Moreover, the poem she's sent as a taster of her work is also top-notch. It represents so much of what makes her work special. Her control of line-endings and stanzas is delicate, working in perfect tandem with the build-up of semantic tension. And then there's her treatment of the contents themselves: this is highly personal poetry but never confessional in tone, and its emotional impact is consequently greater...
‘Wake up: time to die’
(Blade Runner)
It’s
supposed to be digitally remastered
but it’s
pixellated to shit still, luscious
city
smog, rain, light blare like morning mist.
The year
my father knew he was dying,
every
film turned out to be about death.
Blade
Runner the worst: built-in
obsolescence
and a four year life-span
in the
near-distant future of 2019.
I must
have watched it yearly since
and
every time Harrison Ford gets younger.
I don’t
remember whether dad liked it
but
every time Rutger Hauer dies for our sins,
too
perfect to imagine, I think of watching it
with
him: the oxygen tank, the tipping
chair
the NHS lent him and how that year
he was
too ill for his lifetime trip to India
so
watched TV all day. I don’t care
if
Deckard is a replicant or not.
I just
hope he makes it to the mountains.
This
evening, I am grateful to watch
yet
another Director’s Cut, to wonder
at Pris
(your standard pleasure model),
Daryl
Hannah‘s tender immortal quarter-
century
inner thighs – self-sustaining miracles.
I am
grateful that you are here
again to
snicker with me when Deckard fails again
to
persuade anyone that he’s still quit,
to toast
life as it is and still being part of it.
(First published in Under the Radar)
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