Timelines collection Published by Indigo Dreams http://www.indigodreams.co.uk/Bookshop is on it’s way to Romania together with a previous phamplet Between Bamboo published in 2009 (now out of print) to Prof. Lidia Vanu at the University of Bucharest  to reside in the Joyce Room of the Second, Lidia has designated the Joyce room at the faculty for a ‘Modernist and Contemporary British Literature’ library. This is a part of the poetry pf. RO project when poems were translated into Romanian and broadcast on radio. They will be a resource for further translations by M.A. students.

TIME LAG
from Plasterer’s Mate 1992 by Toby Granville

You stare at me, impatient to be away
as the five o’clock light dapples your
marbled nakedness. Your eyes are already
elsewhere, every nerve striving escape.

The pan you fried eggs in lies empty,
the last of yesterday’s papers sculpted by
plaster wiping’s waiting the black plastic bag.

Now our history-moled basement walls
are hung with new ochre skins
made from you unblemished plaster
drying in the trapped heat.

NO NATION

‘If you could choose a country’ Moinza Alvi
Cornflower blue blooms between kaki
as a boy lifts his face to smile in the sun.
He has only known the dust of a basement
the smell of rancid water running down
the drain of the road, the hushed voice

of his mother whispering ‘Silence’
as feet rush by the deserted house.

Elsewhere men in suits sit around
tables filled with food, finest wines
dicing with words, each letter bearing
a different weight , each weight
a pawn in the chess of language.

There is no need to understand
others will translate the Babel.

The boy moves towards the cornflowers
seduced by a colour he has never seen

the quiet of the day, the warmth of the sun;
as he approaches the flowers become men.

He stands transfixed by fear they wear blue
helmets, these men have every and no nation.