Issue 18: Robert Sheppard
(Tom Raworth Memorial)

Tom Beau

Follow me down the gang plank

At my desk I design a mausoleum

Sinister and weirdly persistent

Behind rocks across the pool

Dead men stir like sleepers

Wriggling into velvet

There’s another poem upside down

In fiction he carries two revolvers

I get the full stop we slow the music

And slow the ache

Eyes catch the reflected

Brute force against steady rain

Is the dream mine in which

More hair scarves around her neck

And ear-breathing

When the man shoots and shouts imagine

A museological assemblage

A foxy eye out for a fox

Flies caught on a web

Rhyme with the pattern into

A tube the depraved Narcissus

Where curved boats float on air

Long shadows on the shallow sea-bed

A million dreamscapes nothing centres

With no memory of itself I spend three hours

Mixing powders and working them

He’ll shoot her to shut her up

These two were made for each other

Perhaps made out of each other they

Roar down the chord phones

Our breath our lives on hold waiting

Like the skin of milk on custard

Around my finger a cowgirl

A dealer more than a scholar

Book dust sneezed in the temperate

Sealed room slipped

Betting slips into it and later

My boy lit up the sun

Projections clear on my white shirt

Condemned to earthly life tinged

This house is shouting about itself

A hard price for a free beer but

We pay it in the morning

The monumental folly with

Fake fivers manufactured

At the back of the lecture

The sharp-faced face her sharp

Lips rhyme

Refuse the offer

Coughing up blinis after vodka

Robert Sheppard's next book is the collaborative fictional European poems of Twitters for a Lark, from Shearsman, who also publish his selected poems History or Sleep. A prose 'autrebiography', Words Out of Time, is available from Knives, Forks and Spoons. As a critic he has written on Tom Raworth's work, both in his Shearsman essay collection, When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry, and his 2005 LUP volume: The Poetry of Saying. He lives in Liverpool, and is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Edge Hill University.

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