your touch.
We were in a house I haven't seen
in years,
a shell — roof blown off,
blackened eaves.
Long before you, places existed,
objects
that have lost their definition.
I begin to focus. You are at the
window.
I follow your gaze and see the
clouds
clot on the horizon, a boat trailing
its ghost,
the water's flat black surface,
like ink or blood
and I think of the cold plunge,
water
filling my mouth.
I run a bath, watch it curl with
steam, then
ease myself in. Red spreads across
my skin.
This
year’s National Poetry
Day on 4th October 2007 celebrates
the theme of dreams.
Visit the 
This
collection of “dream” poems
crosses many times, places
and cultural spaces. It is
a collection of different
poetic responses to the subject
of “dreams”,
but also to how dreams affect
what poets write, and why
they write. The poems range
from the deeply sincere to
the mystical, the ironic
to the horrifying. They go
deep into the places of dreams,
and they examine how dreams
talk through broader society.
Most relevantly, many of
these poems look at how we
live with our dreams, how
diverse in nature a dream
might be, and how our dreams
affect our decisions and
behaviours in our waking
lives. As W.B. Yeats wrote, “In
dreams begin responsibilities”.
Contact
us
