The avoidance of excess is one of mine, much in the way that Larkin avoided the excess of high modernism, explicit politics or linguistic fireworks. If such principles result in a 'plain style', that is fine. It doesn't mean it is any the less poetry for that.
Piano Music is 'piano' as in quiet, as undemonstrative as undemonstative can be, I hope, the emotion strained through time, fiction and words to make something that might suggest a calm piece for piano.
It's another to sit with the poems collecting themselves together towards The Perfect Book. The Summer Game, a companion piece to The Winter Game, about an uneventful day at the cricket, is taking a bit longer to find. But there is plenty of time.
Piano Music
The rain stopped half an hour before
and shines now from the cobbled streets
where the aproned proprietors
of tidy, circumspect cafés
wipe tables for the customers
they hope will spend the afternoon
at them, discussing whatever
it takes. One of the first to take
a seat’s a character that finds
themselves in the closing chapters
of a novel set here, a small
town in the provinces with spires
that point modestly to pale sky.
The river can freeze in winter
but now flows with new confidence
towards a city and beyond
where they imagine is the love
that left with insufficient cause
to make them stay. And so the book
ends not quite there but soon after
having never been more than this.
