Poem of the week: Chris Agee

Published on Thursday 2 July 2009 15:34

Chris Agee wrote all but one of the poems in Next to Nothing after the unexpected death of his four-year-old daughter. Her loss is a constant here, from the blank page entitled 'Incommunicable' to the later poems following Agee's travels in the Balkans.

The Tulip Tree

Is what the woman said she called it, the countrywoman

With sad perse eyes and a mane of greying ringlets

Who sold us a small magnolia and told us of her daughter's

Slow death of MS. I thought of the gathering dark

In the dusk of a sugar-plum evening with Miriam

When the treetops, we said, were dusted in icing

She longed to touch: huge snowflakes drifting

Through black panels of our caf bay, a celeste's hour

Magicking childhood's storm-bound sofa. What would she make

(Have made) of the waxen blush of the tulip tree? Today

The memorial stellata of another, like a great bloom of time –

Petals fallen into moments, sudden freshet of sunlight,

The mahogany spreads of Shamrock Compost – was planted

A year to the noon of her death's end to all moods and tenses.

You can buy Next to Nothing (Salt) from saltpublishing.com, or borrow it from the Scottish Poetry Library, which also lends by post. Tel: [phone], e-mail [e-mail] or visit www.spl.org.uk