Tim Dooley
A Salesman in the Lakes
West. Waste. Wastwater with its shifting scree
stirs in Stanley’s inner eye, as he stops for petrol
south of Cleator Moor, noting the No to Nirex signs,
but thinking of the play: Inside His Head.
The abandoned title sends him back to the primal scene,
the bare boards in the blue box by Derwentwater,
the simple table where son and father fight.
Stanley remembers where he first heard these words.
Too big to fit on the 405 lines of the family screen,
the monstrous father raged. Stanley applauded
the younger Loman’s cry. You fake. You phoney little fake.
Now Stanley knows too well the heaviness
that lumbers from small deception to unmeant mistake.
Arriving at last, he checks publicity, bookings,
trying to forget the image of a man his age and build,
slumped in a lay-by, asleep, he hopes, at the wheel.
Page(s) 45
magazine list
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- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
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- Magma
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- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
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- New Welsh Review
- North, The
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- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
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- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
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- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
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- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
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- Shearsman
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- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The