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    Zero Gravity
    Zero Gravity
    Zero Gravity
    Ebook300 pages1 hour

    Zero Gravity

    By Damian Garside

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    About this ebook

    My poetry covers a great range in verbal style, tone and subject matter. It is often markedly ironic and/or satirical, particularly when dealing with social or political issues. The poetry also tends to want to explore spiritual and/or philosophical questions, and can be seen to reflect the poets English ancestry (and literary heritage), his sense of the history and changing political landscape of South Africa, and to raise the great conundrums regarding the place of human beings in a cosmos that science is revealing is far stranger than we thought, perhaps stranger than we ever could have imagined. Lastly, the poems particularly those written over the last few years -- can show a somewhat playful, even irreverent, attitude to the idea of poets and poetry that we can characterize as postmodern, but which for all their playfulness and reference to popular culture raise concerns about the future of poetry and the human values with which poetry has always strongly identified, in our globalized, mass-media world of the sound bite and the visual image.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherXlibris UK
    Release dateFeb 6, 2014
    ISBN9781493140930
    Zero Gravity
    Author

    Damian Garside

    Damian Garside was born in a small town close to the city of Manchester in the North of England in 1953. In 1964 my family emigrated to South Africa, where, apart from a 3 year stint as a postgraduate student of English at Manchester University, he has lived ever since (the last 5 of which married to Modiegi). His interest in writing poetry began in the early 1980s. Since then he has written a great deal of poetry, particularly in the last few years, and had a number of poems published in South African literary journals and poetry magazines, as well as having a few anthologized in books such as The Paperbook of South African English Poetry (edited by Michael Chapman). At present Garside (who holds a Ph D in English from the University of Cape Town) teaches media, culture and communication on the Mafikeng Campus of North West University. Mafikeng is a town in the North West Province of South Africa that was once famous for the siege it endured during the Second Boer War (1899-1902) Zero Gravity is the first collection of Garside’s poetry to be published.

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      Book preview

      Zero Gravity - Damian Garside

      Copyright © 2014 by Damian Garside.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

      Rev. date: 01/17/2014

      To order additional copies of this book, contact:

      Xlibris LLC

      0-800-056-3182

      www.xlibrispublishing.co.uk

      Orders@xlibrispublishing.co.uk

      522916

      CONTENTS

      Whole

      101

      And in this Dream not a Line Went Missing

      Visa or Master

      Wake

      Way

      Wet

      When it Comes to Big Bang

      Without Parallel

      Writ

      Writing Poetry This Day

      X (for Xmas) marks the spot

      I put it to Socrates

      At the Border Crossing

      Cavalier

      Conjugating

      In Taung

      La Luna

      Not Strictly According to Pythagoras’ Theorem

      Once Upon a Forest

      Selfsame

      Copernican System

      Not Being Particularly Committed to Dualistic Thinking

      PLANETARIUM

      A Love Poem with an Even Stranger twist in the Tail than Most

      LOST, PRESUMED BURNT

      In the Bone

      And of the Vertigo of Poetry

      State of Grace

      Hard as I try

      Rite of Passage (Magaliesberg, 3 December 2003)

      TRESPASS

      Sometimes I get held up too, Mr. Frost

      PRESSURE (OF A BAD NIGHT’S DREAMING)

      POEM ON THE EQUINOX

      Frissance

      Within an Inch (Poem Written for Read-only Memory)

      Libretta Pulling out all the Stops in her Quest for the Sanctity of High Officialdom

      Poem Number Nine (Saved from the Weight of Resurrection)

      Obsidian

      Viva the Last praise Poem Viva

      Casanova Poem Numero Uno

      Flame Flowers

      Come to Think of It

      Poem for Denise

      Should the Cap Fit

      Catullus at the Tape

      If Philip K. Dick had Written the Iliad

      Poor Choice

      Spectrum Analysis

      Love Poem Number Two

      Pax Romana

      Nicely Divided

      Rhythm Section

      Graduation

      FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH

      Death Swish

      POEM FOR LUCKY DUBE

      If JM Coetzee had Written The Iliad

      Café Lite

      Dim

      Medallion

      Fire

      For Richard Dawkins

      Where are you now, Vladimir Mayakovski?

      Still Life

      All Along the Axis of Selection (for Imraan Coovadia)

      POEM FOR ANDRE BRETON

      If Suresh Roberts had written the Iliad

      Reading Close Readers

      Oilman

      Poem for Wilfred Owen

      As I Like to Put It (for Daniel, on the birth of his first child)

      Out of the Woods

      Spider in Absinthe (Absinthe Spider)

      At the Grave of Giovanni Jacopo

      Lower Case

      Vow of Poverty

      Verse Blank (for Modiegi)

      Ride (for Modiegi)

      Slice (of Life)

      Speaking of Lambs

      Tickle

      Gaudeamus

      Short

      Mamang in Taung

      Intellectual Property

      Piece of the Puzzle

      PASTORAL

      FOR DEIRDRE

      Time Trek (for Stanley Kubrick)

      The Triumph of Self-Destruction

      The Message

      If Vidal Sassoon had Written the Communist Manifesto

      Fabric (for Brian Greene)

      False Bay Poem (false poem in False Bay)

      Without Batteries

      Set in Tibet

      Sojourner

      General Orders

      Observed Pedalling Against the Flow on the Road to Westville Pavilion

      Poem for Ryuichi Sakamoto

      Pop Goes My Weasel Theory

      A Little Long John Silverish

      Air Power

      Claire Libra Re-revisited

      Damned Shepherds (being my little essay in political pastoral)

      Fine edge

      If Luis Bunuel had Written the Iliad

      Lady of the Lake as Hindu Metaphysician

      Mixed Blessing

      Prudentia Juris

      Free, Fair Territory

      Beyond Comparison

      Darkness at Linz (Poem as Watercolour)

      Upside Down Man Walking Beneath a Blood Moon

      Beneath the Trees

      Big Brotha

      Catullus Remix

      In Our Red World Down Here

      If Only (Life Were Like a Woody Allen Movie)

      Of Cloudy Nights and Garbo Complexes

      With Not the Slightest Idea of Special Relativity

      In the Rhyming Logic of Contemporary Poetry

      Don’t Try This At Home

      Everything that is the Case

      Honey Pot

      False Bay Fish

      Enough

      First People

      Not the Deepest Hole in the Universe

      For Lesedi (my student who was killed in a car crash on the eve of her graduation)

      Bra Ted

      The Nature of the Argument

      Bombmaker, Thief

      If Julia Kristeva had Written The Odyssey

      Miners

      Castagno’s The Young David

      In Mocoseng

      His Epitaph: Our Most Accomplished Poet

      Shield

      Poem Written During an Imaginary Crossing of The Golden Gate Bridge

      Desert Flower

      Pandora

      Newton

      Harvest

      Fingamus Igitur

      In my Painting

      Like Lichen

      Set Piece

      For J

      Donut

      In a Whisper

      Sappho

      Stegosaurus

      Storm

      Send me a Message

      TV Studio Bird

      The Pieces

      O, For a Muse of Ice

      Loop Poem

      Dark English Heart

      Let the Poem Fail

      For Cuckoos

      O Prospero

      Rorschach Coyote Story

      Blarcseb

      Exception to the Rule

      All Praise to the (Reel) Eel (I Feel)

      Short Poems (some untitled)

      WHOLE

      A needless Alexandrine ends the song,

      That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

      Alexander Pope: An Essay on Criticism

      There is nothing treeish about the word tree.

      Nothing fruity about the word fruit.

      And nothing serpentine about

      the word snake

      whose mental concept has

      already wrapped itself

      around my arm

      whose hooded head is raised,

      about to strike at, then

      swallow my pen

      devour it

      whole.

      There is nothing worth bracketing about the word being.

      Nor any point putting scare quotes around what foreshadows death.

      101

      postmodernism 101

      will be written

      in the mirror room

      (so make sure you look good before entering

      the examination)

      the notes for chaos mathematics 101

      will be sent to all students

      on butterfly wings

      (please note that students will

      not be allowed to

      steal other students’ fractals)

      the surrealism paper (part

      of creative writing 101)

      will be written with pens

      and

      paper should

      the student deem this

      entirely necessary

      and those writing

      the master’s examination in

      Zen haiku

      please note that you

      will be pressed for time, the

      allotment is a mere

      hour for

      every precious

      syllable.

      AND IN THIS DREAM NOT

      A LINE WENT MISSING

      All along they suspected that he had been reading poetry.

      Quietly; on the sly.

      Thus when they

      dragged him down to the cellar

      for hypnosis

      the crucial question was one of missing time and whether

      it would take heavenly regression through hellish childhood

      to find every smidgen or iota that can be found

      passing through, so to speak, every

      protective membrane

      until

      we have the code, the key like

      something stored on a microdot

      like the headland of an island

      suddenly visible

      secret squeezed out of something

      next to the near-nothingness of a grammatical stop.

      VISA OR MASTER

      I espied Socrates

      loading his trolley in the supermarket

      wife Xantippe flashing

      new hand-bag

      rubber wheels groaning

      under so much bulk saving

      wishing to accelerate

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