These paper boats of mine are meant to dance on the ripples of hours, and not reach any destination... Rabindranath Tagore

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past...F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.
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On the way to the river are the old dormitories, used for something else now, with their fairy-tale turrets, painted white and gold and blue. When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
--from Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.
- Joyce Carol Oates
Showing posts with label Song of the Slums. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Song of the Slums. Show all posts

Saturday, August 10, 2013

Song of the Slums


Song of the Slums by Richard Harland
Allen & Unwin. 2013.


a gas filled airship
leers over
Swale House 
swollen with the warts of wealth

 she played a harp in those days

 but chance
launches
 Astor into
the beauty of gang music

 in the slag heaps of Slumtown

 and she finds
the drums

 chance 
spins
Astor through
Granny Rouse's world
gives her the friendship of
the eerie Mav
the dynamic 
curious excitement of
Verrol

 and the 
chance for a role in
the Rowdies

 she lives
the drums

 until
London

 a world cluttered with
steam-powered charabancs
stream-lined velocipedes
basketwork rickshaws

 and
plutocrats
swollen with militia
and political mania

slum music 
rages
slashes
the tiaras and
conventional pomposities

 stirring the soul of the street

 giving it a voice

 giving her
a voice

 and 
a drumming soul
Linking to:
Poets United - Poetry Pantry
MY GOODREADS REVIEW

Song of the SlumsSong of the Slums by Richard Harland
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's the Age of Steam with a vibrant heartbeat growing in the slums. Astor has been groomed in the harp, but when she is left in the wealthy Swale household under rather strange marriage circumstances, and escapes, she inadvertently grooms a whole new lifestyle with matriarch Granny Rouse and her slum gang. It is there that Astor finds her real music, her real rhythms and her soul.

View all my reviews
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