In these excerpts from the pages of Robin Robertson’s prize-winning The Long Take, soon to
In these excerpts from the pages of Robin Robertson’s prize-winning The Long Take, soon to be published in paperback, we see New York City in 1946 through the eyes of Walker, a Nova Scotian D-Day veteran just landing on our shores. The book goes on to tell his story, as he makes his way west to become a journalist in Los Angeles, in the heyday of film noir.from The Long TakeAnd there it was: the swelland glitter of it like a standing wave – the fabled, smoking ruin, the new towers rising through the blue,the ranked array of ivory and gold, the glint,the glamour of buried light as the world turned round it very slowly this autumn morning, all amazed.And it stayed there, watching,as they made toward it,the truck-driver and the young man,under pylons, wires, utility poles, past warehouses, container parks, deserted lots, between the longoily marshes, landfill sites and swamps, before slipping down under the Hudson, and coming up on the other side to find a black wetnessof streets trashed and emptyand the city gone.‘Try the docks. They can always use men.’*At night, the river rolls and turns like oil under the bridges,in through the slips.He walked for hours – following the glow in the sky uptown he’d been told was the lights of Times Square –his shadow moving with him below the street-lamps: dense, tight, very black and sharp, foreshortened, but already starting to lengthen as he goes, attenuating to a weak stain. Then back in under another streetlight, shadowdarkening again, clean and hard.Who he really is, or was, lies somewhere in between. *In the last splinter of sunlight allowed between the skyscrapersan old lady is sitting with a book,moving her chair every quarter of an hour a little farther down the alleyway.More on this book and author:Learn more about The Long Take by Robin RobertsonLearn more about Robin RobertsonShare this poem and peruse other poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day seriesTo share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link -- source link
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