First published on 31 October 2024
ISBN: 978-1-915108-25-8
Divorcee Disco Music, the debut collection by Christopher Crawford, lays bare the fractures and fissures within contemporary relationships and in the sensibilities with which we’ve sought to understand the
world, society, nature, and the people who come close to us. Crawford’s poems present a stark and disquieting worldview in a fresh and unique voice — all underpinned by an imagination that both challenges and disturbs.
“These poems come heavily armed, ready to both unsettle and illuminate. It’s a wide-eyed collection with steaming guts that glisten in the headlights. Crawford’s work often leaves me in awe and a little shaken — it’s that masterfully crafted, that alive.”
—Bobby Parker
“Christopher Crawford’s exquisite poetry collection, Divorcee Disco Music, unfolds like a corridor of brightly lit funhouse mirrors that cast back visions of loss and grief and love as they are elongated and twisted
by time. Oil fields haunt these pages, as does the North Sea, ‘a long black muscle / unspooling itself,’ beckoning us ‘to know the home of the dark waves / and to go there.’ Many of these poems bring a sweetly melancholy, poignantly surreal world to life where ‘trams softly crack their / knuckles over the tracks,’ and a table ‘kneels now — uncovered —/ in a room lit with laughter, // surrounded by the broken pieces / of all it tried to lift.’ Crawford is a poet who is willing to look, without recoiling, at complicity, to reckon with the accidental violences we inflict one upon the other and still to go on singing, ‘breathing in and out behind the darkness like a jazz singer, / her lips on the mic.’ ”—Francesca Bell
*
I Go from Town to Town in a Wheelie Bin
In the beginning, it was just to have people
wheel me around and I’d pretend to film it
for a non-existent YouTube channel.
I started to tell each person
they wheeled fantastic and wow,
weren’t they strong, and wasn’t this a cool thing to do
on a Sunday afternoon?
I traveled a little further
each weekend, word spread,
my guerilla marketing tactics had begun
to work, people came from towns like Genk,
Bastardo, and Assholmen
to meet me and wheel me
around like a little king.
I soon began to tax them for the pleasure.
Then tax them for pleasure itself.
For the smiles of their children.
For putting one foot in front of the other,
after all,
somebody had to pay
for all their hard work.
Divorcee Disco Music by Christopher Crawford
This Must Be the Day
She showed me my face
in the mirror
then switched off the lights.And what if I said a row of poplar trees
rooted down darker in my mouth,
deeper, and a long midnight grew
between my teeth.This is the other garden.
What if I choked up then
a throatful of black stars
and spat them to the ground.What if I looked down
on the sky at my feet and saidthis must be the day
the light was trying to hide.*
This Thing Called Love
This thing called love, I must get round to it, I ain’t ready
— Freddie MercuryThis thing sat down in front of her. A life.
Think of an old watchmaker
and his wife. How she might have sat watching himeat breakfast, spoon clicking off his false teeth,
egg yolk yellow in his beard.Their old spaniel twitching and chasing sparrows
in the warm ashes of the fireplace.She, quietly clearing the table
as her husband shambled off
up the wooden stairs to work.How he moved his body sometimes
so she knew exactly what he meant.How he probably never thought that
was enough.*
Vĕrka, Playing the Guitar and Singing in Her Living Room
Notes rising over the room,
her lashes against her cheeks
like the sticky petals of a sundew flower.
Small mouth open, she sings what she has
unabashed for three beautiful, unstoppable,
terrifying minutes.There is no turning away
from this music. No pretending
that the heart doesn’t darken —
sickened at itself, in its being
found out for what it became, forced to hear
what it has come to.That the heart cannot,
will not, reach every corner,
fill each vase in the room
nor bleed through the hollow necks
of the fresh flowers there.
And so instead the song, made a song
by that which moves inside the woman,
infuses the room and illuminates
the possibility of
the absolute impossibility of love.Christopher Crawford’s poems have appeared in magazines like Agenda, The Rumpus Online, Plume, Puerto del Sol, Rattle, and The Cortland Review. Born and raised in Scotland, he’s an ex-offshore oil worker but now lives in Prague where he edits the online literary journal, B O D Y (bodyliterature.com) and works in the digital tech industry. Divorcee Disco Music is his first poetry collection.