My best latest news is that my poem sequence Again Behold the Stars has won a Cinnamon Pamphlet Award, and will be published in spring 2023.
Thank you, mille grazie, Cinnamon Press!
These are poems very dear to my heart and I can't wait to see them in print. They are set in Montalcino, the town where I live when in Italy. The central narrative thread happens in the 1500s, a time of siege. But the poems are also about events in the world right now, and drawn from my own experience of lockdown over the past few years.
A small taster from near the opening, honouring the role of women in medieval sieges:
Redoubt
Three women’s battalions, uniformed in red and violet taffeta, fought on the city walls.
La Fortezza bares a stony
countenance. She gathers
the beseiged under her skirts.
Against her stubborn wall
the cannonballs shatter
like fishermen’s glass floats,
leave no more than scratches.
Moss heals her. Sparrows roost
inside her scars. She glowers
from her high redoubt
beyond the mangled plain,
all the way to the sea
where boats cast off as easily
as taffeta slips from the loom.
In other news, I've broken my hand, luckily not the writing one.
The hospital at Nottola, where they straighened the bones and encased my arm in plaster, was exactly as it was when I wrote this (about partner David's broken ankle) in 2015! You can find this and others from that time in my first collection, White Roads, Paekakariki Press 2018.
La Sala Gessi
Lined up, not crying
in the corridor: girl,
both hands twisted
under a scarf;
grape-pickers, bare feet
tenderly tilted
like knackered horses
shifting the weight;
ashen-faced woman
on a stretcher; you,
your swollen leg,
me with a crumbling panino.
Tutte rotte!
pronounces the nurse
with pride, waving a sheaf
of X-ray notes. All broken.
Inside the sala
they keep their mystery,
their buckets of white slop,
swaddle your pain
in gesso. Woozy,
we join the procession,
happy to stumble
through swing doors
lurching on stampelle,
in wheeled carriages
or wreathed in slings;
part-human, part-cocoon.
Thank you, mille grazie, Cinnamon Press!
These are poems very dear to my heart and I can't wait to see them in print. They are set in Montalcino, the town where I live when in Italy. The central narrative thread happens in the 1500s, a time of siege. But the poems are also about events in the world right now, and drawn from my own experience of lockdown over the past few years.
A small taster from near the opening, honouring the role of women in medieval sieges:
Redoubt
Three women’s battalions, uniformed in red and violet taffeta, fought on the city walls.
La Fortezza bares a stony
countenance. She gathers
the beseiged under her skirts.
Against her stubborn wall
the cannonballs shatter
like fishermen’s glass floats,
leave no more than scratches.
Moss heals her. Sparrows roost
inside her scars. She glowers
from her high redoubt
beyond the mangled plain,
all the way to the sea
where boats cast off as easily
as taffeta slips from the loom.
In other news, I've broken my hand, luckily not the writing one.
The hospital at Nottola, where they straighened the bones and encased my arm in plaster, was exactly as it was when I wrote this (about partner David's broken ankle) in 2015! You can find this and others from that time in my first collection, White Roads, Paekakariki Press 2018.
La Sala Gessi
Lined up, not crying
in the corridor: girl,
both hands twisted
under a scarf;
grape-pickers, bare feet
tenderly tilted
like knackered horses
shifting the weight;
ashen-faced woman
on a stretcher; you,
your swollen leg,
me with a crumbling panino.
Tutte rotte!
pronounces the nurse
with pride, waving a sheaf
of X-ray notes. All broken.
Inside the sala
they keep their mystery,
their buckets of white slop,
swaddle your pain
in gesso. Woozy,
we join the procession,
happy to stumble
through swing doors
lurching on stampelle,
in wheeled carriages
or wreathed in slings;
part-human, part-cocoon.
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