Be Feared E-Book

Jane Burn

• Herausgeber: Nine Arches Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 70

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Jane Burn's new poetry collection Be Feared is a captivating reclamation of self, sisterhood, and love, encountering everything from the Snow Queen to monsters, plagues and infernos. Acknowledging fear, this book embraces discovery, a process of translation and transformation, of finding a voice radiant with both curses and psalms. Rebellious, bloody, and encroached upon by violence, Burn's poetry examines survival, abuse and healing. Intensely imaginative, these incantatory poems rework fairy-tale and folklore and hold up enchanted mirrors to the everyday truths of being a working-class autistic woman, daring to become, claiming her own magnificent, unstoppable fluency and spell-making power.

Leseprobe

Be Feared

Be Feared

Jane Burn

ISBN: 978-1-913437-27-5

eISBN: 978-1-913437-28-2

Copyright © Jane Burn, 2021

Cover artwork: ‘Be Feared’ © Jane Burn

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.

Jane Burn has asserted her right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published November 2021 by:

Nine Arches Press

Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,

Great Central Way, Rugby.

CV21 3XH

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Nine Arches Press is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

To Lindsay,

for helping to make one of my biggest dreams come true.

Contents

Trepanation

Coronach for my slender waist

Mrs/Mother    Hail

How Austistic Spectrum Condition Made Her Worth Her Weight in Birds

The Only Kind of Poetry I Seem to be Able to Write

Triolet for Easter and the icon I have made of a wizened rabbit’s pelt

Look at me, lingering outside this murdered church

Self-Portrait as an Inferno

Thumbelina’s Birth as Told in the Style of Gregorian chant

So you made a thousand shit decisions

Fairy Stories

Fat Alice

This is a Frankenstein Night

Schneewittchen and the Universe

Aubade to the Noise of Chainsaws

Red

Aubade to a Wedding Photograph

Gerda’s searching leads her to roses and, at the edge of the Snow Queen’s land, she realises that her Autism will always be the fairytale with no satisfactory end

The Cursing Psalm

Hood

There are things that give me away if you know how to look,

Frances Cornford’s poem about a lady in gloves makes me realise that I have feelings for a woman for the first time

The nights in which I fantasise an evensong of us

Are Vaginas a Deal-Breaker Thing?

We could live in a cwtch of castles. I’ll grow my hair

The First Time I Really, Properly Swim

I was not the eye of the Hubble. I saw no cosmic string

Villanelle to Cold Psalms

Quiero saber si tú aun me quieres and imagining seeing a bird burning in the sky

Study of Life as Recorded in Cruel Lines

Grin Both Ways

The love that Orca taught me while he grew

Ode to the Sight of my Coloured Cob

The gifts she got at birth

Poor blackbird crumb

Be subtle as the Snow Queen,

The truth began with a mirror, clean and cruel

Magic Mirror

My Offering to the Earth

November’s Spoil of Rain and Plague

Ways in which I came to be a thief

The Altar of the Dead

Spun from the Same

The Un-Flight of Porcelain Birds

How the river takes whatever you pray

If we are here when yellow has done with the year

Is Autism/COVID happening to someone/somewhere else?

The Advent Calendar of Most Useful Things

Spun from the Same

If Ω Is For The Last Thing I Might Ever Do

Acknowledgements

About the author and this book

Trepanation

Or what my life became when I let the ghouls out of my brain

Once I thought I knew    the way of fields

I thought that I had seen    the view’s only truth

I spread upon    the tender world of moss

yielded my head      to the ground

gave passage      to any questing root

my mind an offering    to pullulations of seed

the auger’s turn unwound        the true smell of grass

the bitter beauty of           the sapid green

my cerebrum devoured     the piquancy of growing corn

a chalice to bear       the piety of freshly fallen rain

silver-sharp against    the path of my own rushing veins

its ions broke upon        the scaffold of my bones

I opened my head to      the luminous fusion of stars

let myself wear            the incredible weight of night

filled my skull with      the raw coin of the moon

felt its halo bloom inside       my own cavern of bone

I woke beneath           my version of a morning sky

the wound uncumbered        my devout kaleidoscope

my pate throbbed with welts     of immense blue

I drilled myself aware       of great definitions of cloud

uncovered a world             of high-borne froth

the universe inside             each airborne fleck of ice

their unmapped journey across       each astonishing vault

I thought I knew the whole sound of     each bird

such new complexities from    the delicious well of their throats

such patterns to describe        the shape of flight

I saw each barbule hold     the whole wing against the wind

I could not taste    the ghosts that I had kept

I could not hoard    the wandered voice of distal pain

I could not recall      the ubiquity of your face

How Austistic Spectrum ConditionMade Her Worth Her Weight in Birds

Pitter-scratch, patter-scratch, soil-deluded beak.

The floor is a mystery of worms, a concealment of seeds.

This queerish bird keeps becoming lost, though she is not a tiny thing.

See how this bird knocks her cheek against a cupboard door

and bat, bat, bat! comes a sound of wood bumping against flesh.

The smell of varnish, bitter. The nurture of wood, divine.

Elbow-flicker, elbow-flack, great misguided flight. The air

is a flabbergast of space, a fatigue of liberty. An unreachable scar.

She sees it marked by a devotion of swans and worships

their berth, the lowering of fat unblemished bows. Their christening

of self to shifting water, their mustering of signets into lines.

She is afraid she does not lead her own baby well,

afraid he will drown in her chaos. She is all the horrors

of doing things wrong though she lowers her neck above him

in shapes of love. What sort of bird might she be?

Not the harsh slice of gulls – she did not abandon her chick

to sheer cliff, would never risk his un-flight fall, nor his mite’s casting

to jaws of rock. How she fluffs around this treasure!

Waggle-squat, scuffle-crouch, bulk resigned frame.

The floor’s moor is a complex of heather, peeps of mottled plume.

This bird is folding upon a stool’s perch. Look how she has laid

the addled shell of her head to the length of the table’s slab.

This bird has ways of guessing wind though she is not a free thing

and press, press, press, comes lush, dull pain, a blissful blank,

a bright nest in her brow. She muses upon the plunge of cormorants.

Needles, stitching themselves to fathoms of salt. Oceans

have no corners – is the sea is too big a space?

Reflections were never her friend. She spurs at the wrong-ways

repeating of herself. No matter how she swims, there will be no split

from this clinging twin – the drag of her aping curse.

Gravel-gullet, splinter-hymn, rasp of ugly verse. Compline

is nightmare time, a tuneless ask. She is no nightingale – her voice

of shatter and shriek chimes for every hour that she forces

her breast to thorns. One this weight will never hum for nectar,

no matter how she puts tongue to bloom. She envies the swallows,

prays for such frail connects. Quop-fleck, dash-fear, spook

from human sight. The day is a threat of lungs, a worry of sounds.

She harbours aspects of a wren, as pit, pit, pit, she weaves

a home of threads. Picky-snap, scrabble-snap, her hands

are clacking bills, plucking her purse of screwed receipts, pecking

at paper scat. This bird winds herself with spells as bind, bind, bind,

she is lured back to ground. Becomes concious of blood.

This bird was born a murmuration. From inside her mouth

comes a flight, a flurry for this is the way she cries. Catch them,

though they are not perceptible things and flit, flit, flit,

there are hollows in her chest. This bird is built on bruised

and brittle sticks. Look how she carries a craw of knives that cut

through all her songs. Though she will say I’m fine, I’m fine,

there is no cure for cracks. The tap drips its chorus through dawn.

This bird has a secret, caught behind her lips. Look how her tongue

toils like a trapped wing. It will spiel feathers and sing, sing, sing

a question of sky. Her kitchen is an aviary. She sees blue, its colour

served through cracks. Who made her mocking brain?

Sometimes it is an eyrie, scribbled with scraps and full of bones.

She is an owl’s breaking of dusk, the steeple of an egret.

Dot-dash, dot-dash, her toes cling to ledges like walking code.

She writes a riddle with each step. Home, Sweet Home, Sweet Home.