Rodney Pybus

Rodney Pybus recently won the Peterloo Poetry Competition. His most recent collection of verse, Cicadas in their summers, was published by Carcanet last year.

Poem: ‘Ciao, Fighter!’

Rodney Pybus, 31 August 1989

for Arnost Lustig

It’s swift, this exorbitant ripple of Rs: the sound to a British ear is something, roughly, like

RORE-RAYS said fast as a bird. Trying out an odd word of yours, my tongue feels as if it’s been arrested

lurching, without papers, down a scarred road somewhere in the old centre of Europe.

But when I hear you in full cry after a story that’s getting away like a...

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