{"id":1799,"date":"2017-11-30T15:13:50","date_gmt":"2017-11-30T15:13:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.reading.ac.uk\/the-forum\/?p=1799"},"modified":"2017-11-30T15:13:50","modified_gmt":"2017-11-30T15:13:50","slug":"poems-about-places-and-pasts-an-extract-from-on-magnetism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/research-blog\/2017\/11\/30\/poems-about-places-and-pasts-an-extract-from-on-magnetism\/","title":{"rendered":"Poems about places and pasts: an extract from ‘On Magnetism’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Steven Matthews is\u00a0<\/strong>profes<\/strong>sor<\/strong> of English Literature, University of Reading. His latest book of poetry, On Magnetism<\/a>, was launched this week. It features poems about loss and remembrance, about the relation of the Renaissance and the Classical worlds to our own, and about locales within lives.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The following poem is reproduced by kind permission of the publisher. It is followed by a reflection on the poem, and its place within the book, by Steven Matthews.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

LAST CHRISTMAS CRACKER<\/h3>\n

From the last Christmas cracker I pulled ever<\/p>\n

with Dad, it seemed there flew not just the golf-tees<\/p>\n

I will never use, but my yellow kite<\/p>\n

the line broke from, and the wind wafted<\/p>\n

into the tall oak where he climbed to get it;<\/p>\n

my blue wooden yacht which grounded itself<\/p>\n

in the middle of the council boating lake,<\/p>\n

where he waded barefoot through the sludge<\/p>\n

to restore it sodden to the concrete shore;<\/p>\n

the garage window I broke one Sunday<\/p>\n

learning to curve a shot round the linen post;<\/p>\n

then, in a terrible rush, all the things<\/p>\n

in the future he will not ever set<\/p>\n

to rights, now that he has gone away.<\/p>\n

[From On Magnetism<\/em>, copyright Steven Matthews, Two Rivers Press, 2017]<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This poem is one of the several versions of sonnets that characterise the central formal shape in the book. The collection is concentrated around the ways that Classical and, especially, Renaissance history resonate out and down through to the present in a variety of locales. Therefore, the \u2018key note\u2019 form of the book, the sonnet, is \u2018true\u2019 to the appropriate phase of the literary past, the 1580s-1660s, when all poets tested themselves across 14 lines.<\/p>\n

The theme of On Magnetism<\/em> is how we are pulled back towards remembered places, and to our pasts, at significant moments across our lives. But also, of course (try and push two \u2018like\u2019 magnetic poles together, North to North, or South to South), how we are constantly driven away from all the times, places, and people we were once closest to.<\/p>\n

Memory can never get a final grip upon what it tries to recover, nor can poems, although we are constantly drawn by our memories to create different stories about the past. This poem is one such unavoidable moment, the attempt to recreate a tie long past that is now broken by loss.<\/p>\n

It was important to me, so as to be able to write it, therefore, that I concentrated on the technical demand of the form. I felt a need to string the details, of what was once a lovely time but now can no longer be, into the one sentence across the poem\u2019s lines; weaving and carrying the reader down to the final stop.<\/p>\n

On Magnetism<\/em> is available from Two Rivers Press<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steven Matthews is\u00a0professor of English Literature, University of Reading. His latest book of poetry, On Magnetism, was launched this week. It features poems about loss and remembrance, about the relation…Read More ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"__cvm_playback_settings":[],"__cvm_video_id":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[318,320,690,691,850],"class_list":["post-1799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-heritage-creativity","tag-english","tag-english-literature","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-steven-matthews"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPoems about places and pasts: an extract from 'On Magnetism' - Connecting Research<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/research-blog\/2017\/11\/30\/poems-about-places-and-pasts-an-extract-from-on-magnetism\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Poems about places and pasts: an extract from 'On Magnetism' - Connecting Research\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Steven Matthews is\u00a0professor of English Literature, University of Reading. 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