Gaia Holmes

Biography

My first full-length poetry collection 'Dr James Graham's celestial bed' was published by 'Comma Press' in March 2006 (www.commapress.co.uk). " The poems in this debut collection are made from intense sensual experience, bursting with colours, flavours and textures. Gaia Holmes has an eye for the strangeness of things..." -Jean Sprackland. "There's something in these poems that I can only call detailed intimacy' and 'closely worked humanity'; the language is inclusive but still challenging and draws me into reading after reading."-Ian MacMillan. "Sassy and streetwise, dark and blue, these are poems that are high on words; full of rich imaginings and dislocated love affairs, peopled with ordinary folk made exotic, and with the strange made true."- Amanda Dalton. I have been working as a 'writer' for several years: facilitating poetry/creative writing workshops in West Yorkshire and beyond. I was a lecturer in Creative writing at Huddersfield university for 2 years. I have collaborated with artists, film-makers and musicians. I have read at several literary festivals and at schools, pubs, libraries, coffee shops and galleries throughout Britain. I'm available for workshops and readings!!!

Samples

EPIPHANY And it comes to me as we drive through moors clotted with burnt, black heather, where the air smells of sulphur and honey. Inland, away from you the sky is a finger painting: stale streaks of dark clouds daubed above the slated roof tops. You have to learn to register these things: the sweet and the sour moments of life, each dead pheasant you pass fluttering like a ballgown in the motorway breeze, each blurred wasp you see pulped against the windscreen: the frail mortality of colour. Remember-this is the way you breathe, like a symphony of echo trapped inside a shell. On days like this there are certain things that you recall: the clinging breeze loaded with salt, dead fish rotting on the tide line, the way that the edges of the land blurred and spread and sunk into the sea Remember that day when we woke because the sun beams nudged us out of our sticky nest of sloth. Our ambition became sobriety. We binned empty wine bottles and sour milk, scoured lust off the dishes, sat out in the garden, and waited for our hearts to dry. I'D LIKE TO LIVE IN A FRENCH FILM where the thin tea-brown light paints me wise and beautiful and the sound of my neighbour playing Elgar on his violin seeps through the walls and makes a stinging soundtrack to my life. Nothing will be bland: you will be addicted to my skin, you will smoke stumpy Gauloise cigarettes, fill your car with lust and violet clouds as you drive through storms dodging monstrous wind-fall trees and crashed telegraph poles just to get to me, just to plant little kisses like forget-me-nots at the top of my thighs. And in the morning, every morning the wet streets will shine like pewter, the world will sound like Paris and rain. The air will smell of hot sugar, swollen dough and carousels. WHEN HE COMES So this is it. This is the night. Downstairs the sofa doesn't know me anymore, my occasional china is cracking with boredom, the front door is guarded by foxgloves and throttled with toad-flax and this is it. This is me; mad woman in the attic sifting the air for gold-dust, a circle of crushed moths patterning the carpet around my feet, cold coffee at my elbow, logic in a hip-flask and I'm drinking wine that tastes of hay and Denmark in July and we're all waiting for the storm, an answer, a fag-burn in the sky, words etched into the slick streets, the soft porn of rain on the skylight window. We're all waiting for our dead dogs to rattle up the stairs We're all waiting for our grandmother's to polish our eyes with spit on the corner of a duster. We're all waiting for someone to say our name with meaning. We're all waiting, ears angled cat-like, waiting, for a car to pull up, waiting, for inspiration to open the door and enter smelling of life, of blood, of little deaths, of unspeakable notions and say I'm yours. Take me now.

All poems are copyright of the originating author. Permission must be obtained before using or performing others' poems.

Blog entries by Gaia Holmes

'The Big weekend' (17/04/2011)

The Glass House (12/01/2010)

Audio recordings of me reading my poems for 'Poetcasting' (11/01/2010)

The man who dripped digitalis (09/12/2009)

I am lifting the piano with one hand (09/12/2009)

Blog link: https://www.writeoutloud.net/blogs/gaiaholmes