Bloodshot Monochrome. Patience Agbabi

Bloodshot Monochrome

Patience Agbabi was born in London in 1965 and educated at Oxford and Sussex Universities. Renowned for her live performances, her poems have been broadcast on television and radio all over the world. Her work has also appeared on the London Underground and human skin. She has lectured in Creative Writing at several UK universities including Greenwich, Cardiff and Kent. In 2004 she was nominated one of the UK’s Next Generation Poets. Bloodshot Monochrome is her third poetry collection. She lives in Kent with her partner and two children.

Also by Patience Agbabi

R.A.W.Transformatrix

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First published in Great Britain in 2008 by

Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,

Edinburgh EH1 1TE

This digital edition first published in 2014 by Canongate Books

The moral right of the author has been asserted

The TS Eliot quote on p. 37 is from ‘Philip Massinger’, Selected Prose of TS Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (Faber and Faber Ltd). Reproduced with permission.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material.

The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 84767 153 0

eISBN 978 1 78211 488 8

Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Grangemouth, Stirlingshire

www.canongate.tv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the following journals, in which poems for this collection have appeared in some form: Atlas, BBC Poetry Proms Pamphlet, www.blinking-eye.co.uk, www.madhattersreview.com/issue8/england_index.shtml, Poetry Review, Pratik, The Red Wheelbarrow, Trespass, Vogue.

Some poems have also appeared in the following anthologies: Here to Eternity (Faber & Faber), New Writing 12 (Picador), Poems on the Underground (Cassell), POP Anthology (New Departures), Velocity (Apples & Snakes).

‘The London Eye’ was a Poem on the Underground. It was originally commissioned for Earth Has Not Any Thing To Shew More Fair, ed. Peter Oswald and Alice Oswald and Robert Woof (Shakespeare’s Globe & The Wordsworth Trust). The book was a bicentenary celebration of Wordsworth’s ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802’. ‘Man and Boy’ and ‘The Siamese Twins’ were originally commissioned by BBC Radio 3 for Poetry Proms. ‘North(west)ern’ was originally commissioned in 2000 by Radio 4 for The Windrose, and was made into a short film for BBC Knowledge. ‘Osmosis’ was commissioned for a Southern Arts postcard celebrating a Year of the Artist Residency at the Schools of Humanities and Healthcare at Oxford Brookes University in 2001. ‘There was an old woman who lived in a shoe’ was commissioned as part of the Faltered States performance project (2003) by Apples & Snakes and the Science Museum.

Several of these poems appear on the iPoems system hosted on www.57productions.com.

I would also like to thank Jamie Byng, Francis Bickmore and everyone at Canongate for their enthusiasm and commitment to the book; Jeremy Clarke, Kwame Dawes, Matthew Hollis, Steve Tasane, Geoff Allnutt and Patricia Debney for their insightful feedback on the manuscript; Kate Clanchy for reminding me there is creative life after motherhood and Louisa Stevens for keeping me focused; Jennifer Russell, Sue Booth-Forbes and Susan DeBow for helping me kickstart the ‘Shots’ section at Anam Cara; to Gary Bagot for giving me the plot for ‘Yore Just My Type’ and Adeola Agbebiyi for the song title ‘Slow-Burning Fuse’ in ‘Josephine Baker Finds Herself’; Thabitha Khumalo for alerting me to the issues of women in Zimbabwe for ‘What’s Black and White and Red All Over?’; Peter Abbs, Ros Barber and all those on the MA at Sussex for their invaluable feedback on ‘Vicious Circle’ and the late Carl St Hill for believing in it.

The poet would like to thank the Authors’ Foundation and the AHRB for grants enabling me to write and develop as a writer and lecturer.

Finally, special thanks to all the contributors to Problem Pages, for their sonnets and their prose. Without their presiding spirits this book would never have been written.

CONTENTS

On Turning on the TV . . .

Comedown

Foreign Exchange