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“... Hyena Like something out of Brueghel, maned in white and hungry like the dark, the bat ears pricked, the face a grey velour, more cat than dog, less caracal than fanalouc or civet – here is the patron beast of all who love the night: waking at dusk to anatomy’s blunt hosanna, the carrion daylight broken then picked to the bone while the radio dance band fades to a slow alleluia, and far at the back of the mind, the perpetual frenzy: eye teeth and muzzle coated with blood with matter, as every mouth digs in, for fair, or foul, a giggle in the bushes, then a shudder ...”

“... We have seen this pebble before Though three feet under. From year To year it changes position. The sea dwindles its contours But not to my brief eye In a mere decade of watching. Stone keeps its secrets. Its smoothness is a ruse To content us with surface. At the heart of stone is pure Concentration, which life Is foolishly in love with. We believe that the stillness comes From its exact possession Of a truth that is lost to us ...”

“... I have a dream I wake from, now and then, mostly in summer, the swallows etching my walls with shadow, eider drowsing on the firth, the gold light in the street trees thick with gnats: surprised, as I slip from my bed, to see my neighbours’ cars, their bedroom windows curtained, someone moving on the street – a paper boy, the milkman on his rounds – when, only a moment before, I’d walked through town on just such a morning as this, the swallows hatching the walls in my head, the street trees clouded with sunlight and gnats, but nothing else: no paper boy, no curtains drawn on lives that I had always thought too much like theatre; no one moving in the world but me, so I could pass through any door and wander easily from room to room, unhindered and unobtrusive, nobody home to be offended when I opened drawers and cupboards for the drama of a world left unpossessed, the objects in themselves, that no one else had ever touched or seen, props for a play that no one was there to perform, their reason for being unknown, till the angel descended to set things in motion, with one final link in the puzzle: a bread knife, a needle, a hairbrush, an unwound clock, a fairytale apple, dusted with shadows and venom ...”

“... The Ugly I love you as I love the Hatchetfish, the Allmouth, the Angler, the Sawbelly and Wolf-eel, the Stoplight Loosejaw, the Fangtooth; all our sweet bathypelagic ones, and especially those too terrible or sly even for Latin names; who saddle their menfolk to the vagina’s hide like scorched purses, stiff with seed; whom God built to trawl endless cathedrals of darkness, their bland eyes gaping like wounds; who would choke down hunger itself, had it pith and gristle enough; who carry on their foreheads the trembling light of the world ...”

“... for Will Maclean I House If the house in a dream is how I imagine myself: room after room of furniture no one could use; stairs leading upwards to nothing; an empty hall filling with snow where a door has been left ajar; then whatever I make of the one room high in the roof where something alive and frantic is hopelessly trapped, whatever I make of the sweetness it leaves behind on waking, what I know and cannot tell is awkward and dark in my hands while I stop to remember the snare of a heart; the approximate weight of possession ...”

“... who is a working peer. The only leading official to whom the Prime Minister talks regularly is John Monks, the TUC General Secretary, who shares something of his political approach and whom he usually sees discreetly, rather than for talks heralded by the TUC. Union leaders have had, perforce, to get used to a vastly diminished status – though none of ...”

“... The movement slows: everything grows dark. A man checks the knot in his tie. It’s twilight and a fine rain smears the windows. Will you miss your train, and the delightful party? A man checks the knot in his tie. It’s twilight; superhuman powers will never be yours. You will miss your train, and the delightful party. They argue about civil rights ...”

“... All the misfortunes of man, all the baleful reverses with which histories are filled … all of this is the result of not knowing how to dance. Molière, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme We listen to the late weather-bulletin. The forecast is for severe storms, resulting in spires and chimneys being blown down on top of those citizens who venture out of doors to post letters to relations serving sentences in Her Majesty’s prisons ...”

“... Taxonomy Carolus Linnaeus (1707-78) Weeks out of school: in rainstorms and grandmothers’ cupboards, bear-dark in the corners, filigrees of lacewing and silt; the birds we saw in books: merganser, stork; trees from botanic gardens printed on air; the words in our minds like games that would never be finished: names for moments at sea; or how a skin is altered by a history of shade: the smallest shift enough to fix a thing or make it new: soft or more evenly mottled; bearing scars and hairless; or defined for centuries by how it seemed emerging from the earth: fragile dicotyledon smudged with ash, not sixty feet of constituted rain ...”

“... Aubade(In memoriam J.P.)Morning in lockdown. Shadows in the yard,Quink-blue and graduallyshifting, like those eels we used to seeabove the weir, thickwhipcords of lustand instinct, surgingheadlong through the mystery of grass.Forty years on, but all I have to dois close my eyes to see youcycling to Cherry Hinton in that dust-greyskirt you used to wear, the dawn lightfollowing the river back to town– and every summerproximate, since then,though you were gonebefore the mist set inand anyway, it wasn’t what we thought:the true romancewas place, the faintcontinuum of rainon Byron’s Pool, the passingmoment, when an owl skimmed overheadand left me here, yearslater, half a mileof buddleia and birdsong to the nearesttraffic, threadsof damp along the walls,but warmer than the house I thoughtwould shield me: first sunstreaming through the trees,no I, no us, but just beyond the fence,a skylark in the near field, flush with song ...”

“... Die Musik bei einem Hochzeitszug erinnert mich immeran die Musik von Soldaten, die in den Krieg ziehen. Heine June will continue white, with outbreaks of rice; though, given the numbers, it’s difficult not to assume that one of these persons now present will soon take the cure in a series of high-ceilinged rooms that was once The Merchant’s House, at the heart of an Alpine town near Zermatt, a resort so exclusive it even had two names ...”

“... When I was twenty years old, on days that were darker and brighter than now, I got up at six and swam fifty lengths every morning, steady and even, though not as precise, or as sure as the one other swimmer I passed, flowing back and forth, in the lit pool on Parker’s Piece: an old man, I thought at the time, with a gold to his skin that is only acquired over decades, his slicked hair silver, his bachelor’s eyes halfway from grey to blue, when we met in the changing rooms, silent and male, but never so much that it bothered him not to conceal a fleeting, and half-amused gleam of fellow feeling ...”

“... The body as the sum of all nostalgias. Empire of footfalls; Mother as Script and Ideal – and love no chance event, no accidental stir of wings, or blueprint spiked with hospice. What hymn tunes come to mind at Candlemas, the fence wires rimmed with ice, our plum trees medieval in the first blue gloaming? What carol for the kill-site, sodden plumage scattered in the grass, and beautiful? Always, the meadow is now: the chill after dusk, hunter and hunted pausing in the fog to listen, summer barbering the skin ...”

“... Down by the River El muro cano Va a imponerme su ley, no su accidente.          Jorge Guillén She dies in a local flurry of dismay as kittens do, held steady in a pail of icy water, never what I intended, more a case of inattentiveness than grief or rage, I held her in the current, fingers wound with shift and slither. It wasn’t personal ...”

“... Over the mountain they vacillate. Not quite flies over dung – the mountain is too good for that. And flies land – these hover, and resist landing as long as possible. They need the mountain to stay up there – in their bullshit freedom, coming down as far away from their launch place as they can. Setting club records. Causing distress to old men in fields and kids alone in farmhouses when their cellphones are out of range ...”