Chick

By Hannah Lowe

Hannah Lowe's first book of poems takes you on a journey round her father, a Chinese-black Jamaican migrant who disappeared at night to play cards or dice in London's old East End to support his family, an unstable and dangerous existence that took its toll on his physical and mental health. 'Chick' was his gambling nickname. A shadowy figure in her childhood, Chick was only half known to her until she entered the night world of the old man as a young woman. The name is the key to poems concerned with Chick's death, the secret history of his life in London, and her perceptions of him as a father. With London as their backdrop, Hannah Lowe's deeply personal narrative poems are often filmic in effect and brimming with sensory detail in their evocations of childhood and coming-of-age, love and loss of love, grief and regret. 'Chick opens with a powerful sequence of poems centred around the poet's memories of her Chinese/black Jamaican father -a complex, larger than life character who came to London in the late 40s and eked out a living as, among other things, a gambler. But the book is very much more than a personal reminiscence and family history. This is a collection cross-hatched with myth and history, a hymn to London as much as to its characters. Though all the poems have a strong, vividly cinematographic line, they are also beautifully lyrical -sung stories, offering us the glimpsed lives of strangers and lovers. But however poignant and moving it may be, the collection remains doggedly celebratory of life itself, of people and place, loved and remembered. Each poem takes us a little further into the mystery of lives in a world that is as incomprehensible as it is unforgettable. This is an outstanding, unputdownable first collection' -John Glenday. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780370835

Hannah Lowe

Hannah Lowe was born in Ilford to an English mother and Jamaican-Chinese father. She has worked as a teacher of literature and creative writing, recently completed her work on a PhD, and is now a lecturer in Creative Writing at Kingston University. Her pamphlet The Hitcher (The Rialto, 2011) was widely praised. Her first book-length collection Chick (Bloodaxe Books, 2013) won the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry, and was selected for the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation Poets 2014 promotion. This was followed by two pamphlets, R x (sine wave peak, 2013) and Ormonde (Hercules Editions, 2014), and her family memoir Long Time No See (Periscope, 2015). She also read from Long Time, No See on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in 2015. Her second full-length collection, Chan, was published by Bloodaxe in 2016. She is the current poet in residence at Keats House and a commissioned writer on the Colonial Countryside Project with the University of Leicester and Peepal Tree Press.

Book preview

Chick

We talked about you all the time.

Dan said he saw you ironing cellophane.

I said you’d let me hold a thousand pounds.

We found a hollow-soled shoe.

My cousins loved your tricks.

They’d follow the lady, search your sleeves,

blow luck into your fist. Mum called you a croupier.

At school I said you drove a cab.

Most days you were back at dawn.

I watched through a crack as you slept,

a hump of blankets in the purple light,

the smell of sweat.

I saw you once Dad, knelt over cards,

strewn on the floor, panic in your face.

For God’s sake, Chick, you said.

You couldn’t do the marks.

Then, each Tuesday, £16.30 – a paper,

tobacco, one hand of Kalooki. You sunk

into the settee like you’d been kicked there,

shouted in the bathroom, asked me for money.

At the wake, a ring of phlegmy men

with yellow eyes and meaty skin, told me

what your name meant, placed the ace of hearts

across your coffin, flowers shaped as dice.

Thunder Snakes

Darling, that gambling was in my blood,

was always there like thunder snakes

that slide in through an open door,

across the boards and coil under the bed.

The dice were my first friends, then lacquered tiles

of winds and dragons, plum, bamboo.

A gambler is never lonely. There’s another man

who wants his money. He keeps the company

of kings and knaves, lies awake and flips them over

in his mind, while rain is spitting on the glass

and the anxious light of dawn

slides down the walls, across his body.

In Your Pockets

A roll of tens or twenties. Tons, you said

or monkeys, plums. I lifted what I could

for paint or felt-tip pens, you curled in bed

as I explored the shaded room, or stood

above you quietly, holding back my breath

to match the time of yours. After dinner,

you slapped cash onto the table-cloth

or fetched a fist of bracelets from the car,

a sack of dresses.

                           It was easy, getting

what you wanted till you couldn’t deal

a round of Pinochle or stop the trembling

of your hands around the steering wheel.

Then you were home. No need to snoop. All bets

were off. I didn’t pick your empty pockets.

Five Ways to Load a Dice

Like the yellowed cubes of knucklebone

             they plucked from slag and ashes at Pompeii,

speared with pig bristle or flint

             to slow the roll.

Or like your father in the rattling alleys

             of Shanghai, who smelt his sweat among

the shooters crouched like toads around the felt,

             who breathed into his palms

to warm the wax he’d painted on. These ways are