James Womack was born in Cambridge in 1979. He studied Russian, English and translation at universities in St.Petersburg, Reykjavík and Oxford, and settled in Madrid in 2008. His selection of versions of Mayakovsky, Vladimir Mayakovsky and other poems, was published by Carcanet in 2016. His debut collection of poetry Misprint was published in 2012, and his forthcoming collection On Trust: A Book of Lies is due to be published in November 2017, both by Carcanet.
Naked Fates
I'm writing this on my mobile phone, a post that gets under way in the back of a taxi, on my way home across town from the Madrid Book Fair. Which is an immediate enough way to begin things (Look! There's the Prado!) except it's not entirely true. Or at least, the word 'home' here is working beyond its remit.
After almost a decade in Spain (two lustra, as the Spanish might say, having kept that useful Roman word for a five-year period - the gap between censuses or a sensible distance to maintain between elections), I am moving with my family back to the UK, where my wife has found a well-paid job, better than anything we were ever able to wrest from Spain.
And so, most of our books have been packed into boxes and shipped to Cambridge, along with furniture and clothes and all my son's plastic dinosaurs. Cambridge is not yet home; Madrid is no longer home, but I'm here alone for one last fortnight to run my publishing house's stand at the Book Fair. I sleep on a mattress in our denuded flat, and read poetry at night because the TV has already crossed over.
And I am writing this on a mobile phone. Last night I gave a reading with the excellent poet Richard Scott in Desperate Literature, the best bookshop in town. We colluded beforehand on what we were going to read, back and forth in the tiny parlour of the bookstore. As we worked out our setlist, Richard asked if I had any poems about libraries. I did, but only in a file on my mobile. The terribly modish thing of reading poems from a handheld device: uncomfortable and disorienting, and you always worry that the screen is going to go black just at the wrong moment ('When all at once I saw a crowd, a host, of golden... oh, sod it').
But the poem about libraries (about sex as well, and the internet, and myths, and the word 'tissue') was a good thing to have found, as it is one of the few poems I have written that actually mentions Madrid. I was talking with a friend after the reading, and she said that it took her a long time to become comfortable enough in a place for it to turn up in her work, which I think is probably right. So this poem, uncomfortable though it may be, probably comes from a moment of feeling, maybe, that Madrid was home.
The Naked Fates
The naked Fates occupy a lending-library in Madrid—
no one uses it, no requests are sent.
They sit naked in the bookish gloom, in the three darkest
corners, knitting between them some vast shawl.
One to measure, one to mark and one to cut.
For the traditional fee you may examine the images they cast
into the growing tissue, in this vaulted hall.
One to measure, one to mark and one to cut,
and from whom no secrets are hid…
The fabric spreads like a carnivorous plant.
One to measure, one to mark and one to cut.
If you speak to them they will ask you what it was you said
to be sure they understand what you meant
but then they will show you i.e. these figures from your past
you needed to see—how they live, are they living still,
where they found happiness, what shores they haunt…
They exchange secrets for secrets, so get it all off your chest—
tell them why you came, tell them what you have lost, tell it all.
One to measure, one to mark and one to cut.
They can give you the contact details of the dead,
and point out the loose ends you will want to pull
(One to measure, one to mark and one to cut)
as if that would help, to unravel things. I have heard
of people in the same position as I am, intent
on discovering their past discretions, ones they lost,
who have sought them through the labyrinth of chat-room threads,
managed to touch them with a virtual hand. what do you want
to sleep with you again to be honest
It's an odd poem, not least because I think it came from a time when I was trying to work out a way of compressing the sestina and the sonnet together into a single form. And the last line doesn't work, doesn't hold the ambiguities as well as I wanted it to hold them. But now that I look at it from the outside, I find that I can't quite see, or remember, what I wanted it to do. The answer is probably on the neatly arranged shelves, far away in a different country. A country which will hopefully come to feel like home, again, soon.
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You can pre-order James Womack's forthcoming collection On Trust: A Book of Lies here.
