Poetry

Question 1

Ferryman’s Arms - First Half of Stanza 1

Answer 1

‘magnetized by a remote phosphorescence’
‘I stood with my back turned’
‘With ten minutes to kill’
‘whole place deserted’
‘I took myself on for the hell of it’

Question 2

Ferryman’s Arms - Stanza 2

Answer 2

‘The boat chugged up to the little stone jetty without breaking the skin of the water’
‘but I left him there, stuck in his tent of light’

Question 3

Ferryman’s Arms - Second Half of Stanza 1 (Pool game)

Answer 3

‘dusty green cowl’
‘parched D’
‘As physics itself becomes something negotiable’
‘black did the vanishing trick while the white stopped before gently rolling back as if nothing had happened’

Question 4

Nil Nil - Football Team

Answer 4

‘But ours is a game of two halves’
‘it’s all down’
‘detaching like bubbles to speed the descent into pitch-sharing, pay-cuts, pawned silver’
‘fifty-year slide into Sunday League’
‘sponsored by Skelly Assurance, then Skelly Dry Cleaners, then nobody’

Question 5

Nil Nil - The Town

Answer 5

‘bald tennis ball’
‘stopped wings’
‘dead shanty town’
‘black shell of Skelly Dry Cleaners’

Question 6

Nil Nil - Fighter Pilot

Answer 6

‘it is all that remains of a lone fighter pilot’
‘Venus melts into Carnoustie’

Question 7

11:00 Baldovan

Answer 7

‘However, I am obscurely worried’
‘the bus will let us down in another country’
‘charred wreck’
‘our voices sound funny’
‘black waves fold in’
‘our sisters and mothers are fifty years dead’

Question 8

Waking with Russel

Answer 8

‘face-to-face like lovers’
‘four-day-old smile dawned on him’
‘the true path was as lost to me as ever when you cut in front of me and lit it as you ran’
‘the smile poured through us like a river’
‘pledged myself forever’
‘not my old hard-pressed grin but his own smile’

Question 9

The Circle

Answer 9

‘My boy is painting outer space’
‘(thank god)’
‘The dream is taxed’
‘We all resent the quarter bled off by the dark’
‘muddy water-jar filling with the perfect ring’

Question 10

Rain

Answer 10

‘I love all films that start with rain’
‘However bad or overlong such a film can do no wrong’
‘forget the ink, the milk, the blood’
‘all was washed clean with the flood’
‘and none of this, none of this matters’

Question 11

Waking with Russell - Structure

Answer 11

Sonnet (love)
Traditionally octave (eight lines) first
Then turning point
Continues with sestet (six lines)
Patterson turns this upside down just like his son has turned his world upside down