Fellini Beach

Fellini Beach appeared from Seren in 1994 and was very well received. Liardet brings a weighty tone of voice...making something new and strange.' William Scammell The Independent on Sunday It is a voice rich in undertones and the poems are like jazz tunes in which melodic lines have been dissolved into chordal patterns, remaining barely discernible but tantalisingly present. Whilst the narrative line is often elliptical or only partially glimpsed the language compels our attention through its shifting exactitudes, each phrase acrobatic and adroit. Graham Mort Poetry Wales 'Liardet is very good at heartache; indeed one of his poems is called Lovegrief...... it's good and rare to see hearts on sleeves in such a crafted way.' Ian McMillan Poetry Review

The Water-Garden

The zoological squeaks of perambulators pass.
Down and round to the Water-garden go the long steps.
Chipped statues, on worn patches of the grass,
Hold utterly still the bird-bath that rescinds
An offer of water, shrunk to a stain in the heat.
Rigid Noah outstares the fountain's drops:
The bronze discolours, as the four embodied winds
Divide their separate powers about his feet.

The drops fly, bubble in deluge, and dissipate.
What is it, then, that eludes? Everything
Offers up the emblem of its shifting state.
Ephemeral the squabble of sparrows bathing;
The tree can grow no further inside its cramped cage;
The bubbles cling, or tremble, volatile.
A far roar pumps up a disconnected rage.
The empty pool implies the crocodile.







'A Treatise on the Nature of Traffic Jams'

Intolerable the back end and broken flasher of the truck in
front:
ANOTHER LOAD OF BULK FEED FROM WYNNSTAY. The writing looms
And must be read and re-read until movement resumes.
The truck's a wall. A load. It is bulk. Those drips of effluent,
Those boards, are not negotiable, that single torn off flap.
They are a wall to beat thought against. A mental wall
Behind which pistons strive in the heat and engines stall
To the rhythm of the crankshaft's slabber and slap.

Drivers crane out of windows, jump out in shirt-sleeves
Like distracted thoughts, but the wall holds, and is a map
Of the route chaos or unknowing or bleeding mishap
Takes down into order, and having arrived enslaves
A futile ticking speculation. All the impotence grows.
Many many miles ahead, through thick emissions of gas,
At two miles an hour, the tractor leads its heating mass.
The driver hums, as if he knows something no one else
knows.

The Lineaments of the Flowering-cactus

After Arcimboldo

It simply stages a drama of flourished limbs
As if caught in mid-act, flaunting success:
Propped behind, as if part of it from here,
From one side of the noisy, canal-side bar
An equally flamboyant man is wooing
A young girl invisible from this angle.

He is quite unaware how the cactus appears
To grow from him many idolatrous trunks,
To wrap his face like a hoary octopus,
Or a hank of puff-adders intertwining,
Or antlers, of which he moves independently.
He would not be so confident if he knew.

The cactus reaches up as the man leans towards
A teetering promise, the segments of face
Visible through such gaps as the swung boughs
Afford in their flight, a man breaking up,
Left eye through one gap, right through another.
One creature pursues two bright pink flowers.




Prayer for the Body After

1
All my lean body, father, all my lean body
Is called-to by yours, being uncertain
Of the chance angle of light which seems to make it
Almost transparently mortal, as vulnerable
As yours which sunk into the final stillness
While all else continued to move, beside
The farded beautified length of which
In a contrivance of chapel light transforming
Your arranged shroud, straight mouth, numinous lids -
Or the momentary image of your leaving
The world through the furnace - my body lies.

2
Upon it last night, I dreamed, my wife
Returning from her two year absence moved
Herself with every last slow interlocution
Of pleasure, her storm of hair, her breasts
Falling towards me as she pushed herself deeper
In a tensed expectance, and I pulled her down
Upon me in a tautly locked embrace
Of life, perspiring for the good of it
In a mutual, slippery, sumptuous heat
As we tried to climb the very backbone
Of each other, hearing as I did - estranged
Like an invocation, like a whispered
Incantation of the living, vital goodness -
My own name breaking on her murmurous breath.