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
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core
Funerary Monuments, Aegina
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
Summary
Simple enough distinction. The dead
always seated, the living standing by.
What complicates is how they're linked,
each couple holding hands in such
a definite, tender way it's easy to imagine
love streaming through the veins,
tingling in the fingertips. And not just that.
Standing here among the excavated tombs
in fields of snaky asphodels, you gravitate
towards some threshold, the singular step
between the now and then of everything
you ever thought was possible in life and death.
Even in those monuments that time's
been savage with and left as shadowy iconography,
there seems to be, however faintly, some purpose
flowing in the graininess of stone hating annulment, endings of any kind.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Getting There , pp. 58Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2001