Contributors to The Lonely Crowd pick their favourite books of 2024. John Lavin The Letters of Seamus Heaney (edited by Christopher Reid) is surely an important book, giving the reader a more unfettered insight into the mind of the great poet than the equally essential Stepping Stones (Heaney’s autobiography-by-interview with Dennis O’Driscoll). Immediately the lapsed Heaney…
Karl Lorentz Ellerstraße 174 40227 Düsseldorf Annette Shröder Industriemuseum Cuxhavener Straße 9 40221 Düsseldorf Oberbilk, den 2. Oktober 1997 Dear Annette and the management team, I thought you would like to know that I have now come to terms with my unfair dismissal from the Industriemuseum. I’m no longer angry…
She remembered filing out of the workshop in a daze. Condemned by a jury of her peers. Jamie and Marcella asked her to come for a drink as if nothing had happened but she couldn’t face it. She felt as she had the first day. Innocent and enormously foolish. She didn’t belong here; she never had. It wasn’t that she hadn’t the brains; it was that her ambition wasn’t high-brow enough. Years of dulling necessary work had knocked that out of her. Life and single mothering and bad TV had thinned her emotions. The bad poetry of her youth at least had had heart.
At thirteen, David was proud of his vocabulary. He knew what ‘solipsism’ meant, and he was a ‘solipsist’, although he preferred to think of himself as an ‘egomaniac’, it sounded cooler; and, being a solipsistic egomaniac, he suspected that everything he’d ever experienced was created by his subconscious and only he was real.
One month after she graduated college, Leah and her mother took a vacation to Maine. Originally, Leah had intended to go backpacking across the country with her boyfriend, who she had been dating since freshman year, and who she later married, then divorced
The Heart is a Security Risk Thank you for searching my suitcase As I left Palestine Thank you for your note you left explaining what you did and why A kind thought indeed So you felt the need to open my suitcase To go through my possessions As I was leaving the country…
I don’t bother going home to change after my last exam, even though it’s only three o’clock and the pub will be empty. In Carty’s you’ll get served in school uniform, as long as you take off your tie and blazer before approaching the bar.A lonely pint will be the perfect first drink; just me,…
A grey light with a gossamer tinge
Through his eyes. Those diaphanous
Hands, on the dawn which follows
The midnight after a death.
Their nearness lent a new weight
To the interlocking between angels,
Blackmarket lemons on a forest day
When I cottoned on to this and ruled
The winter, in a sheltered river whose
Mouth is hidden, since death itself is
After all an angel.
I climb the stile and drop into the field, feet sending a dust cloud into the air. It films my eyes and I blink it away as best I can. The sheep are bloated yellow dots under the crumbling boundary wall, awake but still, conserving energy before their move to the next patch of shade.…
…slap at thrip and thunderbug, midge & mosquito come whining from the dark at neck and wrist, ancient blood knowledge voiced by this time & in this place long before the winking out of every point of light & too the ones unseeable, inaudible, stars so far that they are yet to be even seen here so young is the planet in relation, how it will go with the one to whom you are wed Mary well ask the biting bloodbugs, ask the twirling phantoms hereabouts & implore the leaves & the shine on them & if you must grieve at this point before death then
Christopher Cornwell’s dazzling debut collection, Ergasy, was published by The Lonely Crowd. Here, his fellow writers pay tribute to an exceptional talent who will be sorely missed by all who knew him.
(For Chris) ‘Brilliance is a category of exclusion as much as any other abnormality’ – Christopher Cornwell I don’t complete poems very often – and never quickly – So please forgive me for writing in haste And for writing this kind of thing The sort of blank heart-on-the-sleeve verse That you hated…
The party is in the morning. I arrive early at the venue, ensure it’s clean, the bathroom stocked with toilet paper. I arrange the tables, decorate the cake with a wicked witch flying on her broom, black cat as passenger. I blow up the balloons – helium is not allowed, not to disturb the fire…