Biography
Starting at Liverpool College of Art I have always combined writing with painting. Poetry especially depends on images and it enriches my short stories and longer fiction. I have won the Molly Keane Short Story Award and was second in the Michael McLaverty Short Story Award and the Cootehill Poetry Prize. Widely published in magazines, with several collections of poetry (Citizeness 2011) short stories (Rainy Pavements (2007) and novels Finding Out & the latest, A Small Inheritance (2012). Editor of The Lantern Review, a small magazine of poetry, reviews & short prose. Blog: patjourdan.wordpress.com
Samples
Open Day The lower corridor had that medical whiff - (constraints, dentists, swirls of pain in swoons of gas. The spitting, gulping blood)- here in the convent's lucid coolth. These laboratories have large mediaeval tables set with little sinks, hissing Bunsen burners, charts, things from nightmares kept in jars. Locked cupboards. Specimens. Open Day, otherwise I would not be here. The oatmeal mice and white-velvet rats lie opened out. The Snow Queen has cut and tented all their skin, with dressmaker's pins. Each inner sanctum labelled. No privacy allowed. Suffering has been neatened with the deft knife. While we were elsewhere, learning German, someone had been killing here. Classmates in smooth green linen, heads bent obediently in spring light, transmuted mangled bodies into science. Open Day and everything comes to light.
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Ann Foxglove
Mon 17th Dec 2012 10:10
Hi Pat - welcome to WOL. I like your poem - reminded me of my schooldays - loved biology up to O level then gave it up - and it seemed odd that some of my pals who'd gone on to do it for A levels were dissecting rats etc! While I was in the Art Room probably! Hope to see more of your poetry on here. If you put a poem on the blog section you'll find more people will see it and you may get some comments.