So he stood in his shoes
    And he wondered,
    He wondered,
He stood in his
    Shoes and he wondered.
                                                              John Keats

Written under the sign of Eros, builder and destroyer of cities, and prefaced by an epigraph from Keats, the poems in A Place in the World are about home and antipodes, identity as a shibboleth and institutions as leviathans, Pacific islands and raised beaches, Edens and new Jerusalems, the critical spirit and the need for continuity. Cradling Scotland's stony myths in his palm, the poet sets off for Europe, an old civilisation that can barely reconcile itself to having become a colony of its own Utopia. In his pocket is a battered copy of the civil philosophy, also out of Scotland, that lends the book its punning title. Somewhere in the looming shadow of the cities is the poet, still looking--like the Greek philosopher--for human beings. A Place in the World, Iain Bamforth's fourth collection, is his most lyrical, challenging and considered work to date.
 

Table of Contents

Third-Person Lion 1

A Charm for Europe 2

Tobias Smollett in the Var 3

Rough Sleeper 4

Disgruntlements 5

Voyage au Pays du Fer 6

Strasburg Event 11

Quatrain 11

Calvin's Architect 12

The Window 13

Baudelaire: Albatross 14

Questions for Chekhov 15

Diogenes Looking for Humans 16

A Vision 18

Gauguin: Self-Portrait near Golgotha 19

Glosses 20

Tongues and Claws 23

Eggs called Chaos 24

The Stone Toad 27

Coal Fish 29

Gideon's Bible in a Late Night Motel 30

Europa and the Whale 31

The Wound Man 33

The House-Boat 35

In the Republic of Virtue 35

Pig Melon Incarnation 36

Cares of a Family Man 38

Well and Hearth 38

A Boy in Dresden 39

From A to B and Back Again 40

The Decision 41

Clueless 42

Arrow, Bowstring, Hand and Eye 43

1909 Photograph of a Broken Hill Miner 44

Chanson 45

Proverbs and Maxims from the Hive 46

Baudelaire: The Cracked Bell 48

The Unreached 49

Travels with a Donkey to the Bridge of Europe 51

The Weight of a Day 52

Hope, Art and Labour 53

A Nest of Boxes for the Opening of the Scottish Parliament 56

Ten Years: A Psalm 61

A Promised Land 62

Angelology 63

Transparency: An Address 64

A Sport of Small Accidents 65

How Long is a Piece of String? 66

Trümmerfrauen, 1945 66

Hiding in the River to Escape the Rain 67

The Very Sound of Where We Are 68

A Distance from the Sea 69

Thomas as Imagined by Caravaggio 70

Joseph Beuys 71

All the Old Dears 72

By Further Knowing 73

Movement 74

Painting with Razors 75

Two Poems on Classical Themes 76

Frail Craft 77

Strange Weather 78

Bottler Names 79

The Guest 80

The Large Triumphal Chariot of Medicine 80

Only This 81

Family Virtues 82

An Informant to Alexander Carmichael 82

Baudelaire: Collecting my Thoughts 83

Gutenberg Wings 84

Alsace is an Island 85

King and Queen of the Most Sunken City 86

Heavenly City of the Twentieth Century 87

Falling Off the Map 88

Life of the Civil Servants 89

Song: It Makes Me Wrong 90

This 91

A Sceptical Examination of the Body of French Medicine 92

Salt of the Earth 93

Two Steps in the Phenomenology of Walking 94

Droit de cité 95

Bucket 96

Strasburgers on the Beach 97



Notes 100