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    I Think We’re Alone Now
    I Think We’re Alone Now
    I Think We’re Alone Now
    Ebook95 pages40 minutes

    I Think We’re Alone Now

    By Abigail Parry

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    About this ebook

    I Think We’re Alone Now is a bold and far-ranging second collection from a fresh and original new voice in British poetry.

    This was supposed to be a book about intimacy: what it might look like in solitude, in partnership, and in terms of collective responsibility. Instead, the poems are preoccupied with pop music, etymology, surveillance equipment and cervical examination, church architecture and beetles. Just about anything, in fact, except what intimacy is or looks like.

    So this is a book that runs on failure, and also a book about failures: of language to do what we want, of connection to be meaningful or mutual, and of the analytic approach to say anything useful about what we are to one another. Here are abrupt estrangements and errors of translation, frustrations and ellipses, failed investigations. And beetles.

    Abigail Parry's first collection, Jinx (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2018 and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize 2019.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloodaxe Books
    Release dateNov 16, 2023
    ISBN9781780376820
    I Think We’re Alone Now
    Author

    Abigail Parry

    Abigail Parry spent seven years as a toymaker before completing her doctoral thesis on wordplay. Her poems have been set to music, translated into Spanish and Japanese, broadcast on BBC and RTÉ Radio, and widely published in journals and anthologies. She has won a number of prizes and awards for her work, including the Ballymaloe Prize, the Troubadour Prize, and an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, Jinx, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018.

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      Book preview

      I Think We’re Alone Now - Abigail Parry

      The brain of the rat in stereotaxic space

      is all laid out on numbered plates.

      In lilacs, greys and greens, which adumbrate

      the local function;

      a riddle

      flattened out. A knot

      bisected down the interaural line.

      The brain of the rat in stereotaxic space

      admits no trace

      of all the little rat-thoughts, little rat-needs,

      that scurry round its maze. Just page on numbered page

      of isthmuses and commissures, and junctions and rhombomeres,

      all jigsawed into place.

      The brain of the rat in stereotaxic space

      insists the pieces tessellate

      and nothing else squeaks in. Just fig on numbered fig,

      glossed in 8-point lowercase.

      The brain of the rat in stereotaxic space

      invites us to extrapolate

      and come up with grim stuff –

      here’s no ghost, no guest, no hidden ace

      tucked up a sleeve. No sleeve, in fact. Just stacks of coloured plates.

      The brain of the rat in stereotaxic space

      has something to relate

      about how late it is. How much has been a waste.

      Grateful, nonetheless,

      to have had my time at a kink of neural space

      that more or less exactly corresponds

      to that where you had yours –

      a riddle

      uttered once, between one blank page and the next. And that will do, I think.

      Speculum

      I like the word – how pert it is.

      Inquisitive. Part instrument, part

      clockwork bird – the kind that says ho hum

      and clicks and squeaks in all its joints.

      A whimsical professor, beaked

      and blinking: let’s take a look then,

      shall we? In the Vulgate, it’s a mirror:

      videmus nunc per speculum.

      Only later on are we through a glass

      and darkly. (An odd phrase, that –

      a pane of sullen blue behind each eye.

      You don’t look through a mirror.)

      You go not till I set you up a glass

      where you may see the inmost part of you.

      That’s Hamlet to his mother. In a sec,

      he’ll get all weird about her bed

      and stick his sword straight through an arras.

      As for me, I find it strange to speak

      in one breath of one’s conscience

      and one’s cunt. Hard to know thyself,

      when for years the only way was with a mirror,

      tilted up. For a long time, I believed

      it was an absence: blank negative

      the lab could not develop. An ellipsis.

      Imagine my surprise, to find the way

      extended upwards, backwards, inwards.

      All the same, I’m bothered by the rhyme

      that finds my centre in its recess.

      And yes, I find it tiresome to

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