To Charles Brasch
Preface
Part One
Sleep Will Come Singly • A Ballad of Bad Omens • The Tempest • Sea Legend • Fire Without Phoenix • The Time of the Eagle • And I, In Arcady • The Beachcomber • For One Flying • A Handful of Sea Shells • A Figure at the Window • Island
Part Two
Ceremony of Pain • Dream • Soldier's Pay • Monastic Ruins • A Performance of Death & The Maiden • At a Holy Well • From a Train in the Midlands • In Radcliffe Square, Oxford • The Streets of My City • In the Fields of My Father's Youth • Colophon—The Poet to his Book
Source: Oliver, W. H., Fire Without Phoenix: Poems 1946-1954. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1957
Electronic source: Fire Without Phoenix: a TEI-conformant transcription
All poems © W. H. Oliver
The Streets of My City
From the New Occidental
The awning's slender pillars pace
Along the curving street.
Over a staggered row of shops
Out-buildings climb to meet
Sudden gorse-clad slopes.
A terraced road above the gorse
Climbs to a crest and falls
Down to iron rust roof slums
From green, sullen hills
Littered with wooden homes.
The empty-eyed turn in the wind
Like rubbish in a pool
From pub and job and boarding house
Through vacant streets until
It falters, and they cease.