The Uncertain Land and Other Poems. Patrick O’Brian

      

      

       Copyright

      Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

      Copyright © The Estate of the late Patrick O’Brian CBE 2019

      Foreword copyright © Nikolai Tolstoy 2019

      Cover © Magdalena Russocka / Trevillion 2019

      Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

      Patrick O’Brian asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008261344

      Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008261351

      Version: 2019-02-28

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

       Foreword by Nikolai Tolstoy

      Part I: Poems

      Blitz poetry

      ‘The sea and the sky are silent’

Mrs Koren

‘The harsh dry polished rattle’

‘You will come to it’

The Olive Harvest

The Inine

tibi donum offero

A present

French verses

       Mal du pays

       Le bois des oiseaux

       Espagnols exilés

‘A dog bit his master’

Goat

       Looking towards the south

       Foxes surprised

       Epitaph

       February

       The Deep Gold of a Pomegranate-Tree

       The Cypress Tree

       Meads no more

       The Lagoon

       A Lycéen

       In Upper Leeson Street

       How to lay a mine

       The far side of the pass

       August, Sun-impaled

       Words from the bottom of a river

       Croagh Patrick

       A T’ang Landscape Remembered

       Song

       Farewell, my sin I have enjoyed you

       A man under his impulsion

       David danced before the ark

       The falling of the leaves

       Dear Mona Fitzpatrick ’32 (or ’3)

       The theft

       The electric light failing

       Youth gone

       Giving up smoking

       Diego

       Spaniards Exiled

       The Captain and the Stock

       To the hermitage and down, refreshed

       Waiting for money in a far country

       In Madame Ponsalié’s garden

       Walk by the sea to see wonders

       The raven

       The young listless man

       From the Welsh

       Snowdon for the sunrise

       The wine-dark sea

       The bad day

       Sterne

       The Pleiades on Christmas Eve

       The apology

       Dead hours of louring justification, a desert of time

       Myself a young man read a poem

       The uncertain land

       Silver-haired charm and urbanity

       Winter in Foreign Parts

       Obsèques

       The dark figures

       ‘Is true the rat’

       The duty of pleasure

       Poulp: or, the Medusa a Toy

       Grey and white

       No smoking: the second day

       Pray, Luv, forgive me my sourness

       The Mandrake

       For Louise’s visitors’ book

       ‘Clouds over clouds’

       ‘Walking on the high mountain’

       ‘Help my understanding, Lady’

       ‘Down through the vines’

       Collioure

       ‘Long, straight, the steel lines’