Your promise has been extracted like the cow-horned remains of molars long-soused in a Diet Coke marinade.
You may not have felt it but, whilst you loitered or stopped to ponder some frozen splinter of the Danube playing host to blue-lipped skaters slinking on a waning gibbous moon,
we pulled the bastard out.
It’s always possible, of course, that if you retake that path – if you find your own footsteps still frozen on Wagramer Straße and push yourself foot by foot into the once snug groove of snow-sheen – you’ll find your way back
to a little blood, the odd gyzym of promissory pulp.
Though, more likely, you’ll find yourself here, just off the Aldwych, where blue-lipped skaters slink against the fizz and blink of Our Lady of Employment Law, this year’s sponsor, her animated billboard,
or
totally wrecked on Bow Street, retching your way past opera-goers, corporate hôtes, potentates of capital whose quaint tuxedos wear them as appendages, as hosts, as hernial substantia, on which their frayed existence holds.
Go home.
Go to your study to contemplate the scarf hanging behind the door and what a sturdy noose it would make.
Ape the scowl and twitch, the muttering to no one, those hallmarks of the only genius you’ve known.
Give yourself fully to each cerebral spasm: a raffle of pickled parts, the mother feeding on the flesh that she herself has bred, les parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants.
In Ahren Warner’s Hello. Your promise has been extracted, the lyric runs in parallel with a series of photographs made by the author across Europe. This picture shows how the poems appear with the photographs they are in conversation with in this large format fully illustrated book.
Related Reviews
'Theatrical, toxic and oddly gorgeous… Warner moves from playful social observation, through reflections on memory and artifice, to a near-Baudelairean spleen, his games with language and ideas as serious in their investigations of the given world as any philosophy.' – John Burnside, Poetry Book Society Bulletin
'Witty and wide-ranging… Ahren Warner has a claim to be the "poet's poet" of his generation. Even in apparently domestic and personal guise, he's a writer whose work conveys voluptuous but intelligent delight in language and technique.' – Carol Rumens, Guardian
