Post-Baby Book Boom

I was speaking to the poet David Morley yesterday at Warwick University; his wife recently gave birth, and he was telling me how he had been writing furiously ever since the event, poems shooting out of him.

I was reminded by his story of my own experience back in 2002 in North Cornwall when, having just given birth to twin boys, I found myself writing a novel some 100,000 words long. I wrote at night largely, in an annex of the renovated barn we were renting, with one ear open for any squeaks from the baby monitor.

This system worked well for about five or six weeks postnatally. The boys slept in Moses baskets in the living room and I tapped away most of the night. It was the summer holidays and my husband, a teacher, was not at work, so he was able to look after the babies during the daytime while I caught up on my sleep - though breastfeeding meant having to be at least vaguely awake some of the time - and I would take the night shift.

The oddest thing was how little sleep I seemed to require. I've always been able to survive on five or six hours a night for long periods of time without too much trouble, but during those six weeks after the birth of my twin boys, I was almost electric. I would plug myself into a couple of hours' nap to recharge, and then stay awake for the next twenty-two, not only functioning normally, but super-normally, writing thousands upon thousands of words as they just flew out of me.

That novel was never published; it remains one of those bottom drawer efforts that I still wonder about. But I do wonder now, far less electrically charged these days, what it was about the post-birth period - traditionally held to be so exhausting, particularly with twins! - that suddenly lit me up creatively in that bizarre, almost painful fashion, forcing me to write and write as though I were running out of time to do so.

It occurs to me that some kind of adrenalin must kick in at times following a birth - not for every birth, not for every person - that leaves you in that super-charged state. A natural reaction, perhaps, designed to allow you to cope with a three month period of such profound lack of sleep that it would knock most people sideways.

For creative people, it may also result in a period of the most astonishing fecundity.

At the time, I assumed it was because I had been dragging around for nine months with this double burden, this sense of gravity and vulnerability that can occasionally kick in when pregnant. I was certainly vast with the boys, and carried them full term, so wide towards the end that I had to shuffle sideways through doors. So when their birth finally released me, I was filled with such restless energy that I felt I could do anything. Super-human ...

So how to recapture that state of being super-charged, of being creatively electric and lit up from within - without having to produce twins beforehand?

Nine Arches Press Birthday Shindig

You are invited to come and join Nine Arches Press in celebrating their first year in business at a special Birthday Shindig!

On: Tuesday May 5th 2009 at 7pm

At: The CAPITAL Centre, Milburn House, Milburn Hill Road, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL

Readings by a fine selection of Midlands poets, so far confirmed are Simon Turner, George Ttoouli, Matt Nunn and Jane Holland. PLUS: Cakes, music and open-mic slots for up-and-coming poets, not to mention Nine Arches pamphlets for sale too.

This event is FREE and all are welcome.

If you can drop along to celebrate our first year with us, it would be a pleasure to see you there.

Jane Commane
www.ninearchespress.com

Motion Sickness?

He hasn't been the most popular of Laureates, nor the most scintillating. He has been, at times, both too much and too little in the public eye. Some people I've met have had nothing but good things to say about the man and his work. Indeed, I've met the man myself - but only for thirty seconds, before he dashed off, wine glass still in hand, to another gathering of poets somewhere across London. He seemed rather unengaged in the poetry event I was attending, and who can blame him? Once you've been to one, you've been to them all.

The big question is, how many poets will state in later years to have been 'inspired' by Andrew Motion's term as Laureate?

Well, stranger things have happened at sea.

* POETRY SOCIETY EVENT *

Monday 28th April 2009, 7.45pm.

The Poetry Society marks the end of Andrew Motion's decade as Poet Laureate. On this historic occasion, Andrew will also be reading from his new collection The Cinder Path.

VENUE: Purcell Room, 7.45pm, Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre. £9 for Poetry Society Members, £10 for others. Tickets from www.southbankcentre.co.uk or 0871 663 2500.

Email Virus: Apologies

Many apologies to anyone who received a spam email apparently from my email account recently. I have today found many instances of other people online who have suffered with precisely the same spam message coming from their accounts, quite innocently, and why.

"This is due to a worm virus currently propagating itself through e-mail and instant messaging.

The worm sends various messages that entice users to click on a malicious link that leads to a Web site. Clicking on the said link downloads a copy of worm onto message recipients' computers. Upon download, it then gathers e-mail addresses saved on the recipient's computer and sends itself out to all of those addresses. It also creates e-mail addresses using common names appended with a domain name.

The virus, most likely, has acquired your e-mail address from one of your contacts. The virus then forges the "To" field of the e-mail making it appear that it came from you or one of your contacts. When a recipient's e-mail server rejects the e-mail, a non-delivery notification is then sent to your e-mail address."

I have no memory of clicking on a link to activate this, and I have no real idea how to get rid of it. I've contacted my email provider but so far no reply. My main question is, is that it, or will it strike again? Is it safe?!

Any clues?

Podcasts?

Just been listening to some Harlequin podcasts (romance series fiction) on the e-Harlequin site, and thought it might be fun to put up some podcasts on this blog.

Podcasts are pretty simple to make with an MP3 player or on a laptop - I could probably even manage a short film, via YouTube, if I knew someone with a reasonable camera - and they would certainly ring the changes from text-based discussions, besides being a more intimate, first-hand approach to blogging.

So, any thoughts about what I could cover in a short writing-based podcast?

I could, for instance, rather than rambling on about whatever I've been doing recently, invite a local writer or two to talk with me. One of the co-editors of Nine Arches Press, Jane Commane and I have been talking about developing a Midlands-based poetry podcast for the next issue of Horizon Review, but I think there's also a possibility there for creating less grand podcasts, in a casual sort of ad hoc style, for Raw Light.

Tom Chivers' "The Terrors"

Tom Chivers is a poet based in London, who has just published a pamphlet of poem-emails entitled THE TERRORS. To give you a flavour of his content, here's the short preface:

What follows is a sequence of imagined emails sent from the author to inmates at London's Newgate Prison incarcerated between roughly 1700 and 1760. All mistakes, typos and anachronisms are deliberate.

Tom Chivers promises - and delivers - anachronisms in these well-presented 30-odd pages of poems - poem-emails, prose-poems, email-musings - with an urban twist well-suited to such disturbing subject matter. For instance, in an email to Babs_Spencer@yahoo.co.uk, Chivers addresses the unfortunate Barbara, who appears to have been imprisoned for forgery, as though they are personal friends. 'Thank god you were throttled before you were burnt', he writes, then leaps straight into another stanza: 'The burger vans hum as I wait for the nightbus, onions caramelising on the grill, faggots and all.'

This is contemporary elegy, then, for the long-dead, the unknown, many of them victims of a clumsy, unjust and barbaric legal system.

Geoffrey Hill in his Mercian Hymns phase is, surely, an influence in these poems, structurally at least, if not in tone as well. This is from one of several emails to William Dodd :

I snared the gaping crowd, Will; told Akerman you once danc'd into the living grave wherin we're food for worms. I'd love to see your homely porter, clad in bespoke skin of wolsey grey; strange choirs, guttural outpourings.

I'm what you'd call a fellow traveller; terrestrial stranger with my twin-pack scriptures, ghostly doctrine tagged along the walls. Watch for the pattern and the source, you said.

The pattern: infamy!
The source: infamy!

But not all these email-poems run along such expansive, discursive lines. Some are elegant with impressive one-liners - 'The Chinese say a person with a bad name is already half-hanged' - while others try a different tack, short clauses and place names run together in mini-sentences, creating a breathless, accusatory charge into the past:

Hooded in a whimple. Skirts up to here. It was you, wasn't it?
Gun Street. Spitalfields. Drab or tom.
Findy sides open to the fog. Bundle of kid.

Even though some of these poems are difficult to read, and must have been even worse to write, Tom Chivers does not shy away from the unsettling or the genuinely horrific detail in these quasi-historical accounts; indeed, his outraged sense of injustice permeates THE TERRORS. Here are the opening lines of 'To: Elizabeth Brownrigg/Subject: Murder by inches':

1. The subject is tied up naked, beaten with a hearth-broom, a horsewhip, or a cane, til she is speechless.

Some of the rest of this poem is so horrific, I don't feel able to quote it here. But it conveys, swiftly and eloquently, the atmosphere of Newgate Prison in the eighteenth century, or how we, looking back on such times from the present, can only believe or fear it must have been for the inmates.

Nine Arches Press is to be congratulated for publishing this short collection by Tom Chivers, which is both innovative and disturbing, and which gives a voice to the voiceless, albeit an imagined, anachronistic one. I was extremely pleased to be present at the launch a few weeks ago in London, and to be able to read alongside Tom. Hearing his introductions, and the poems themselves, left me keen to review such a fascinating, experimental collection.

If I had one minor criticism to make, it would be that, on reading these poems, I felt curious to know more about the people to whom they were addressed, including crimes they had been accused of and how they were sentenced. But it's only a minor point, and perhaps a list in an appendix could be added in a later edition.

THE TERRORS is a bold, dark, and deeply unsettling collection which introduces a strong new poetic voice in Tom Chivers. You can buy the book online from Nine Arches Press via Throckmortons bookshop (which will directly support this bold new publishing house).

There is also a short poetry film by Tom Chivers reading from THE TERRORS on location at Newgate, available here.

Doctor Who and the BBC Writing Room

Doctor Who and the recent Planet of the Dead episode.

Like many people, I'm a fan of Doctor Who and am eagerly looking forward to the last few episodes with David Tennant (stagger, swoon) before he bows off our screens - as Doctor Who - forever.

Today it was brought to my attention that Raw Light is now listed on British Blogs, which I promptly visited and found this interesting website on Doctor Who, amongst other things.

If you're a writer and fancy trying your hand at writing for television - or radio - as I've said before on Raw Light, your first port of call must be the marvellous BBC Writers' Room website.

There you will find many examples of real BBC scripts - for Doctor Who, Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, etc. - and thousands of tips on script-writing and other useful stuff, including their free ScriptSmart software download (not available for Mac, when I last checked, so sadly I can't use it) so you can concentrate on the dialogue, not the formatting.

It's great to have samples of these scripts online now, and to be able to watch missed episodes online or buy the DVDs. But it wasn't always that easy for writers - or fans, for that matter.

When I was a teenager, two of my school friends - Lynn and Sheila - used to send off specially for BBC scripts of Blakes 7, learn them by heart, then shoot barrages of dialogue at me relentlessly to check if I knew the episodes well enough to fill in the blanks (it was an all-girls' school and we were odd like that).

Lynn got married, Sheila died tragically young in a riding accident, and here I am, 42 years old and still able to quote vast chunks of Blakes 7 from memory. Just a pity it's kind of pointless knowledge ...

Hopkins' "Easter Communion"

Easter Communion

Pure fasted faces draw unto this feast:
God comes all sweetness to your Lenten lips.
You striped in secret with breath-taking whips,
Those crooked rough-scored chequers may be pieced
To crosses meant for Jesu's; you whom the East
With draught of thin and pursuant cold so nips
Breathe Easter now; you serged fellowships,
You vigil-keepers with low flames decreased,

God shall o'er-brim the measures you have spent
With oil of gladness, for sackcloth and frieze
And the ever-fretting shirt of punishment
Give myrrhy-threaded golden folds of ease.
Your scarce-sheathed bones are weary of being bent:
Lo, God shall strengthen all the feeble knees.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

This is one of Gerard Manley Hopkins' lesser-known poems but perfect for Easter Day. One of my favourite poets and most in-built poetic influences - encountered young; forever present - Hopkins whirls from word to word, almost delirious at times, careless of convention, his alliterative criss-crossing of sounds deeply Anglo-Saxon, seemingly lost in religious ecstasy yet never out of control, leaving the faithful reader breathless and dizzy.

For further reading, his most beautiful and achieved poem is "The Wreck of the Deutschland".

Happy Easter/Spring!

Enough Reading, Start Writing!

It can be a lonely life, being a writer, and rather low on feedback. So it was a pleasure to catch up today with the kind words a few people had to say about my poem 'Day Tripping' on the Peony Moon site earlier this year.

Reading the comments, although fairly short, was a reminder that I need to do more writing and less reading - which is all I seem to have been doing in recent months, apart from the odd essay for my studies at Warwick. (Hence the long silence on Raw Light.) Reading is fabulous and utterly essential, but there comes a point as a writer when you have to say 'Basta!', lay the books aside and pick up the pen. Or pencil, in my case.

Which is precisely what I shall be doing, later this week and next, despite my pressing need to revise for forthcoming exams.

Though this week must also involve a quick trip down to Cornwall to see my eldest daughter. An important visit, since the latest news is that I'm going to be a grandmother!

New Poem (a Sapphic) in the latest Poetry Review

The latest issue of the flagship magazine of the Poetry Society, Poetry Review, is just out this week, and I have a brand-new poem in it, entitled Sapphic: Jamesian, Aureate.

I also have a review of poetry books by Wendy Cope, Maureen Duffy and Patience Agbabi amongst its pages.

To buy or subscribe to Poetry Review, you can visit their website here. It's £30 for the magazine (4 issues a year) or £40 for the magazine PLUS membership of the Society, with all the usual perks.

There's some discussion of the latest issue recently on Poets on Fire, for those interested in forum life.

Amazon Reviews

My third poetry collection Camper Van Blues has been out a few months now, and still no reviews on Amazon. Which is rather sad. If anyone has read Camper Van Blues, and would like to leave a few comments on Amazon, I'd be ever so grateful. I'm sure it must help to boost sales if there's at least a few reviews. Assuming, that is, that most of them don't begin 'Don't waste your money on this steaming pile of utter ... etc.'

If you're willing, here's Camper Van Blues on Amazon.co.uk.

*

London poetry reading this weekend

FREE POETRY EVENT!

Join me on Sunday 29th March from 7pm for drinking games, petty chit-chat and poetry readings by Tom Chivers, Tim Wells, Jane Holland, Jane Commane and James Wilkes , at The Market Trader, 50 Middlesex Street E1 7EX. Nearest Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate East, Liverpool Street.

The Terrors launch on Facebook

Find the venue

THE TERRORS by Tom Chivers is the first in a series of special edition pamphlets from Nine Arches Press; darkly-humoured e-dispatches of crime and punishment from over the walls and across centuries. The Terrors is a sequence of imagined emails; poetic missives from the start of the 21st century to inmates at London's notorious Newgate Prison. The emails introduce a cast of 18th century villains and their gruesome crimes: 'Half-hanged Smith'; executioner-turned-murderer Jack Ketch; the notorious Waltham Blacks.

Some Questions about Major Poems

William Butler Yeats, originator of many 'major poems'

Not a military high-achiever, Major Poems, but a type of writing which seems to have eluded me to date. I have dreadful, unexplained upper back pain at the moment; having spent some hours today typing up recent poems from my notebook, it is now far worse. In this admittedly wretched mood, I find myself wondering - not for the first time, alas - why so many of my poems end up as minor notes instead of major chords.

I wonder whether a comparison of major poems of the twentieth-century might throw some light on this question. But whose poems would make the list? (One thinks instantly of Yeats and his numerous political masterpieces, of 'Easter, 1916', and that haunting opening line, 'I have met them at close of day'.) And what might these poems have in common to justify their greatness?

Among the various things to be considered, I list, somewhat arbitrarily:

ideas
imagery
structure
length
content
time of writing
point of writing within a poet's career ...

For instance, is it only older poets, in general, rather than younger poets, who write major poems?

And does any particular style of writing preclude the writing of a major poem? One might say, for instance, comic. Yet we have comic masterpieces too. Stevie Smith's 'Not Waving but Drowning' is one example. But again, is that major or merely memorable?

If so, what are the criteria for a poem becoming major rather than 'merely memorable' or striking enough to have stood the test of time? Do we say 'This is a major poem' straightaway, or do we wait for anthologists and critics to tell us which poems are major?

Bloom would include 'influence' on my list, no doubt. The influence of a precursor. But influence means nothing without an accompanying act of rebellion to spark originality.

The only thing I return to here, again and again, is that a major poem must possess, or represent in itself, an important idea. Yet clearly it is not the idea which makes it important, or one could simply state an idea in prose and it would qualify as a major poem. So the important idea or ideas would be accompanied by ...

Or are such questions ultimately pointless?

I don't believe, like Keats, that poems should come naturally or not at all. Art is about making it look natural, hiding the brushstrokes. But they are always there, nonetheless.

Horizon Review, Mark II

'The Dark Pool', Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (1995). Photo: Cardiff & Miller. See Kathryn Brown's review of this latest Modern Art Oxford exhibition at Horizon Review.

The rumours are true. The poems are all in. The short stories artfully arranged. The reviews straightened. The interviews gasped over. Now the covers have been dragged off. The windows thrown open. The mangy old slippers replaced by spanking red stilettos. HR II is both done and beautifully dusted. Still a little tweaking required, but all very minor and after-the-event. Some apparent vague incompatability with the Vista IE7 browser, which happily I do not use.

But otherwise wickedly delightful, skipping for joy, and live online right now at

Horizon Review

it's the long-awaited ... [extravagant drum-roll] ... ISSUE TWO!!

Go read and enjoy.

Ride the Word VII: March 25th 2009

I will be reading in London from my latest poetry collection Camper Van Blues later this month, when I drop in on the Resurrecting Knives tour special, an event which includes
Vincent De Souza reading from his eponymous April 2009 Salt poetry collection.

Here are the details of time, venue, date and the names of the other Salt Publishing writers reading alongside me that evening at Borders, Oxford Street.

Wednesday 25th March 2009
Borders Oxford St, 203-207 Oxford St, London W1D 2LE
7.00 - 9.15 pm FREE

Jay Merill
David Gaffney
Jane Holland
Mark Norfolk
Vincent De Souza
Scott Thurston

Plus special guests Brand magazine - Editor Nina Rapi

A Short Season of Other Poets: Rik Roots

Cliff

As the hovercraft puffed its skirts
against the concrete apron, so I flew -
Dover harbour a spray of images
behind my brother as he swung me
over the salt-crust lawns, the edge
of the unguarded cliff, a handgrasp away
from learning the dangers of trust.

Now the last hovercraft has been scrapped
for spares, I can discover new seductions:
the dangers of windy walks through stiff grasses
to watch the sea bolster Dover below; the feel
of rain spattering my neck, my back
as I dance with you, tonight's friend,
on the edge of the cliff - eyes forward
not down - each step an experiment
in my trust of flinty contact.

This poem is from the e-chapbook 'Poems to Quote to your Lover' by Rik Roots, which you can find - amongst other publications and poems by Rik - on the RikVerse website.

"Rik was born in the small village of Dymchurch on the Romney Marshes in Kent, England. Dymchurch has three Martello Towers and a station on the Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Light Railway. This was Rik's world for the first 24 years of his life, except for those six terms away at college - the North East Surrey College of Technology, that is: Rik somehow managed to fail his final school exams and thus never made it to university.

Poetically, Rik has been writing since he was 14 or 15. He happily acknowledges that no work from that early period survives, thanks to a fortuitous kitchen fire which may or may not have been started deliberately. The kitchen was relatively unharmed, in case you were worrying.

Rik's major claim to 'proper' poetic fame is being part of the group that established Magma Magazine - he even edited Magma 6, for his sins. The magazine's subsequent success has nothing to do with Rik; he left the Management Board a few weeks before Magma 7 was published. Rik's main publishing credentials are, strangely enough, in Magma Magazine. Nowadays he rarely submits poems to journals and has no plans to seek 'proper' venues for his chapbooks and manuscripts - Rik has a website, after all, which makes him very happy!

On a broader note, Rik is currently studying for that elusive degree with the Open University, and writing science fiction novels. Rik used to work for Her Majesty's Civil Service which is, he says, a perfect training ground for people wanting to write novels based on alternate realities and fantasy.

Rik currently lives in London with his partner, Nigel, and some cats. His other hobbies include causing trouble in various online venues and inventing languages. He also codes up websites."

*

And this concludes my Short Season of Other Poets. Many thanks to all those who kindly agreed to let me host their poems on my blog, and good luck with the publications I've mentioned here over the past few weeks.

A Short Season of Other Poets: Siriol Troup

CAGED ELEPHANTS

There were things no one told us –
how dusk trickled slowly through the cracks
like something you could touch with your trunk,

a soft mist scented with myrtle and laurel,
voluptuous, weighed down by the rills
of brown birds tearing their throats, and pain

below the range of human hearing: the grief
of solitary, creamy moths, the terrified
crumbling of cement. Or how, beyond

watering distance, eyes would kipper in their sockets
and to weep would be like the first gasp
of a fresh wound, cruel and beautiful. How day

would no longer be that sweet climb
into brilliance – the sun oiling the warm
bark of the baobab tree, the horizon glittering

like a needle. How our ears would soon forget
the shape and weave of a continent,
which no amount of trumpeting could bring back

because we were stretched to the very limits
of illumination, our only constant,
fear – not fear of death or darkness or hunger

but the fear that we might go on hoping
for something better than this: a small
adjustment, or a giving in.

About Siriol Troup:

Siriol comes from a Welsh family but was born in Hong Kong and spent most of her childhood and teenage years abroad, in Africa, Germany, Holland and Iran. She now lives in Twickenham with her husband and four children.

She read Modern Languages (French and German) at St Hugh's College, Oxford and later returned there to teach 19th and 20th century French Literature.

Her poems have previously appeared in The TLS, Poetry Review, PN Review, Poetry London, Poetry Wales, Modern Poetry in Translation, and other journals. Her pamphlet, Moss, won the Poetry Monthly Open Booklet competition in 2002 and her first full-length collection, Drowning up the Blue End, was published by Bluechrome in 2004.

She has won many prizes for her poems, including 2nd prize in the Arvon International Poetry Competition 2006. She teaches and lectures on poetry and is currently poet in residence for the Twickenham River Centre Project. Beneath the Rime is her second collection, published by Shearsman.

A Short Season of Other Poets: Barbara Smith

Barbara Smith writes:
‘On Not Seeing,’ came from two separate but linked events. In February 2008, I had a rare weekend away with my partner in Rome. We arrived too late on Saturday to visit the Sistine Chapel, but made do with all the other beauties that Rome offers. Four months later, on a June day out with the family at the beach, I was lazily cloud-gazing, lying on my back, when I had a ‘ping’ moment. This was first published in qarrtsiluni, July 2008.

On Not Seeing Inside the Sistine Chapel

You were a sky-gazer, a cloud-watcher,
seeing within those steamed puff-pillows
the forms of fabulous beings.

Just now I saw a fisherman, his white head
turned away, his finger flung
behind him pointing at infinity.

His rag-rolled head streamed to the west,
clothes rippling in the high sky-wind.
And when my lazy eye looked again

he morphed into a huge ornamental E,
whose top lintel was a crocodile’s mouth,
snapping at the blue. This too bleeds,

feeds into a sterling pound sign. You
must have spent afternoons on your back
gazing at patterns forming and merging,

dissipating where the mind dragged it.
You took your pigments and pulled them,
your art fixing a borderless sky inside

a broad high vault, peopling the heavens.
Ah, Michelangelo, I know why the sky
became your backdrop, why you loved shades

from azurite to smalt to cobalt blue.

Barbara Smith lives on the east coast of Ireland, dividing her time between raising six children, writing and teaching Creative Writing. In 2007, her debut poetry collection Kairos was published by Doghouse Books, Ireland. She was awarded an MA in Creative Writing from Queen’s University, Belfast in 2008. Barbara is the 2008/09 recipient of the Annie Deeny Memorial Prize, granted by the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annamakerrig, Newbliss, Ireland to emerging poets. She blogs at Barbara’s Bleeuugh.

A Short Season of Other Poets: Tony Williams

The Civil War

A church clock static on the midday chime:
the valley breathless like a desert bowl:
a boy shy in the lane in a too-big suit.
My brain no longer resists this stratagem,

but lolls instead in the meadow of its crime.
Off-shore the mackerel, blank in a huge shoal,
are the reasons my mind’s land is destitute.
Under the harbour’s calm I cannot see them.

Vertically the cloud builds over a parkland lime
which hides the idea of Charles I in its giant bole.
The cloud is the vision of republicans. Absolute
blue surrounds that shifting diadem.

'The Civil War' was first published in the now-defunct Avocado [small lit. magazine associated with Coventry-based Heaventree Press; not necessarily defunct, but certainly 'resting' at the moment. Jane.].

Tony Williams's first full collection The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street will be published by Salt Publishing in the summer. He lives in Sheffield, and works as a graphic designer and as a lecturer for the Open University and Salford University. His blog is aye-lass.blogspot.com.

A Short Season of Other Poets: Nuala Ní Chonchúir

Tattoo

My body is a palimpsest
under your hands,
a papyrus scroll
unfurled beneath you,
waiting for your mark.
I clean my skin,
scrape it back to
a pale parchment,
so that your touch
can sink as deep
as the tattooist's ink,
and leave its tracery
over the erased lines
of other men.

You are all that's
written on my body.


Tatú

Is pailmseist mo chorp
faoi do lámha,
paipír ársa
scrollaithe fút,
ag tnúth le do rian.
Glanaim mo chraiceann,
sciúraim siar é
go pár báiteach
ionas go bpúchfaidh
do lámh mar
dhúch tatuála,
ag líníocht thar
línte dofheicthe
gach fir eile

Níl faic ach tusa
scrábáilte ar mo chorp.


Born in Dublin in 1970, Nuala Ní Chonchúir lives in County Galway, Ireland. Her third short fiction collection Nude will be published by Salt Publishing in September 2009. Poems and an essay will appear in The Watchful Heart – A New Generation of Irish Poets, edited by Joan McBreen (Salmon, April 2009).

Nuala was chosen by The Irish Times as a writer to watch in 2009. Her website is www.nualanichonchuir.com. She blogs at womenrulewriter.blogspot.com. These poems are taken from Tattoo-Tatú (Arlen House, 2007) which you can buy here.