Adam Horovitz

- United Kingdom -

Adam Horovitz is a poet, journalist and editor. He was born in 1971 in London and raised in Slad, Gloucestershire. He has appeared at numerous festivals and venues around Britain since the early 1990s and his work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including 1914: Poetry Remembers (Faber, 2014). He has also been the poet in residence for Glastonbury Festival website (2009) and Borkowski PR company's website (2005 to 2007).

He has released three pamphlets: Next Year in Jerusalem (2004); The Great Unlearning (2009) and Waiting for the Flame (Yew Tree Press, 2014). His first full collection of poems, Turning, was published by Headland in 2011. He was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2012. His memoir about growing up in Cider with Rosie country, A Thousand Laurie Lees, was published by the History Press in 2014. He was a judge for the Manchester Poetry Prize and the inaugural Bare Fiction poetry prize in 2014.

“Adam Horovitz comes of age as a poet with these vivid poems of love and loss, joy and grief, place and memory. Always, he gives the reader the very taste, colour, detail of a house, a kitchen, the valley, the sounds of a garden through an open door. I welcome this passionate collection, the first of many, I hope.” Gillian Clarke

Adam Horovitz was born in 1971 in London and raised in Slad, Gloucestershire. He has released three pamphlets: Next Year in Jerusalem; The Great Unlearning and Waiting for the Flame. His first full collection of poems, Turning, was published by Headland in 2011. He was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2012. His memoir about growing up in Cider with Rosie country, A Thousand Laurie Lees, was published in 2014.

He writes, “Poetry has been in my blood since childhood. Both of my parents (Michael and Frances Horovitz) were poets and it was a natural thing to do. I zig-zagged along in their footsteps as a small boy, writing sweet little poems, as many children can and will if encouraged... The main reason I stayed with poetry, however, would be the death of my mother, Frances Horovitz, in 1983, when I was 12. Her Collected Poems was a last line of communication with her, and you can find numerous nods to it in Turning and A Thousand Laurie Lees.”

His works have been received with critical acclaim. "Tactful and tactile, he has his own true voice, speaking his occasionally disturbing material with a light yet firm touch." Anthony Rudolf A review of Turning states, “These sad, beautiful poems eventually lead the poet into acceptance. A brilliant first collection which makes me impatient for its follow-up.” Jody Porter

Memory, loss, place and myth are central preoccupations for Adam Horovitz. As in these lines:

Last night she saw badgers, he tells me
as we walk to the hospital.

I remember walking with her to see a badger’s sett
on the other side of the valley, the orderly piles of dung,
the cowslips, the dusk.

Last night she saw badgers at the end of her bed.

There are poems portraying place through a lens of what might be considered traditionally feminine concerns, as in A House Built From Cloth:

old stones like teazle teeth
chewing at my feet

Adam Horovitz is an assured craftsman, using rhyme and form with subtlety and grace that often complement his evocation of rural landscapes:

the moon is an owl; its cries

changing the track of the sea.
The stream sings out in reverse,
a song of solidness, of creak,

As R.V. Bailey writes, “You feel every word’s had to survive a terrific grilling before it’s allowed to pass. So what we have here is very bracing, very taut, alive writing.” Rural landscapes feature strongly, but there is nothing nostalgic about Horovitz’s poetry. The poems often unsettle by the way things seem upended or out of kilter, and the play between what happens on the surface and what lies underneath is also strong and fascinating. Downloads, ‘gewgaws, gizmos’ are set against the ‘random melt of stars’ and in Inner City Duende nature creeps in ‘as she slashes the brambling/ arms of friends away.’

Adam Horovitz is an accomplished performer of his poems. As well as his moving appearance at Ledbury Poetry Festival he has performed at Glastonbury Festival and all over the UK, as well as being a headliner at poetry slams, including at Cheltenham Festival of Literature Slam.

"Adam Horovitz writes poems of great beauty and truth; poems which are earned through experience, suffering and love and deployed in a physical language of scrupulous integrity. He is the real deal." Carol Ann Duffy

More about the poet

Poetry

/ A House Built From Cloth

I grew up in a house built from cloth
played in the ruins of cottage industry
old stones like teazle teeth
chewing at my feet

fragments of industry
their lime-wash white
faded to a smoker’s gold.

I grew up in a valley
stretched over stone like cloth
rolled footballs and roller-skates
over sheep-felted grass

built locks
in the stream
under the old trade road.

I grew up in a landscape
where hedges and dry stone walls
ran through the fields like seams
where the past

was a runic language
stitched, dyed and woven
into oracular hills.

Time settles like ordered cloth
in these valleys
catches itself red handed
as it is folded back.

I grew up watching the past
pulling the weight of the future
along the canal’s linear thread.
/ Training Run

for Ashley Loveridge

Linear. Beyond lines. Path swallowed
by the mare’s tail flick of cow parsley.
Your feet pound out the hollowed
laughter of this discarded canal. A sparse lee

in the woods jolts you awake,
out of the hammered dream of the run;
it writhes with the scent of rain, aches
under a blanket of wild garlic, sun.

You have bitten, sharp as an arrow,
into the low heat of the dusk,
the deep focus, the valley’s marrow.
The world is a husk

until you run it, until you find your way
over nettle creep, cow dung, hard-trodden clay.
/ Last Night She Saw Badgers

He stands at the school gate
hunched and trembling
like a tree at winter’s rise.

The air is glue. I wade to him, each step
taking all of my twelve years.
He is grey as the rope we found in Orkney,

coiled and faded on the cliffs of Ronaldsay,
worn out with hoping for the rescue
that would never come.

The car is waiting.
We must go to London now, he says.
Death waits in the car, unspeaking.

I too am silent. The blood rushing
in my ears like howling trees
is noise enough for me.

I do not grasp the journey.
It is over in moments.
I am contracting time to reach my mother

in her sad bed in the stale ward
where my two plastic Star Wars toys
stand against the coming dark.

Too long I have waited in the deathly quiet
of the Vicar’s house, unspeaking, ungrateful,
mapping out how I will run away to London.

Too long without news and contact,
the dreams I’d shared with her as a child
rising again like tides too urgent

for the moon to pull them back.
Last night she saw badgers, he tells me
as we walk into the hospital.

I remember walking with her to see a badger’s sett
on the other side of the valley, the orderly piles of dung,
the cowslips, the dusk.

Last night she saw badgers at the end of her bed.
/ Orpheus in the Download Underworld

We make our disappearances day by day,
absence speaking for absence
through a waxed veil of leaf and seed-pod.
Territories are marked with a wing beat,
the bounds of tenderness negotiated in magpie semaphore
as we are subsumed by books,
magazines, downloads, DVDs,
gewgaws, gizmos, all those pretty
fig leaves bought to cover shame.

The house is hollow,
an echoing cave of certainties lost,
where Persephone picks pomegranate seeds
that catch in her teeth, spits them out and curses.
Cats howl around her like furies
after mice, scraps of paper,
the dust born of silence,
screwed into fists of guilt.
The goddess cries for us to stay indoors.

There is majesty in certainty if you can stomach it
but I prefer the random melt of stars,
waiting in the darkness for trees to bud,
listening for the metallic scrape of growth
as foxes slice the winter with their tongues
and owls stamp prints of mice on frosty turf.
I am walking the path away from home,
a love song balled foetal in my hand.
Follow me. I’ll not look back.
/ Inner City Duende

Now she is clockwork in the bus lanes,
a bottled-up tock of sorrow.
All her straight lines are strung
through a maze of stuttering street lamps.

A slow build in the beer barrels
to this, the banshee hour
louder than trains
the rhythms of her misery

running on iron rods down
into the hot bright
hells of Angel, Euston,
Camden Town.

The city swallows her,
binds her in Tarmac,
trails pleasures behind her;
a constellation of fractured glass.

She weeps mascara.
Her eyes are ideograms, untranslatable,
as she slashes the brambling
arms of friends away.

And then she is dancing
to the dark sounds of her sorrow,
the city's breath rising through her
as she ripples, divided, multiplied,

like a water-bound moon slipping
through shop windows,
as street neon carves her tears
into the lights of cars.
/ Conditions of Living

Once, we died dreaming and drowning
in the first flush of youth
our bones yellowing beneath our skins.
We died standing up,
propped on our spears

watching the world subsume us
in a winding cloth of sand.
We fell with our cattle and our crops
when winter swallowed us
like nightmares in a dream of sun.

Now, we are always in the light
but still we're fearful.
The world spins faster. We see atoms
dancing in our minds and slow our ageing,
hide behind our mobile phones

check our profiles
in the darkened mirrors of the web.
We do not recognise ourselves.
Instinct is caged in ancient bodies
which in their turn are caged in metal.

The land grows meat instead of trees
and all the world's a stage that hates its players
who strut and forget
that they are only scuffed knuckles
on a fist of rock.
/ The Long Earth

after the book by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

If all it took was just a sideways step
to break your shackle to this tired earth,
untangle the strings of quantum physics
and shimmer down the mirror parallel,
find worlds which Darwin could have barely dreamed,
would you not do it? Would you not run?

I'd be off faster than the starting gun
to seek the Long Earth flickering unreamed;
new genera; and what mutations dwell
under different suns. I'd hunt strange musics
courting river banks, mountains and the surf.
If all it took were but a sideways step.

Yet here we stay. There is no interstitial strait,
just dreams; the faith of science. All that we create.
/ Solstice

The wood is cut and darkness sighs
its needle shower of yew-green light,
of brown stems in the ragged hedge.
Stars pucker on the cusp of sight
and, startling from the woodland’s edge,
the moon is an owl; its cries

changing the track of the sea.
The stream sings out in reverse,
a song of solidness, of creak,
as if water needed to rehearse
the change of seasons, or to speak
a human tongue in sympathy.

I hum the water's song, the shallow
breath that shatters on the path
in footsteps, startling a deer,
then slide indoors to wood the hearth
and spark an answer to the fear
of winter; a flickering hallow

that scatters the long night's shadow up the wall
and frees me, briefly, from the vixen's numbing call.
/ Love Poem Disguised as a Fairy Tale

after Madame D'Aulnoy's The Girl-Fish

In her eyes, the girl she was; the hard
unthinking rifle-shot of youth. They are urgent
as a cat's yowl in the dark rooms of home
where nothing matters but the way fish
lifts wet, unspeaking from the plate.

She is deer now, but for those eyes.
They dance through me, demanding to be spared.
Another life is on her.

She whispers from the soft purse
of her deer's mouth that she still has much to do.
I love her and I always have. I never saw her until now.
I will return to my palace of books
hungry though I cannot eat for thinking of her

as she runs through the bright wood, a spare
change of terror jangling in her girl's eyes,
crab apples crunching like years beneath her feet.

My hunt is over. All I can do is wait
for the changes to cease, for the drifting powers
that drive her to other skins to calm
their churning, for her to find me again
with her girl's eyes and hope

that the woman she's becoming under feather,
hide and scale can see beyond the way
I've learned in her absence to stiffen, like a startled deer.
/ Lost to the Body

A tide curls through us,
salts our tongues with words,
the urgency of their unknotting.

There's a pornographic opera
nightingales sing locked
in the wine cupboard.

The hushed laughter of women
gives us the library. The river is ours
their absence tells us,

its water delicate
as gorse flowers. The farmyard's
silvering. Trees in shock of leaf.

A week lost to the body,
seed moon a hobby lantern
guiding us seaward

as we sow new names for spring.
/ Commemoration Hour

A moth-cupped flame sputters
out of silence in my kitchen, draws insects
whining through the window's crack.

They sing like distant bi-planes,
dogfight-dancing at the edge of sight.

I watch red wax spill
over the candle's battered lip
and think of family, long dead,

the quiet men on unquiet fronts
who let the rituals of their religion

slide away, buoyed up
on propaganda, desperation, hunger,
as they wrote loving letters in the dark

succoured only by a single flame,
by the guttering distances of home.

Oh, how they dreamed of family,
gave thanks to G-d for the minuscule mercies
of the weekly post (when it got through)

but even the gentlest man will break inside
when bombs and snipers dictate their diet,

when all the animals of hell
come crawling out from under mud
on sinews of metal clasping at the bone.

*

What precisely did they die for,
or limp home wounded with?
My grandfather never said, sitting in silence,
with his memories, in the garden of his weekend home
until he was forced to cross Germany's borders
and escape into England two decades on.

Great Uncle Martin could not say.
Splintered in 1915 by enemy fire, only his letters remain
regaling his dearest sister Röschen
with brotherly bravado, detailing requests
for the essentials: paper, food and pens;
whatever news might make it through the lines from home.

*

The candle's spitting out its last
one hundred years on
but still the news is limited and grim.

The insect whine of war continues.
Tanks rumble through my kitchen
whenever the fridge fires up.

Commemoration wears an ugly, celebratory mask.
Its eyeholes stare us down like guns
and from its mouth a fine gas seeps.

'Gas! Quick, boys.' An ecstasy of fumbling
in the press for ways to not quite say
"We won, we won, we won!"

But we won nothing. The war continues
in fragments, though no one is yet
crazed enough to join the dots,

and all I can see in this quiet hour
is red wax stiffening on the candle
into the faces of all the people that I love.