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- Herausgeber: Nine Arches Press
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
There is (still) love here, the compelling new collection of poetry by Dean Atta, is a personal and powerful exploration of relationships, love and loss, encompassing LGBTQ+ and Black history, Greek Cypriot heritage, pride and identity, dislocation and belonging.Atta's tender, precisely-crafted and generous poems seek consolation and affirmation. These are poems as an antidote for challenging times, whether facing prejudice or the challenges of the pandemic, experiencing grief or recovering from heartbreak. Here, we encounter blue feelings and homesickness, things lost in translation and the pressures of the many roles we play in life. We also find the recipes of home, gifts and giving, the togetherness of community and connection to help us to heal. There is still love here - and journeys towards forgiveness, acceptance, queer joy and the power to unapologetically be yourself and fully embrace who you are.
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There is (still) love here
There is (still) love here
Dean Atta
ISBN: 978-1913437503
eISBN: 978-1913437510
Copyright © Dean Atta, 2022.
Cover artwork: ‘Falling Deeper’ © Sanna Räsänen, 2022.
All rights reserved. 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.
Dean Atta has asserted his right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
First published September 2022 by:
Nine Arches Press
Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,
Great Central Way, Rugby.
CV21 3XH
United Kingdom
www.ninearchespress.com
Printed in the United Kingdom by:
Imprint Digital
Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
for Faye
Contents
On Days When
How to be a Poet
Five Litres of Blue
Signet
The Making
Writer in Residence
What Do You See?
Stony Eyes of History
British Citizenship Test
The Door
No Ascension
Preparing for the Worst
Fragments of Faye
Lost in Translation
Pulse
Stuck in the Mud
Two Black Boys in Paradise
What I Didn’t Know Before
Circassian Circle
Category Is Books
Yours and Mine
Letter to London
Strawberry Thief
On Giving
Four Plantains in a One-Pound Bowl
How to Make Louvi
Translate This Sentence
Στο τραπέζι µε την αγάπη µου(At the table with my love)
Empathy
Broken Bench
No Headspace
Nightshift
Beachcombing at Night
Sensing Something is Wrong
A Letter to the Man in the Next Room
Tenement
Mundane Magic
When
I Never Asked for Another City
Dear Brokenhearted Man
Murmuration (Faye as a Flock of Starlings)
Acknowledgements and Thanks
About the author and this book
On Days When
you feel like a wilting garden,
gather yourself, roll up your lawn,
bouquet your flowers,
embrace your weeds.
You are a wild thing playing
at being tame.
You are rich with life beneath
the surface.
You don’t have to show leaf
and petal to be living.
You are soil and insect and root.
How to be a Poet
When your mum loves you unconditionally, say,
Mother, your love is so cliché.
Seek rejection.
Relate to roadkill. Let life crash into you.
Embrace the pain of others when you have none of your own.
Write poems on your phone.
Be at one with technology and at odds with nature.
Be a natural disaster but blame society.
Be a contradiction.
Take your time to rush.
Hurry up and wait.
Do average things but expect to be great.
Look at things differently.
Close your eyes and feel.
Stand out in the sun and pretend to be a flower.
See all people as flowers.
Try and fail to be the sun.
Blame your mum.
Blame your dad.
Blame everything you never had.
Don’t rhyme without reason.
Don’t hang on to the pencil shavings of life.
Refuse to stay sharp, keep writing.
Five Litres of Blue
I used to think the blood in this body
was five litres of blue,
that only when I bled was it red.
I looked it up and found out
the blue of our veins is a trick of the light.
Human blood is always red,
sometimes crimson, sometimes bright.
Where do blue feelings come from?
I could be at the table with family: blue.
In a nightclub with friends: blue.
In the arms of a lover: blue.
Writing this poem for you: I used to
think of writing as some kind of bleeding.
That colour people stop and notice,
red of accidents, homicide or self-harm.
I used to think the blood in this body
was five litres of blue. How else
could I explain blue feelings to you?
Signet
Your engraved ring reads D.M.P.
if I hadn’t changed my surname
this would have been left to me
we are making each other pay
for an inherited debt
your brother my father
the push and pull between us
an elastic band in the hands of a restless student
we have grown with this tension
yet never snapped back at each other
and without fail
