Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- On Headed Paper
- The Built Environment
- Sub-architecture
- Bernini's Apollo and Daphne
- What Gretel Knows
- Katana
- Where the Swimming Pool Was
- A False Winter
- Tammasmass E'en
- Notes: A Monumental Brass
- Inscription
- Cambridge Primitive
- On Reading the Meaning of ‘Falchion’ in an Encyclopaedia
- Wish You Were Here
- Othona
- Potpourri
- The Animal in Motion
- Cartography for Beginners
- ‘Grasmere Lake’
- The Valley of the Stour with Dedham in the Distance
- The Henry Hudson Bridge
- New Battersea Bridge Nocturnes
- Wet Season
- Lecture
- Objection!
- A Stretch of River
- Difference
- Building
- The Egyptologist
- Cockle Shell Beach, Low Tide
- Labour
- Daphnia; or, The Water Flea
- In Praise of Pollen
- Four Seasons, St Giles Cripplegate
- Notes and Acknowledgments
Sub-architecture
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- On Headed Paper
- The Built Environment
- Sub-architecture
- Bernini's Apollo and Daphne
- What Gretel Knows
- Katana
- Where the Swimming Pool Was
- A False Winter
- Tammasmass E'en
- Notes: A Monumental Brass
- Inscription
- Cambridge Primitive
- On Reading the Meaning of ‘Falchion’ in an Encyclopaedia
- Wish You Were Here
- Othona
- Potpourri
- The Animal in Motion
- Cartography for Beginners
- ‘Grasmere Lake’
- The Valley of the Stour with Dedham in the Distance
- The Henry Hudson Bridge
- New Battersea Bridge Nocturnes
- Wet Season
- Lecture
- Objection!
- A Stretch of River
- Difference
- Building
- The Egyptologist
- Cockle Shell Beach, Low Tide
- Labour
- Daphnia; or, The Water Flea
- In Praise of Pollen
- Four Seasons, St Giles Cripplegate
- Notes and Acknowledgments
Summary
You can't blame us for our home towns with their proliferating
semis,
the pebble-dash and exposed red-brick uniformly imperfect.
Since my translocation I see it, on Google Earth, the squamous
look
the roofs have. The scabbed pavement where they put in
and then took out the beech, because they planted the wrong sort
of trees. They and their roots had to go. Insertions. Deletions.
My avenue. Come to the point. What hedges planted, trimmed,
removed? How would you describe the shape of the end, dead end,
and its turning-slash-parking room? The way it floods when it rains
all afternoon? It's like…we're incompatible. Because? Housescan't
shut their windows, can't open their doors and aren't at all like us.
Except, they too must worry about what's going on inside. The
shuffling
of objects, the changing of rooms. AndI'm sorry houses, what a
price to pay;
to lose your character! All for the love of warmth and/or economy.
So cells in sunlight, shot aerially, glint—not fully changed, but,
probabilistically, resigned to change.I'm sorry town, I see you now,
browed and beating. Unregulated and still spreading. They got you
on a good day, waiting—as if that was living. But it is living.
It's not our fault,we're simple and malefic. I think we can do
better. Well.
- Type
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- Information
- The Built Environment , pp. 3Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2018