Randolph Stow: Frost-parrots

Hunted south-east, the Cape unglimpsed, from Tristan,
we met a coast not known till then, a stone
unwieldy country, fringed with trees in flower,
which flowers all at once blew towards us, crying.

Parrots – but vast; and death-chill, lovely things.
For in their glinting feathers was the blue
of broken glaciers and the talc of rime
and all the shades of ice: as lilac, rose,
the greens of clefts and flame of midday sunsets.
As for their trees, without them those were bare
and black and frosted charcoal, branched like coral.

Their cry was like the creak of snow you ache through
or chink of ice-spikes in a bough long martyred
or locked streams breaking up. And colder things;
jangling bedsprings in contemptuous attics,
and bottles rolled down alleys we forgot.

Their eyes were frost-stars! In their look was death.
To something. Something needed, till that day.


Published 1990. A poem that feels joyously drunk on the clarity / mystery of its images. It takes off with the magnificent faux-Jacobean line which flowers all at once blew towards us, crying; and although not every picture and word placement after that is successful, and the final line prefers puzzlement to rhetoric, it nonetheless creates a vision that didn't exist until the poet's making of it, which not all poems do.