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the poet
Highly commended in The Forward Prizes and commended by The Poetry Society's National Poetry Competition, Tom Weir won the Magma Editor’s Choice Prize with his poem A Man Blames the Dent in the Bonnet of his Car on Two Deer. He was also one of the inaugural winners of Templar Poetry's iOTA Shot Pamphlet Awards for The Outsider. As well as publishing the collections All That Falling and Ruin thanks to a grant from Arts Council England, Tom's had poems in Stand, The Scores, iOTA Poetry and elsewhere. After many years spent living in the north of England, he now calls Bristol home. It's here that he's working on his third collection.
the poems
Trampoline
After Gerard Woodward
I should probably mention the dark,
the distance, how we sank a little deeper
into the waves the further we got from land,
and how tired we were
after ten days camping in that heat.
And then there was the brandy
and the brandy after the brandy the waiter poured
from the bottle hidden beneath the bar
that he didn’t charge us for,
that the kitchen staff came out to watch us drink,
that he told us they used to clean the windows
and an hour later, when these children
started springing from the earth,
I was no longer sure he was joking –
all these faces appearing on the air,
held at the tipping point where the dim light
strung them up like photographs
above a ground that continued to refuse them –
faces stretched from all that falling,
all that trying not to fall.
Show Me The Way to Bahrain
At half time, while the stewards tried to keep the steel fence
that separated the two sets of fans from collapsing,
you told me your favourite part was the chant about Bahrain.
But it was loud and there wasn't enough time to explain
that what they were actually singing
was show me the way to Plough Lane.
So you must've spent the second half thinking
these 300 fans who’d made the long trip from London,
arms outstretched and shouting at the sky
as if discovering rain for the first time,
these men and women drinking vodka hidden in bottles of coke
and falling over plastic seats and laughing,
these men and women treating this stadium
by an airfield up north somewhere like the house
their parents left one weekend when they were sixteen,
were all paying homage to some place in the Middle East
they’d never been – its heat, its deserts, its duty free.
So when I read that the plans to build a stadium
back in Plough Lane have finally been approved,
I think of you, of Darlington away,
that cold, damp, beautiful day.
Walking with Annie
What else is it for, this night –
but the compromise
it makes with the city
to call off its threat
the way you might draw
a pack of dogs from the scent.
Just you and me, little fox –
sack of skin and bone
I carry close to my chest
as we head further into the dark
than I’ve ever been –
so dark the river below
has become an imagined place.
We’ve been here each night
since the week you were born
but never this late.
Look how vulnerable
you’ve made the dawn.
Publishing credits
Trampoline / Show Me The Way to Bahrain: All that Falling (Templar Poetry)
Walking with Annie: After Sylvia (Nine Arches Press)