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Mary MacRae’s second collection
published Aug 10 by Second Light Publications. See order form (pdf file) for discount offers
Listen to Mimi Khalvati reading The Valley
with kind permission of Carcanet
*** SPRING FESTIVAL – ADDITIONAL WORKSHOP:
Celebrate the Natural World with Myra Schneider, Friday 17th May, 10:30a.m. – 1:00. more details.
Need help with travel to Second Light events? See Second Light Mary MacRae ‘Access to Poetry’ Fund
Our judge this month is Joy Howard and she has selected Gill McEvoy’s Glass Bird in a Shop Window as her winner. Her commended poets are Anna Avebury, June Hall, Alison Michell and Nicola Warwick.
Surely the maker of this bird is
one whose winter months are lived
among deep silences of snow,
who understands the blue and purple
bruise of folds among the drifts,
who knows
the strange transparencies of ice,
the way light toes on it
a fragile dance?
I have been standing here so long
my feet have slipped into
boots of fur,
snow is settling on my shoulders
under dank green pine
and snow-locked birch.
Ice splits; a bird flies up.
Freckles the freezing air
with blue.
A shudder of snow
ushers its escape.
Poem: Third Prize in the English Fellows’ Association Poetry prize, 2010.
A spare but linguistically rich evocation of being transported to another world through the medium of the everyday experience of window shopping. The sense of deep cold, the play of light in a winter landscape of the Far North are brilliantly present, and we are there among the pine and birch, our breath catching at the sudden imagined flight of a glass bird.
Mammogram, by Anna Avebury
Yellow Bird, by June Hall
Cross My Palm, by Alison Michell
You Hated Those Plums, by Nicola Warwick
