In The Poetry

In My Two Small Fists

in that bright blue summer
I used to gather
daisies for my father
speedwell for my mother

with buttercups
and prickly heather
cowrie shells
and a seagull’s feather

treasures in each fist
all squashed together
daisies for my father
speedwell for my mother

(that’s how I see it
but I don’t know
if it really happened
[...]

I ran away from home. I said, I’m going on the Aldermaston March to ban the bomb. They said that this was out of the question, the boy’s mad. Crazy. My mother said, Where will you stay? You’d have nothing to eat, you don’t know anyone, what would you eat? You’re not going. Harold, say [...]

Variation On An Old Rhyme

This is the blackbird that wakes with a song.

This is the sun
That shines for the blackbird that wakes with a song.

This is the earth
That welcomes the sun
That shines for the blackbird that wakes with a song.

This is the snow that fell through the night
That covers the earth
That welcomes the sun
That shines [...]

My husband and I took up ballroom dancing and a whole series of poems emerged because of that, forming the nucleus of a book that is called American Smooth. I will read that title poem for you.

American Smooth

We were dancing – it must have
been a foxtrot or a waltz,
something romantic but
requiring restraint,
rise and fall, precise
execution [...]

I left school when I was fifteen, and when I was fourteen there was this very wonderful teacher who covered his classroom in maps, and he always said when he retired from school, he would go to certain places on these maps. The poem’s called ‘Geography Lesson’

Our teacher told us one day he [...]

First you must have
unbelievable faith in water,
in women dancing like hands playing harps
for straw to grow stalks of fire.
You must understand the year
that begins with your hands tied
behind your back,
worship of dark totems
weighed down with night birds that shift their weight
& leave holes in the sky. You must know
What’s behind the shadow of a treadmill [...]

I am the very air
you breathe
Your first
and last
breath

I welcomed you
at birth
Shall bid
farewell
at death

I am the Kiss of Life
its ebb and flow
With your last gasp
You will call my name:
‘o o o o o o o o’

*

I am the very air
you breathe
Your first
and last
breath

I welcomed you
at birth
Shall bid
farewell
at death

I am the Kiss of Life
its ebb and [...]

This is a passage from the last section of The Book of Nightmares which is called ‘Lastness’.

Lastness

2

A black bear sits alone
in the twilight, nodding from side
to side, turning slowly around and around
on himself, scuffing the four-footed
circles into the earth. He sniffs the sweat
in the breeze, he understands
a creature, a death-creature,
watches from the fringe of the [...]

A lot of what writing poetry is about is about paying attention. And this poem comes out of me being in the bathroom and noticing a spider in the bathtub in a little tangle of hair and then sort of expanding on that and trying to draw some meaning from it.

An Epiphany

I have seen the [...]

‘Bats’ Ultrasound’ was the ancestor of a whole sequence of poems of mine called Translations from the Natural World. Bats live in a world of radar beyond our hearing and I wanted to get a sense of that ultrasound so the last six lines of this poem are in English, but they’re in bat English.
Bats’ [...]