Matt Simpson
Summers in Cambridge
‘This is the news: he fishes, drinks and wastes
The lamps of night in revels.’
The city is too intimate,
faces the same. Dons
with their madeira
rich as sauce have kept
too many centuries alive,
rivers trees and lawns
have been eternal
too long, too green
each summer. Only
the traffic thickens
and the foreigners.
Today the routine walk
to Grantchester. The same
obscenities from wasps. The same
whitewashed inertia. The same
three pubs. The usual ogle
into Byron’s Pool as if
a cleanlimbed poet …
Last year in Berlin
found it amusing
to think - Du lieber Gott -
of Grantchester.
Brooke’s poem framed
on the pub walls among
conventional landscapes.
I should find other
memories,
cancel the place out,
Despite the carp at Madingley,
the Rembrandt in the Fitzwilliam
Museum, the sexy things
that stroll the Backs.
Tonight the radio’s news unreal
the world’s sport of riot and disaster
the whiskey and the chat
the chat and the whiskey
the Church clock at ten to three.
Page(s) 75
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The