Blood and Old Belief: A Verse Novel by Paul Hetherington

By Paul Hetherington

Show description

Read or Download Blood and Old Belief: A Verse Novel PDF

Similar poetry books

Dante’s Inferno: The Indiana Critical Edition

This new serious version, together with Mark Musa’s vintage translation, offers scholars with a transparent, readable verse translation followed via ten cutting edge interpretations of Dante’s masterpiece.

Itself (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

What do "self" and "it" have in universal? In Rae Armantrout's new poems, there's no inert substance. Self and it (word and particle) are ritual and rigmarole, song-and-dance and lengthy distance name into no matter what darkish subject may possibly exist. How may a self no longer be egocentric? Armantrout accesses the strangeness of daily incidence with wit, sensuality, and a watch alert to underlying trauma, as within the poem "Price Points" the place a guy conducts an imaginary orchestra yet "gets no issues for originality.

The Nibelungenlied: The Lay of the Nibelungs (Oxford World's Classics)

The best of the heroic epics to emerge from medieval Germany, the Nibelungenlied is a revenge saga of sweeping dimensions. It tells of the dragon-slayer Sivrit, and the mysterious state of the Nibelungs with its worthwhile treasure-hoard guarded through dwarves and giants, of Prünhilt the Amazonian queen, fortune-telling water-sprites and a cloak of invisibility.

Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut

(Robert John) Wace (c. 1100 - c. 1174) used to be an Anglo-Norman poet, who was once born in Jersey and taken up in mainland Normandy. Roman de Brut (c. 1155) used to be in keeping with the Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Its acceptance is defined by means of the recent accessibility to a much wider public of the Arthur legend in a vernacular language.

Additional info for Blood and Old Belief: A Verse Novel

Example text

The evening’s a wave of heat, then haziness, while nearby a homestead waits where no-one’s lived for years. She walks towards it, scared of something silent in the dark. ❧ She pauses in collecting fallen fruit, shoos away the clacking geese, looks at sky through leaf and branch. The bruised fruit softens in her hand. She sucks and spits. Remembering herself, she sits and writes. Gathers herself in words, scores them out, gathers herself again. The sky so large, the shadowing of trees so small a haven, turns a black stone in her hand, walks towards the homestead where the pictures are that she believes must be her ancestors.

I smooth my dress and wipe the benches, wash the dusty cloth. All seems watched, as if God’s staring eye lights up the house and radiates the crops. I’d wipe them clean of earth, too, if I could, wipe quite clean the dusty, dirty world of all its rough and blemished wear and soil and make it shine, and hold it at my heart— cleansed, it would at last be Godly-strong and I its matron, gathering it in arms. 50 Thirty-one: Katherine Katherine lifts the bread bin’s lid and finds the crusty loaf. She gouges with her fingers into the moistness, pulling free a handful, pushing it into her mouth, and the taste shivers in her as a small ecstasy.

47 Twenty-nine: Jack Jack shelters under willows near the creek, their dense cascade of underwater roots like the flowing scarlet-orange hair of some woman who has drowned. He walks where property line and creek line join and part, hemmed with river stones and trailing shadow near a group of boulders. Here he waits while midday glares with thirsty yellow heat. Old dreams welter in his troubled mind. ❧ In keeping myself apart I suffer change until I lose the names of days. Dragging a bag of wheat I bang and twist a knee and, waiting for pain to slow, I see the wide, brown river that was boyhood’s pleasure— pushing a twine-tied raft in water like a million rushing threads of light and darkness joined.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.46 of 5 – based on 15 votes