Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Another Look
- A Great-Grandfather
- A Great-Grandmother
- Grandfathers
- Grandmothers
- Birthplace
- My Mother and her Two Brothers
- Their Wedding Photograph
- Sticks and Stones
- Hickory Dickory
- Jolson Sings
- First Day at the Grammar School
- Catching an Old Film on Television
- Days of TEFL
- Snap
- May 1997
- Emma at Seven Months
- Somewhere Down the Line
- No Joke
- For the Man I Used to Go Fishing With
- Fishing in the Grounds of a Therapeutic Community
- Not at his Best
- Dead of Winter
- ‘Committal’
- The Dovecote
- The Idea of Order at Hunts Cross
- Jupiter Optimus Maximus
- Squeezing a Poem out of Me
- Fragment
- Something for Gael Turnbull on his Seventieth Birthday
- Making an Arrangement
- An Invitation to Breakfast from Sydney Smith
- Hiroshima
- Sez I Sez I in Stephen's Green
- Seventh Heaven
- At Drumcliff in 1997
- Getting There
- Mnemósynon
- Moonlight on Leros
- Olives
- The Quality of Greek Light
- Scottish Waiter Bringing Squid
- Funerary Monuments, Aegina
- Taking the Hexameter a Walk
- Moonlight on Aegina
- Whalewatching – Vancouver Island
- Seventh-Storey Heaven
- Sarah Biffin
- Ancestors
- In the Dock Canteen
- On Tape at the Old People's Home
- Winter Solstice 2001
- A Long Way from Home
- Publisher's note
The Quality of Greek Light
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Another Look
- A Great-Grandfather
- A Great-Grandmother
- Grandfathers
- Grandmothers
- Birthplace
- My Mother and her Two Brothers
- Their Wedding Photograph
- Sticks and Stones
- Hickory Dickory
- Jolson Sings
- First Day at the Grammar School
- Catching an Old Film on Television
- Days of TEFL
- Snap
- May 1997
- Emma at Seven Months
- Somewhere Down the Line
- No Joke
- For the Man I Used to Go Fishing With
- Fishing in the Grounds of a Therapeutic Community
- Not at his Best
- Dead of Winter
- ‘Committal’
- The Dovecote
- The Idea of Order at Hunts Cross
- Jupiter Optimus Maximus
- Squeezing a Poem out of Me
- Fragment
- Something for Gael Turnbull on his Seventieth Birthday
- Making an Arrangement
- An Invitation to Breakfast from Sydney Smith
- Hiroshima
- Sez I Sez I in Stephen's Green
- Seventh Heaven
- At Drumcliff in 1997
- Getting There
- Mnemósynon
- Moonlight on Leros
- Olives
- The Quality of Greek Light
- Scottish Waiter Bringing Squid
- Funerary Monuments, Aegina
- Taking the Hexameter a Walk
- Moonlight on Aegina
- Whalewatching – Vancouver Island
- Seventh-Storey Heaven
- Sarah Biffin
- Ancestors
- In the Dock Canteen
- On Tape at the Old People's Home
- Winter Solstice 2001
- A Long Way from Home
- Publisher's note
Summary
That man with rheumy eyes,
what of him,
emerging from the sea?
He's been alternating crawl
and breast stroke this last half-hour,
a hundred yards of each,
and, in between, has stood waist-deep
gulping air. Underfoot
shingle rumbles silently;
there are silver spirals of small fish.
He's conscious of his body,
its shape and lengthening history,
grossly white and foreign,
an axolotl, dead-frog rubbery.
Pretending to diffidence,
he entertains the thought
that he's amusing,
harmlessly ‘different’
to those brown ones
lounging under tamarisks.
They watch him twisting water
from his trunks, wriggle into
shorts, yank a t-shirt on,
flaunt his day-late Guardian.
Behind him
on the concrete road
there's an ancient tinkle
and clopping of panniered mules
over a ground bass of rip-
roaring scooters. Something
that looks like a hornet
is keeping a beady eye on him.
A Greek friend says he himself
takes advantage of
the sharpness and clarity
to investigate
less pleasant things in life,
links the birth of tragedy
with the quality of the light:
blind Oedipus, Antigone's cave,
Persephone clasped
in the pitch-black arms of Dis.
That's Greeks for you,
going on about
these ‘scowling times’,
when all you want to do
is tuck in to calamari, sip ouzo,
finish the crossword,
or simply, on a day like this,
take in the view!
Lifting a camera
to one eye, he clicks,
winds on.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Getting There , pp. 55 - 56Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2001