At a Funeral, Someone Eating Ash
Deciding out of mercy to forget
what we'd just seen: ash scattered,
chance breeze, ash cast back into the scatterer's mouth.
It is a thing to swallow a funeral
and as the scatterer spat into the grass,
I thought of how funny the dead man had been,
all his bleak jokes—how he might've slouched
in the corner with a cocktail stick
to get his own burnt body from your teeth.
I thought of the emaciated birch
we'd planted in his honour, the elegies sombre
and ridiculous as cassocks, how none of them had fit
the scatterer clawing at his own grey mouth,
the laughter that I forced back down my throat.
James Appleby is the editor of Interpret, a new magazine of international writing, where he has published winners of the International Booker Prize, the King's Gold Medal for Poetry, and other awards. His debut pamphlet, Spurious Language, was highly commended in the Poetry Business’ International Book & Pamphlet Award. James is a fluent speaker of French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese; he has been invited to read at poetry festivals across Europe, and he is a translator-in-residence for the 60th Anniversary of Modern Poetry in Translation. He was born in 1993 and works in Edinburgh.
Spurious Language is an assured and imaginative pamphlet that restlessly plays with voice, language and translation, of both words and human experience. It brings a mix of wit, unease and emotional precision that makes it feel quietly powerful, alongside presenting the new translations of other poets, notably Yiran Li.
