John Stammers

[Engleberton Crabferry]

John Stammers is a British poet, born in Islington, London. His collections include: Panoramic Lounge-bar (2001); Buffalo Bills (2004); Stolen Love Behaviour (2005); Interior Night (2010), and The Picador Book of Love Poems (2011).

I have basically been in need of some British counterparts to the Postmodern American scene (which is by far better documented, and generally better, if perhaps better exposed). And I recently came across this poet by way of a recommendation by a friend. I am wondering in fact if anybody else has any recommendations for good British post-modern poetry???

My knowledge of Stammers is limited to two of his collections; the Panoramic Lounge-bar, and Interior Night. So far I understand them to be quite different, the earlier exhibiting a greater, less personal imagination; the latter a more satirical, sardonic personality that seems to befit a specific type of postmodern anguish at the flurry of fragments it tends to deal with.

As usual, I have included here a couple of the author's poems (both from Interior Night), as well as (perhaps conceitedly!) some criticism of my own... I hope you like...

[Engleberton Crabferry]

Funeral

I too know it, the charm of funerals in the rain,
the ferocity of a veil in daylight,
or the studied black suits and millinery,
disremembered rituals of the tribe.

The portals of the mausoleum lean
as if having suffered breaks-ins
by morbid archangels;
its columns evince a certainly verticality,
each finding itself unable to fall
into that abstraction
known as giving up the ghost.

Wreathes sadden in a damp mode.
I smoke an ugly brown cigarillo;
its liverous grey whisps swell the nose.
We shall float up, a grey twist of smoke.
Are you with me, yourselves, at the rendezvous?

Entitled, simply, ‘Funeral’, the opening poem to Stammers’ collection Interior Night necessarily initiates a tone of morbidity. It’s first line, however, speaks of the ‘charm of funerals in the rain’, the speaker claiming, ‘I too know it’, as if perhaps envisaging or pre-empting a kind of axiomatic cultural experience. It is a rather romantic sounding opening, in fact; “I too know it”, as if recognising a kind of mystical aura he knows to be a perception shared with all human kind. ‘The ferocity of a veil in daylight’ is hereafter contrasted with the initial “charm” of the rain, both of them implicitly qualities of death’s allure. ‘or the studied black suits and millinery’, he says; blackness and uniformity uncannily conspiring to bolster the aforementioned “ferocity”, culminating in the ‘disremembered rituals of a tribe’; the event of death so infrequent and abject, society so evolved from basic, universal ritual, that a performance here, a ceremony, reminds us of mortality and human life, its origins. The following lines use of the word ‘portals’ – meaning both a literal entrance, gate, or door, as well as a supernatural orifice of the dimensions – then initiates a “lean” towards the metaphysical, to God and the Heavens; ‘[the tomb] as if having suffered break-ins / by morbid archangels’. The ‘columns’ of the mausoleum are said to ‘evince a certain verticality’; each of them ‘finding itself unable to fall / into that abstraction / known as giving up the ghost’. It is as if the columns – inanimate as they are – do not fall prey to the “abstraction” of failure and mortality; they simply perform their job, containing the body of the deceased, the use of the phrase as both common-place figurative or proverbial, as well as the literal housing of the corpse/spirit. The final stanzas assertion that ‘wreathes sadden in a damp mode’ rather obscures the feelings of the poem’s speaker; for it appears to be the ‘mode’ of the dampness of the wreathes which provides the sadness inherent to the image; the absence of “I” or “me” implicit of an absent or deathly quality to the speaker himself, as if sadness permeates the scene, as opposed to a singular person. And the final image of the poem here then recalls its romantic opening; the speaker musing on the ‘grey twist of smoke’ coming from his ‘ugly brown cigarillo’ (brown, not black, one notes; differential perhaps due to its insistence or hurrying of mortality, as opposed to a ceremonial lament), asking of his readership; ‘Are you with me, yourselves, at the rendezvous?’. And the poem is perhaps then departing slightly from its initial rejoicing in the axiom of shared experience, the speaker unsure this time, of his emotionally attuned company-in-thought. The final word of the poem (“rendezvous”) is also pivotal, for it connotes both a meeting, and a specific time and place; the meeting one of living mourners, the time and place of death.

[Engleberton Crabferry]

Interior Night Stunned by an iron-black fatigue, I am a man driven mental by a woman I’ll never meet. I stagger rock-still beneath the poster for Supernature by Goldfrapp. Across the tube-lines is her semi-nude music advert. Someone’s daughter shed her clothes for that ad – or never put them on – in the name of art: the art of getting really famous so that strange men slake their concupiscence on you on tube platforms. I adore her high cork-heeled shoes. The unshaven, Caledonian guitarist sings the Dancer at the Gate of Death, or something which sounds oddly like that, fierce and obscurely irreconcilable with any imaginable dance-manoeuvres. He hammers the strings like a slaughtering drum, repetitious and bleakly sardonic, to the commuter-girl’s heel strike like so many chisels on high-end, black marble. This is a day for jumping. This is not a day for jumping under; it is a day for jumping into the moment that is gone before landed in, into that arriving thwack which will rush me off to the end of the line and all points connecting. The rails boom to the oncoming train, plosive along the line to fuck-knows-anywhere-actually, further even. Travelling back and forth is its own form of stasis. ‘On attend le Metro,’ a Frenchwoman outlines to her little girl. The resonance pounds in the gaps between noise as the sound survives the death of her song and the fluorescents judder with delayed silences. Consider the interiority of a coal-grey rat, purposeful knowing no purpose, that scurries between the track of disused lines. Invisible rain crashes from the inner sky. It always comes down to this: I am at the gate along a black tunnel. My personality lacks all cohesion. I am in fragments. Thank heavens for you at least, Alison Goldfrapp and your half-naked advert, your unconscionably elongated legs, the bare back of your bent wrist held fastidiously in place of your breasts in a faux-breast, more breast than breast as these devices tend to be. Alison, I could wait at the end of line for you, for the exact pair of doors to slide fully across, to open so that I might enter manfully and with a true conviction. The twin black holes of the tunnel-ends suck the platform out like a flat, deflatable universe in the same way that the whole lunatic edifice will itself be sucked back to nought, the abiding nought. All things die, and when you die you’re dead. End of.

The title poem of the collection, Interior Night is a sardonic, apathetic, sensual musing on the nature of self and sex and fame. It is the commodity fetish of Alison from the band Goldfrapp that provides source material for the poet’s intermittent metaphors of longing and separation from the self and others by way of the symbolic. In the first stanza, the speakers is ‘stunned by an iron-black fatigue’, ‘driven mental / by a woman [he will] never meet’. The Goldfrapp frontlady is on a poster in front of him somewhere on London’s underground network. Stammers perhaps shows his conventionality in the phrase; ‘someone’s daughter shed her clothes for that ad’, as if perhaps he is a member of the older generation, reminiscing of (or cleaving to) a cultural past forbidding such nudity as the girl in the poster displays. The poet’s satirizing of the girl’s so-called “art”; ‘the art of getting really famous so that strange men / slake their concupiscence on you on tube platform’, is then ironically undermined in his admittance that: ‘I adore her high cork-heeled shoes’ (himself the “strange old man”). It is ironic, also, since the duality of this personality is thus manifest in the paradox of simultaneous retrospective moral compass in his lament for dignity, and his position here as luring, disconnected bystander. The following stanza appears to depict another, complimentary realital scene, in which a “commuter-girl” passes by an ‘unshaven, Caledonian guitarist’, her heels striking, ‘like so many chisels on high-end, black marble’. The guitar itself appears to be “irreconcilable” with ‘any imaginable dance-manoeuvres’, and is “fierce”, sounding oddly like Dancer at the Gate of Death (whatever this is a reference to?). This startling or discordant inclusion by Stammers not only complements the sleezy, sardonic allure of the first stanza, but also ends with an image reminiscent of a type of allegory for the Postmodern, i.e. the chisels (low-brow) meeting “high-end, black marble”; the guitar music and the girls heels coming into conflict; the guitarist himself playing his instrument like percussion, ‘like a slaughtering drum’; death to convention and the sanity of the moment. The following stanza is more a frenzied block of fragmented noticings; both physical and mental. ‘This is a day for jumping’, he says, ‘not for jumping under’. And thus the poet decides not to commit suicide (under a train), but to “jump”, as it were, to the irreconcilable rhythms of the underground and postmodernity. A ‘moment that is gone before landed in’, is perhaps the poet summing-up, allegorizing, his stanza; the ‘fuck-knows-anywhere-actually’ of ‘travelling back and forth’, the ‘Frenchwoman’, who ‘outlines to her little girl’ the phrase ‘On attend le metro’, as well as the considered ‘interiority of a coal-grey rat’, who is ‘purposeful knowing no purpose’. It is as if Stammers is rather nihilistically resigned to such “fragments”; his pessimism revealed in the impatience of cursing after having only recently decided not to commit suicide. It is a pessimism that gives the poem a personal, almost confessional quality. ‘Thanks heavens’, he begins the 4^th stanza, colloquially, ‘for you at least, Alison Goldfrapp’; the irony here perhaps self-evident in the context of atheistic or secular, commodity fetishized postmodernity. The poet is given over to self-consciously yearning for the superficial, constancy of Alison Goldfrapp as 21^st century pin-up; her ‘faux-breast, more breast than breast’, he says, ‘as these devices tend to be’; a metafiction, the poem itself a device for faux-objects; itself symbolically operative. He then allegorizes rather crudely the underground train, its doors opening (the vagina opening), so that he ‘might enter manfully and with a true conviction [or erection]’. The final stanza’s “sucking” of the platform, like a ‘deflatable universe’, then further allegorizes fellatio, albeit obscurely, since the ‘whole lunatic edifice [or structure] / will itself be sucked back to nought’. And ‘when you die you’re dead’, says the poet. ‘End of.’, as if perhaps, after his having obscured the allegory and the poem’s musing to “nought”, we as readership may also discard the possibility of soulfulness according to his conception of the universe.

[Engleberton Crabferry]

http://michael9murray.wordpress.com/...-night-2010-4/

[Engleberton Crabferry]

Film in a Time of Rages

Nowhere is so sad as a cinema full of light.
He watched the houselights go up on rows of seats
with no one in them. The velour of them.
The cute numbers on their tiny plaques.
In a fall of anthem and the hushed, respectful egress
of an audience, the picture house
has slowly come to a halt. He pauses to take in
the mysterious face of his wristwatch
as it smears the time away in large sweeps.

Pathé News is all the rage in an era
with more than enough rage for it to be the all of.
He has sat through the shambles of Northern Europe,
the newsreel of carnage and ordnance
presented as information on something else.
How is he to respond to fresh news of death?
Compassion enough was early in his life
but the arc of his empathy had nose-dived
through the course of events.
For a moment the world across the Channel
floats for him as if on a child’s inflatable globe,
the countries demarcated by pale colours
and the outlines of national jurisdictions.
What was a child’s death in A, a political fact
or a sociological fact, or a fact constructed?

At such moments he is thrown back
onto astrophysics or ancient Greek thinkers
who wore their considerable barrels lightly.
In the long run our noisy tenancy
will lapse. In the very long run our world
would. In the very, very… he stops himself
thinking about it in terms of runs,
whatever they might be. He feels oddly light-headed
with the notion of a complete void
in place of all this stuff, as if he and everyone else
were already consumed and this
was a kind of after-echo or ghost image
as when a powerful light source goes out.
These are the days when radar is all the rage,
when a downed, spectral aircraft will live on
as a green smudge on a vectored screen,
the way that same smudge will live on
in the mind of the screen’s operative
who in turn, and so forth. It was doubtless
a question of runs, he thought.

This was during the V-1s, as they called it.
Three doors away down his street
kingdom came in the form of a rocket
that blew several neighbours to it.
He saw the same thing portrayed
in a feature film. It didn’t look as grotesque
as he reckoned it must have been.
Their remains were never excavated,
he assumed because there were none.
People made do with a ceremony
which he had come to see would outlast –
because not material and so timeless –
any vestige or substantial residue.
Did the people know this? Should he tell them?
He felt it was really up to the government.
He stepped from the picture house
into the cinematic glare of full daylight,
the rage of a siren and a buzzing
he suddenly prayed not to hear the end of.

The ‘cinema full of light’ here appears to be an allegory for reality, i.e. daylight. The poet appears to be simultaneously in a street, with ‘houselights’ “going up” as if on ‘rows of seats’; the ‘numbers on their tiny plaques’ of course existing in both arenas. The phrase ‘The velour of them’ is a slightly confusing one, since it appears to apply solely to the interior of a cinema, the velvety seats and carpets commonly associated therewith. Velvet itself commonly carries a sensual connotation, and may this merely invoke the sensuality of the ‘picture house’; both the cinema and the ideal home there in front of the speaker, constructed. The closing line of the first stanza is rather obscure, and yet one has a sense of time-as-construct, i.e. ‘He pauses to take in / the mysterious face of his wristwatch / as it smears the time away in large sweeps’, as if – in the cinematic allegory – the speaker “pauses”, or stops the procession of events occurring, as well as noticing the hands of his wristwatch sweeping away time, regardless. Time is both manufactured time, out of one’s control; and manufactured time, within one’s grasp, i.e. a remote control; the simultaneity of the constructs forbidding either one ultimate clarity and truth. ‘Pathé News’ is introduced as the founding phrase of the second stanza; the speaker claiming it is ‘all the rage in an era / with more than enough rage for it to be the all of’. The “rage” of the era thus seems to be constituted by Pathe News, as well as it being (colloquially) ‘all the rage’ or popular. ‘He sat through the shambles of Northern Europe’, reads the following line; images of one sitting in a cinema watching Pathe News reels, as well as one in one’s “picture” house, alone, merely “sitting it out”, as it were. The ‘newsreel of carnage and ordnance / presented as information on something else’, is perhaps indicative of the degree to which a cinematic viewer of the atrocities of war felt separate from the events themselves. The repeated use of the word ‘He’ throughout the poem is perhaps fittingly distanced from its imagined “I”. That is, one assumes that either Stammers is speaking from his personal experience and wishes to invoke a 3^rd person, as to mimetically account for the narrativization of historical events; or that he is simply speaking of an unnamed 3^rd person, an everyman of sorts, remaining anonymous as to mimetically account for the unaccountability of war. The ‘arc of his empathy’ which is said to have taken a nose-dive ‘through the course of events’, begs the question of how he might respond to the ‘fresh news of death’? It is interesting Stammers use of the metaphor of the ‘child’s inflatable globe’ for how he momentarily then begins to imagine Europe, for it appears that whilst the degree of separation from events is initiated by the cinematic reel, and is consequently childlike in vision, the arc of empathy would suggest that the poet’s childlike state is one of greater emotional connection with other, and thus the metaphor struggles to retain credibility. The question: ‘What was a child’s death in A’(?) is reminiscent of the classroom exercise about the war, Stammers then musing on the nature of historical fact as fact constructed, or political/sociological fact, etc. The third stanza sees a new direction of the poem and speaker’s thoughts; him reverting to the ‘astrophysics and ancient Greek thinkers’, or simply put “other worldliness”, in order not to have to confront the impossible facts of war and death; the impossibility of facts themselves. The ‘noisy tenancy’ of the human race will ‘lapse’, he says; meaning both to decline and to leave pauses, as on a video tape; the word ‘tenancy’ invoking once again the houses of the cinematic allegory at the poem’s beginning. The poet, or the character in the poem, then moves into thinking rather abstractly about time, and the inevitability of the ‘void’ of meaning in existence; ‘as if he and everyone else / were already consumed and this [the poem or the cinematic allegory - metafiction] / was a kind of after-echo or ghost image’. The phrase ‘as a powerful light source goes out’ brilliantly evokes the illusory shapes one sees in the darkness at the turning off of a light. The poet’s resurfacing doubt is hereafter captured in the image of the ‘vectored screen’ of a ‘radar’; the image seen by an auditor/operative, ‘who in turn’ will be seen by us, the readership, ‘and so forth’. The framing of the incident in Stammers’ poem is thus reminiscent of the post-structural, self-conscious framing of historical events; the lack of inherent meaning; an infinite mirror effect that is not quite mirrored but subject to minor permutations upon its traversing a conduit or vessel. ‘Doubtless a question of runs’ he concludes. The final stanza’s imagery then conjures the second world war’s V-1s, the ‘rocket / that blew several neighbours’ to ‘kingdom [heaven?]’, or perhaps merely as it were “portrayed” to him, the poem’s speaker/cinema watcher. It becomes clearer and clearer throughout the poem that the speakers is engaged in a kind of dumbfounded, symbolic apathy as regards the events of wartime Europe. He does not know what is real and what is simply “reel”. ‘Should he tell [the people]’, the poet wonders, of the inadequate ceremony played out as a result of their deaths? ‘He felt it was up to the government’; a seemingly strange admission, although perhaps – given the nature of his resignation to the realm of the symbolic and propaganda – he merely feels helpless in his endeavour as giver of truthful information. The final four lines of the poem see the character stepping from the ‘picture house’ into the ‘cinematic glare of full daylight, / the rage of a siren and a buzzing / he suddenly prayed not to hear the end of’. It ultimately appears therefore, that the man is incapable of confronting the modern world after war, “praying” (as if to God!) not to hear the end of the sirens, as if they and the newsreel’s depiction of war is all we have left of it’s tragedy.

[Engleberton Crabferry]

Existential

When we designed the world we found it necessary
to leave room for the absences.
You will notice there is a good deal more emptiness
than objects. This ensures that when an item
passes out of existence it may be accommodated.
It would be more correct to say that the world is composed
both of the things that are and the things that are not.
The same holds true for people. When a person passes
they become a void precisely equivalent to themselves.
In a regrettable misapprehension, there are those who believe
they can in some way perceive the lost ones.
They give names to such things: ghosts, spirits, visitations.
I assure you they cannot; they that are gone
are gone for good and all, and are manifestly absent
in every way. So much will surely now be obvious:
otherwise they would be unable to occupy
that particular non-existence corresponding to the former them.
Since the beginning these spaces have continued
to grow in number with no sign of abatement.
It is our conclusion, therefore, that in the end
the whole of existence will be a single miraculous absence.

[Engleberton Crabferry]

Out of My Depth

I know this is lunacy. I came across, in the gutter,
a wet ball of paper. I picked and picked at it
until writing in bled, watery biro unwrapped.
The text pulled with such an odd nausea,
it seemed to be for my own attention.
And although it was the script that wavered,
it was we that sank. I sank

and it was as if, in some decrepit hospital bed
during the months of delusion and vomitus,
I’d be up there between the uncertain sway of two skyscrapers
on a high-wire, bang rigid, gripped
onto the short wavelength of a long pole,
or way, way out in a mid-ocean swell
barely treading water, below me the unfathomable abyss.

‘Is he conscious?’ they might be saying.
Yes, yes! I’m somewhere out here in the edgeless sea,
or I’m close to choking, sucked,
like the final minute in an hourglass,
into the dry quicksand of a dune marked:
DANGER DO NOT PLAY HERE!
One way or another, I’m going down.

The trees in my street gather in the wind,
and I could love them for their down-to-earthness;
there are neighbours behind those doors!
I look down into my own dear hands;
the words come open, simple, as the paper flattens.
These messages appear more frequently of late.

Out of My Depth begins in a rather colloquial fashion, the speaker admitting; ‘I know this is lunacy’, as if perhaps pre-empting derision from his audience (whomever it may be). The ‘wet ball of paper’ which he says he ‘came across, in the gutter’ seems at first to symbolize the grotesquery, the nauseating realital element of ‘The text’. In the penultimate line of the first stanza, he says, ‘although it was the script that wavered, / it was we that sank’, as if then providing a metafictional retrospective to his readership’s supposed response to the previous lines, for they are obscure, and in them “we” sink/have sunk, but also to the symbol of the text in the gutter (whatever significance it may have established – itself vague at this point). Immediately after this assertion, the poet reverts to the 1^st person singular; ‘I sank’, as if perhaps insinuating another meaning to the phrase; a more literal, visceral feeling of one sinking, the following lines (the 2^nd stanza) then accounting for the subjective experience of the poet’s sinking, as opposed to his readerships’. The 2^nd stanza is host to two seemingly antithetical images, the speaker walking a tightrope between ‘the uncertain sway of two skyscrapers’, and the ‘unfathomable abyss’, above which he precariously treads water. They are both symbols of the precarious however; the uncertain, paradoxical feeling one gets when “sinking” emotionally, as if “out there”, unprotected; an imminent likelihood of death. And indeed, as with much of the collection, death is a theme in the poem. In the 3^rd stanza, the speaker then begins to imagine (rather narcissistically) other people speaking about him, asking; ‘Is he conscious?’, to which he replies that ‘Yes, yes! I’m somewhere out here in the edgeless sea’, or that he’s ‘close to choking’, ‘like the final minute in an hourglass (itself a metaphor for the expiration of human life; for mortality). One can’t help but notice an ever-so-slightly self-aggrandizing tone to Stammers’ poetry throughout the collection, much in keeping with the feeling here in the 3^rd stanza of Out of My Depth; a type of romanticised self-consciousness that is not quite post-modern by way of its indulgence of the core profundity hinted at of the poet’s experience. The ‘DANGER DO NOT PLAY HERE!’ marked into a fantasized ‘dune’ made of ‘quicksand’ hereafter, is an equally vivid symbol of the precariousness of the mental state of “sinking” in which the poet has found himself; the image of the letters sinking away, losing clarity, reminiscent of the poem’s first stanza; the ‘writing in bled’ of the paper/text found in the gutter. Essentially one might argue, the poem is one of an allegory, or extended metaphor, of the effects one has reading texts in the 21^st century; the gutter-element perhaps indicative of the low-grade position reserved for textual meaning in the prevalent scholarly culture of post-structural linguistics. If indeed this is the case, one might argue that the visceral, self-aggrandizing tone of the poem’s speaker veritably undermines its own allegory, renders the experience of contemporary critical engagement a bodily, core profundity, and not the post-structural depersonality we may have come to expect. Not ironic, but sincere. Indeed, in the final stanza, the poet expresses a love for trees and their ‘down-to-earthness’, as if jealous, proclaiming that unlike them he is detached from the earth; decentred or blurred as the signifier. ‘The words come open’, he says, and ‘These messages appear more frequently of late’, meaning perhaps that the frequency of such warnings and obscurantist commentaries is progressively greater in the critical mass of our time, and that, as a poet/thinker, he is bidden to undergo such agonizing separations of the self. After having read much of the collection now, it seems to me Stammers is conscious of his own assimilation/contribution to the critical debates of postmodernity (he even references Derrida by name in his earlier collection The Panoramic Lounge-Bar), and yet he is by-and-large productive of a latently romantic response to that question, scuppering his authenticity slightly; prohibiting clarity of vision.

[Engleberton Crabferry]

Here is a review of the work I have been reading, by Charles Bainbridge, for the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010...-john-stammers

[Engleberton Crabferry]

Here is "O"; the poem Bainbridge claims to be one of the most impressive pieces of the book... a compelling, poetic insight to the nature of experience with drugs (the poem's speaker allegedly hailing from the 'amphetamine generation')... I especially like the 'faces congealed into faintly visible questions', and the 'mosquito stab' of the needle. Extremely visual, but also synaesthetic (if that;s how you spell it???) in the opening part of the poem ('I hear no songbird’s breath, see no scent of lily flowers'); the whole poem beautifully disturbing! ...

O

I hear no songbird’s breath, see no scent of lily flowers.
From two brass pipelets and one plastic bong
shift blue-grey coils of smoke. In an upstairs spare room
are faces congealed into faintly visible questions
or epiphanies stillborn at the point of emergence.
This bedsit miasma is merely the latest form
to materialize from your opium trial. Before this,
you have crumbled the opulent, black truffle
to boil above the candle’s slight flame,
half-baked lab work to extract a tacky, mauve liquor.
The mosquito stab of the hypodermic has pumped
the little thrill of injection down your plump vein.
You wish an arm of glass to see the relief slide in.
Breathe. Breathe and feel it like an orgasm held perpetually
at the instant of climax. Give it to me, please.

But when the goods might be, the fleet, pseudo-adrenal
charge of blood-chemistry excited to unnatural heat,
there is no more than a kind of blunt vacancy.
I feel nothing; they feel nothing; we feel nothing.
We conjugate a blank consensus: this stuff doesn’t work.
We mumble soft complaints on the futility
of doing this so-called drug with its sorry rigmarole:
we are children of the amphetamine generation!
Nothing is happening; nothing: no rush, no burn,
no ecstasy of transport; why are we still
in this room after how many hours has it been after?

Decades later it finally hits, as the recollections surface
and re-swell like tissue paper flowers in a water glass:
that’s the whole beautiful reason of it. Peace for the wicked.
Now the sweet O never bubbles to a purple gunge on the spoon.
These days you live with neither rush nor tranquillity,
just obscure head pain and proprietary codeine.

[Engleberton Crabferry]

http://www.clivejames.com/poetry/stammers