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    My Family and Other Superheroes
    My Family and Other Superheroes
    My Family and Other Superheroes
    Ebook76 pages34 minutes

    My Family and Other Superheroes

    By Jonathan Edwards

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    About this ebook

    Leaping from the pages, jostling for position alongside the Valleys mams, dads, and bamps, and described with great warmth, the superheroes in question are a motley crew: Evel Knievel, Sophia Loren, Ian Rush, Marty McFly, a bicycling nun, and a recalcitrant hippo. Other poems focus on the crammed terraces and abandoned high streets where a working-class and Welsh nationalist politics is hammered out. This is a postindustrial valleys upbringing re-imagined through the prism of pop culture and surrealism.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSeren
    Release dateApr 1, 2014
    ISBN9781781721636
    My Family and Other Superheroes
    Author

    Jonathan Edwards

    Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) was a pastor, theologian, and missionary. He is generally considered the greatest American theologian. A prolific writer, Edwards is known for his many sermons, including "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," and his classic A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. Edwards was appointed president of the College of New Jersey (later renamed Princeton University) shortly before his death. 

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      Book preview

      My Family and Other Superheroes - Jonathan Edwards

      Acknowledgements

      1

      My Family in a Human Pyramid

      My uncle starts it, kneeling in his garden;

      my mother gives a leg up to my gran.

      When it’s my turn to climb, I get a grip

      of my bamp’s miner’s belt, my cousin’s heels,

      say Thank you for her birthday card as I go,

      then bounce on my nan’s perm and skip three rows,

      land on my father’s shoulders. He grabs my ankles,

      half holding me up and half holding me close.

      Here he comes, my godson, Samuel Luke,

      passed up until he’s standing in his nappy

      on my head. And now to why we’re here:

      could the Edwardses together reach a height

      that the youngest one of us could touch a star?

      Sam reaches out. He points towards the night.

      Evel Knievel Jumps Over my Family

      A floodlit Wembley. Lisa, the producer,

      swears into her walkie-talkie. We Edwardses,

      four generations, stand in line,

      between ramps: Smile for the cameras.

      My great-grandparents twiddle their thumbs

      in wheelchairs, as Lisa tells us to relax,

      Mr Knievel has faced much bigger challenges:

      double-deckers, monster trucks, though the giraffe

      is urban legend. Evel Knievel enters,

      Eye of the Tiger drowned by cheers,

      his costume tassels, his costume a slipstream,

      his anxious face an act to pump the crowd,

      surely. My mother, always a worrier,

      asks about the ambulance. Evel Knievel

      salutes, accelerates towards the ramps.

      I close my eyes, then open them:

      is this what heaven feels like,

      some motorcycle Liberace overhead,

      wheels resting on air? Are these flashes

      from 60,000 cameras the blinding light

      coma survivors speak of? Before he lands,

      there’s just time to glance along the line:

      though no one’s said a thing,

      all we Edwardses are holding hands.

      Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren in Crumlin for the Filming of Arabesque, June 1965

      Sunday. The crowd beneath the viaduct

      waves banners made from grocery boxes, bedsheets:

      Welcome to the valleys Mr Peck!

      Wind turns their chapel dresses into floral

      parachutes; their perms don’t budge an inch.

      The emotion of it’s too much for one girl’s

      mascara. We love you Miss Loren! My father

      parks away from them, around the corner,

      in his brand new car, a ’30s Lanchester,

      with stop-start brakes, a battery he shares

      with a neighbour. All sideburns and ideas, a roll-up

      behind one ear and a flea in the other

      from my gran for missing Eucharist,

      he coughs and steps down from the running board,

      as two Rolls-Royces pull up opposite.

      Gregory Peck, three years after being

      Atticus Finch, steps from one, says Good morning.

      From the other – it isn’t! – it is, wearing her cheekbones.

      My father’s breakfast is nervous in his stomach,

      but he grabs his Argus, pen, and Yes, they’ll sign.

      Her high heels echo away through the whole valley.

      That’s how my father tells

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