Ache E-Book

Scarlett Ward

• Herausgeber: Verve Poetry Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 37

Beschreibung

Scarlett Ward is an incredible young West Midlands poet as comfortable on the page as in performance, with a real ear for language and an imagination to match. Her debut collection, created with help and advice from Liz Berrry and others, doesn't disappoint, as it takes its Insta-concerns (Scarlett has 10k+ followers) of depression, insecurity, mental ill-health and the deep and powerful ache of a love found, and turns them in to quite startling poetry -at times as light as petals, at others as heavy and violent as a hob nail boot. Read, gasp, enjoy.

Leseprobe

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Scarlett Ward is a Black Country poet working from Cannock, England. In 2019 she came runner up in Mother’s Milk Poetry Prize, 3rd place in Wolverhampton Literature Prize, and runner up in the Verve Festival Community Poetry Competition. She was shortlisted for Best Spoken Word Poet by Saboteur Awards, and her work has featured in anthologies from Eye Flash Poetry, Hedgehog Press, and Fly On The Wall Poetry. Her micro-pamphlet Rebirth was published digitally with IriOsi Press in 2016. She is a snail enthusiast and hopes to extend her family of giant land snails in due time.

Twitter: @scarlettwith2ts

www.facebook.com/Scarlett Ward

Instagram: @scarlett.ward

PUBLISHED BY VERVE POETRY PRESS

https://vervepoetrypress.com

[email protected]

All rights reserved

© 2019 Scarlett Ward

The right of Scarlett Ward to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

FIRST PUBLISHED JUN 2019

REPRINTED NOV 2019

Printed and bound in the UK by Imprint Digital, Exeter

ISBN: 978-1-912565-23-8

ePub ISBN: 978-1-912565-82-5

For Jacob, you are the reason I stayed alive long enough to write any of this. You are, honestly and without any exaggeration, the reason I breathe at all. I love you.

CONTENTS

i. To ache is to heal

We’re going to have to talk about it

I don’t know much about Catholicism

In which the oyster refuses to open

I ask myself

Purple (Love Notes To My Depression)

Melanchole

BPD

Spinner

X

I grew

The smiling yellow pistil

Sunflower

Kitchen windows

Recovery

What I chose to spend my birthday money on rather than a prescription for antidepressants

ii. To ache is to endure

Culling season

Snow

Higher

Crockery spines

Every piece is titled ‘Home’

Can’t help myself

How I can bear to drive past your address

One hundred and six miles

Tide times

The language of flowers

iii. To ache is to love

What is true of Spring

How I fell in love

Your name

Strawberry

Clinging

Autumn

Seen

A Sonnet to every Love that came before me

We have our own language

In this version of reality I never found you

One bedroom

Buttercup

iv. To ache is to recover

To ache is to

Scarlett’s guest poets - Jess Davies, Sallyanne Rock and Rebecca Lockwood

Notes & Acknowledgements

ache

i. to ache is to heal

We’re going to have to talk about it at some point

aren’t we?

Except I don’t want to.

Can’t we talk instead of dandelion manes;

the way they nose their way through

cracks in the pavement,

only to be scattered in infinite directions

when kicked violently enough,

scorned spores spiraling;

frantic heads of fine-spun lace

dizzying themselves away,

as though away is the only place far enough

from that damned kicking boot.

Can we focus on the flowers

and not think of anything else -

not how I ran home to my mom’s house,

shame dampening the crotch of my underwear,

and not the beads from my snapped bracelet

that I clutched tightly in my fist.

I don’t know much about Catholicism

but for the sake of this poem say I do.

Say I’m the communion bread,

the thinly stretched wafer

molded into nipple-sized circles

that fit easily into the mouth

when placed on the tongue.

Say you place me on your tongue,

don’t wait for me to soften before you chew.

Say I leave you feeling

absolved.

Say you do as you will with my body,

my soft girlish body,

all unrisen dough and uncooked,

as you do with the body of Christ;

pull it apart until it relents in your hands.

Say I am kneaded out by fist

and baked in stone fire,

chewed by your jaws,

torn apart by canine.

Say what you did was holy.

Say what you did was out of love.

Why then have you hidden me in your pocket

where you pray that God will never look?

In which the oyster refuses to open

then after that,

every word required a prising

apart of my reluctant jaw,

a sucking sound of a parting

seal, a pulling separate of

a gummy membrane

fastening, a cracking of

cockle-spine prying open

to get to the

Pearl.

I taste the metal of a blade

slipped in neatly