A View from the Big Top
My circus nightmare is to climb
the swinging ladder to the end of time
and then, unbalanced on the trembling wire,
grab at the trapeze with hand-holds insecure:
no high-wire act’s rehearsed for this,
a plunge into the shuddering abyss.
The audience believe that my free-fall
is entertainment for the interval.
Bring on the clowns. To re-enact their part
pratfalls and custard pies are for my sort
with grease-paint’s mocking laughter, not applause.
The cage will open when the lion roars.
Enclosures and Disclosuresincludes a wealth of poems from the last decade – poems of love, travel, thoughts about war and nostalgia, including studies of a redundant hospital and a cinema. ‘Literary Landscapes’ are one of Mercer Simpson’s special interests. Here are
poems about Thomas Hardy in Cornwall, memories of Henry Vaughan in Wales, a literary festival in Torbay and the pool where Virginia Woolf committed suicide.
Mercer Simpson’s poetry is an interesting blend of the thoughtful, wistful and speculative…
— Robert Nash (Bulletin of the Welsh Academy)
Mercer Simpson is a former editor of the Bulletin of the Welsh Academy and ex-poetry editor of the New Welsh Review. He studied at Magdalene College, Cambridge and has published three previous poetry collections; Rain from a Clear Blue Sky (Seren), East Anglian Wordscapes (Rockingham), and Early Departures, Late Arrivals (Rockingham). His poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies, particularly in Wales. He is based in Cardiff.
My circus nightmare is to climb
the swinging ladder to the end of time
and then, unbalanced on the trembling wire,
grab at the trapeze with hand-holds insecure:
no high-wire act’s rehearsed for this,
a plunge into the shuddering abyss.
The audience believe that my free-fall
is entertainment for the interval.
Bring on the clowns. To re-enact their part
pratfalls and custard pies are for my sort
with grease-paint’s mocking laughter, not applause.
The cage will open when the lion roars.
Enclosures and Disclosuresincludes a wealth of poems from the last decade – poems of love, travel, thoughts about war and nostalgia, including studies of a redundant hospital and a cinema. ‘Literary Landscapes’ are one of Mercer Simpson’s special interests. Here are
poems about Thomas Hardy in Cornwall, memories of Henry Vaughan in Wales, a literary festival in Torbay and the pool where Virginia Woolf committed suicide.
Mercer Simpson’s poetry is an interesting blend of the thoughtful, wistful and speculative…
— Robert Nash (Bulletin of the Welsh Academy)
Mercer Simpson is a former editor of the Bulletin of the Welsh Academy and ex-poetry editor of the New Welsh Review. He studied at Magdalene College, Cambridge and has published three previous poetry collections; Rain from a Clear Blue Sky (Seren), East Anglian Wordscapes (Rockingham), and Early Departures, Late Arrivals (Rockingham). His poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies, particularly in Wales. He is based in Cardiff.