'Now he answers to everything that reminds him of her'
In this moving elegy to his infant daughter, Saddiq Dzukogi reminds us of how complex grief can be. The body’s responses to grief offer a way for us to cope with its deep pain. Here, the poem, 'So Much Memory', is a tender performance in which the poet, beautifully and hopefully, seeks to capture the lingering song of his daughter’s memory.
SO MUCH MEMORY
by Saddiq Dzukogi
Now h...
20th December 2022
'Joe stopped, stooped, picked a flower'
It seems clear enough that Quincy Troupe wants his poem, 'Picking a Dandelion', to achieve the coveted status of “timelessness” while being rooted in a historical moment. Here are Joe and Jill, two people with commonly available American names, enacting an ordinary gesture of affection. Yet this ins...
12th December 2022
'While there is still some light on the page, I am writing now a history of snow'
Allison C Rollins manages, in this striking poem, to contain the anxiety of those facing sightlessness, and the urgency they feel to try to preserve in memory, that which is fleeting. For her, the poe...
5th December 2022
'The memories shift in their skins at every moon, to do their ripening'
Joy Harjo’s ode to family, to ancestry, and to the woman’s body, truly makes sense if we understand that for Harjo, there is no line separating the natural world and her human body — that for her the ...
29th November 2022
'My husband holds the cold stethoscope to my chest'
I must admit that I leave 'In Patient' still wondering, “Is she all right?” I suspect that Erin Evans knows this, and what she wants to say is that this moment of humour, a distraction from the thing...
22nd November 2022
'I have stuffed the South’s nightlights in my mouth. Gala of fireflies'
Tennessee Hill’s South emerges in her poem as a character, a personage that haunts and possesses her with beauty and a certain disquiet. Her poem, 'Crater Heart', moves from fragmentary image to simil...
17th November 2022
'He’s friendly they yell, 50 yards back'
The title of the poem, 'The Love Ridge Loop', is, no doubt, something of a joke, an exaggeration built on irony. After all, the poem is an ironic love poem, and, at the same time, an anti-dog poem. Bu...
7th November 2022
'The mon tonight is closer to us'
Perhaps we are too close to the monumental moment in history to fully appreciate just how to approach it in poetry, but the poets are writing about this pandemic in the way that poets must — to find l...
31st October 2022
'My father's seat empty, placemat bare'
This is an elegant elegy to a father who has passed, captured in the rituals that families create as a way to remember, to honour and even to celebrate. The extra place set at table before a feast of ...
27th October 2022
'This sea: a Chevy engine revving high reminding me how everything’s design'
In 'Beachcomber Nocturne', Lupita Eyde-Tucker beautifully wrestles with the complex relationship that we sometimes have with nature, by first acknowledging that there is a strange colonising impulse b...
14th October 2022
'We don't remember our birth, when a mother dies, it's gone'
Victoria Chang has an uncanny capacity to contain, in the compact machine of a well-honed poem, so much emotion and meaning. She explores such a core element of what connects us as human beings — the ...
9th October 2022
'You scuff, as you obey'
There is, of course, no hidden chapter in the “Good Book” that explores sandalled Jesus’s fashion rules, but Cornelius Eady in ‘Easter Shoes’ is being funny and deadly serious. The poem takes him back...
29th September 2022
'It's your turn, it's always your turn, the night says'
Rachel Eliza Griffiths has written poems and composed photographs in response to the loss of her mother. She has always been fascinated by the exchange between birth and death that characterises their...
24th September 2022
'Bringing drought when instead we should have deluge'
There is a posture that poets sometimes take, that of the prophet speaking predictions into the world, or simply proclaiming what is happening in the moment. More often than not, the role is reluctant...
15th September 2022
'My seven siblings and I sheltered ourselves inside these labyrinths'
In Heather Cahoon’s poem ‘Shelter’ she manages, with simplicity and the use of deftly selected detail, to capture the mood of childhood delights that, in the manner of such things, always seem on the ...
6th September 2022
'Like dust their lives so small compared to ours'
Roxane Beth Johnson’s elegy to her father is striking for the tender and intimate details that constitute the memory of him, especially his shirts, which become almost talismans for her to explore ide...
30th August 2022
'Home be this small silence you curl into anywhere you go'
Nowhere in her poem, 'Self-Portrait with Impending War', does Lauren K Alleyne mention a war, but the rumours of war and the disquiet of the world seem to haunt this “self-portrait” in which the self ...
22nd August 2022
'One perfect stitch after another perfect stitch'
'Mend' is a poem of great intimacy. L Renée remembers her mother as the mender of garments, and as someone who had a life of rich experiences before the poet was born. This moment of separation descri...
16th August 2022
'It was the eve of war but they didn't know'
War, impending war and exile forced by war, are increasing preoccupations in the work of Ladan Osman — not so much the wars, but the damage that they do to everyday people who are trying to live in th...
16th August 2022
'A tiny magical man makes me an offer'
This poem captures one of the peculiar, private deals that we sometimes make in a world that seems to be marching on, completely out of our control. Some might call it a prayer, or a spell, or a stran...
22nd June 2022
