The Uses of Pepper
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The Uses of Pepper, my fifth
collection-in-progress, grew out of my experience of teaching inside the
English prison system, in a Young Offenders' Institution, in 2001. During
that year I had first to confront the extent of compounded alienation, the
shock of young men trapped in the cycle of crime, then my relative
uselessness in the face of it. This meant learning a new language as
quickly as possible, adapting to a new atmospheric pressure which seemed
to buckle all recognisable human emotions out of shape, intensifying and
enlarging them: fear and guilt, suspicion, reprisal and regret. It was a
harrowing, if powerfully educative time. A short collection by the same
name appeared Spring 2003, one of the winners of Poetry
Business Book and Pamphlet Competition; it also received an Arts Council
England Writer's Award in the same year.
"These scrupulous poems treat the saddening and fearful world of the prison. They do so meticulously, humanely, with rare tact. There is no voyeurism, no gratuitous exoticism. The strangeness and the difficulty here are designed to make us exercise our hearts and minds, for better understanding and more compassion." David Constantine, Judge's Report, Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition, 2002/03 |
For the Seven Hundred and Forty
Ninth Species of Barbed Wire
Only the rain can cling to it, snatched away
by a rumour of air thickening then passing.
Let a hand try the same,
we're told, and a trap
of razors will spring and close, spring and
close.
(In it, we're told, the body of a jackdaw left its feet
thirty
metres from its head, which nonetheless
turned to address them:
'.....only half of us can make it
over the wire, half in the world, half
out,
though the pale gas of morning rises on either side.')
Think of
it: a contraption of blades coiled
along the top of the towering fence
erected between
six hundred young men and their birthright.
One side
of it thrives all the indices
of hunger, the other the many sorts of worldly
apple.
Psychosis
Because he is older,
stronger,
and the other boy smaller and more docile,
he can take into his hands his
whole body
(.....the body of the mind, that is,
taken in the large hands of the
larger mind)
and do to it whatsoever he wishes
as if merely massaging himself,
flexing
that awkward ache so troublesome
of late, the cramps he gets in
the spaces
in both wrists there between the vital bits, which
he works out through his
fingers, answering
the mind's need for the
exercise-yard:
all that's left is the smaller
one's
flightless body, and him, sated with
protein.
The Uses of
Pepper
“…..a carminative,
a digestive stimulant,
a passive maker of trade-routes; a balancer
of
civilization to rival the Scales of Justice when
placed alongside its
uxorious silver tulip-lip
of salt ….. a means of keeping the
pot-plants
from the moggy
piss.”
William Schwartzman, The Spice
Trade
And in the hands of this young
man
an effervescent caster of some spells.
A fine ash from the pepperpot
he empties in
the plush interior, while the engine ticks cool
C the
squalls
that'll scramble the scent in the
half mile radius
of the police dogs, itch in their million
nose-cells;
that'll have them, when the wreck’s
recovered, recoil
sneezing on their leashes C balking in the
rays
which float with it.
Pepper. Yes, but the sort that gets
to rise, to evolve, to rub out
the traces, to fly:
the cloud of it that ascends to a higher form
of
salvation, and hovers there like this:
a freak cumulus snowing softly
over
a sunlit, uninhabited, never-visited place.