Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by J. O. Morgan

Dedication

Title Page

There was her . . .

it’s like grain . . .

The first duty . . .

it’s like the lights . . .

He told me he . . .

it’s like finishing . . .

The first time we . . .

it’s like mathematical . . .

You may as well . . .

it’s like the hand . . .

At around midday . . .

a mind . . .

He worked as . . .

it’s like trying . . .

Recently a tribe . . .

I saw a woman . . .

‘. . . it’s not itself . . .

We used to think the . . .

Dozing through the . . .

Don’t forget the . . .

O, bulbous . . .

In the beginning . . .

It’s not the aim . . .

God said . . .

Such a miserable . . .

God, beginning . . .

I used to be . . .

it’s like two . . .

His first note . . .

Working the late- . . .

I saw a yellow . . .

On a high moor . . .

The one big axe . . .

Two house-mice . . .

I was biding . . .

Bearing down on . . .

Our father . . .

It’s akin . . .

Doves make . . .

Similarly . . .

We have discovered . . .

it’s like a goose . . .

Long after . . .

‘Who kissed . . .

Copyright

About the Book

At first, these extraordinary poems may unsettle and disturb, but the next reading could be one of rapture and astonishment; it all hinges on your point of view. Like the optical illusion of the maiden and the crone, you can only see one image at a time; the brain deciding which is the figure and which the background. It is a book that acts out its own subjects – dualities, ambiguities, boundaries – through physical dislocation, through patterns of interference.

This is a collage of many voices: eager or dispassionate, unreliable or matter-of-fact – depending, as with everything else, on your angle of entry. Some of the voices fear involvement; some are afraid of doing nothing; some, perhaps, have already gone too far. Like the image on the cover, these pieces shimmer and buzz in their own instability. Is this punishment or reward? What is the yellow smoke? Will there be bodies floating under the plastic pool-cover? Are we, like the hotel manager, seeing visions?

Volatile, troubling, but endlessly interesting, these poems show J.O. Morgan working and compressing language into a precarious, frictional state. As a result, Interference Pattern is a unique reading experience: vivid, challenging and completely original.

About the Author

J. O. Morgan lives on a small farm in the Scottish Borders. He is the author of four collections of poetry, each a single book-length poem: Natural Mechanical (2009), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, its sequel, Long Cuts (2011), shortlisted for the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Award, At Maldon (2013), shortlisted for the Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award, and In Casting Off (2015).

ALSO BY J. O. MORGAN

Natural Mechanical

Long Cuts

At Maldon

In Casting Off

to the ungiven, or forever given up

INTERFERENCE
PATTERN

J. O. Morgan

There was her father’s safety razor

sat without its plastic cap.

There was the ledge on which she’d clambered and

the smooth face of wall off which she was flicking ants.

There was the mirror and the recollected gentle

sweeping motion, so often observed from the door.

There was the disbelief of her slow backward fall,

a disbelief continued as she struck the stony ground.

Except, for some reason she never could fathom, she pressed

the blade to her lower lip and slid it off laterally.

There was the shape of a man stood blocking the sun

and her strengthlessness, bolstered in being so easily lifted.

She felt nothing more than the negative line

of metal drawn smoothly across her warm soft skin.

There was the bright sandstone yard in which she was laid

and the green plush pillow on which her leg rested.

In the mirror she watched the deep red film

slowly lowered to blanket her lip.

There was a keenness to pick at the splinter of stone

sticking out, and reluctant agreement to leave it alone.

In her mouth the mineral tang was more prominent

than the syrupy warmth of the liquid’s free flow.

There was noise, and the wonder of how much blood

it must take to have turned such a large pillow black.

it’s like grain poured through a funnel

a steady cylindrical stream of tumbling seeds

it’s like watching that flow and seeing

each separate speck and of a sudden

reaching in to catch the one required the

only shape that fits and placing it ready

then back to the flow for the next

yet it is neither the grain nor the funnel

for the funnel will jam and must be shaken

or the grain is rotten and so the source

must be closely examined or else the flow

runs dry and a different approach is

considered or all the fallen grain swept up

and carefully poured through again

The first duty of each day is to unlock the heat

from the mixed changing rooms, to prep the electric sauna

for prepaid use, to uncover the pool where, I’m told,

two girls once drowned, though long before my time.

This we may presume: how they got in after hours, drunk,

daring each other to swim beneath the blue-green tarp that

each night tucked the water up; how the first girl panicked

halfway under, tried to surface where the surface wasn’t;

and the second, seeing the bump in the plastic, went in