The Yellow House
Poetry (Salmon Poetry, Clare 2017)
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“The poems in The Yellow House bear reading and re-reading. On finishing the collection, you are left with a feeling both powerful and affecting. The poems are moving but never merely sentimental; sometimes lyrical, but not self-obsessed. The emotional range is matched by the artfulness of execution. We are lucky that Wall writes poetry this well. If Wall means what he writes in the penultimate poem of the collection, ‘The ship of Theseus’: ‘I remake myself / in every new phrase’, then we have much to look forward to in the future.” David Toms
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Read a poem from the collection
I would know your step
the set of your shoulders
the way you hold your head
if you walked across the horizon
three miles distant
wherever they have horizons
steppes or deserts
I would know your step
I would know your voice
if you stood in a choir of voices
in the world’s biggest choral anthem
some unimaginable allelujah
in the biggest cathedral
on the horizon of a steppe or desert
I would know your voice
I would know your hair
in a curiosity shop of copper
in a chest of chestnuts
in a goldsmith’s workshop
your red gold hair
in a cathedral of copper and gold
on the horizon of a steppe or desert
I would know your hair
I would know the sounds
you make in sleep
the noise of your dreams
if you were the chorus
of a great cathedral
or the copper in a wire
the curiosity of goldsmiths
on the horizon of a steppe or desert
I would know the sound
Read a poem from the collection
The revolution will come
but not here
heads will roll
but not on my watch
and there will be noise
and there will be lamentations
and there will be a better world
and everyone will know
that the bastards got what’s coming
even if new bastards come
they will be our new bastards
and not the old bastards who kept their boots
upon our necks and smiled and smiled
and the air will be cleaner
and the sewers will run red with blood
so much the sea will darken
the whole island surrounded
by the colour of sunset
on a way of life that was not ours anyway
and above all
there will be singing
the invention of entirely new ways
of being together and apart
and new ways of remembering
but not here