Didicoy E-Book

Karen Downs-Barton

• Herausgeber: The Poetry Business
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 21

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Didicoy offers a window into the colourful, precarious world of a multiracial Romany family, and focuses on characters at the often-untold margins of society. Blending lyricism with formal experimentation, these poems explore what it is to belong. Clear-eyed and outspoken, Didicoy has something of the impact of a contemporary Cathy Come Home. The collection is wonderfully peopled, with an unforgettable portrait of a mother and a powerful and important depiction of life in a children's home. Writing like this, which combines real expressive skill with material which must be expressed, really reminds us what poetry is for. – Jonathan Edwards, winner of the Costa Poetry Award

Leseprobe

Published 2023 by

Smith|Doorstop Books

The Poetry Business

Campo House,

54 Campo Lane,

Sheffield S1 2EG

Copyright © Karen Downs-Barton

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-1-914914-37-9

ePub ISBN 978-1-914914-38-6

Typeset by Utter

Printed by People for Print

Smith|Doorstop Books are a member of Inpress:

www.inpressbooks.co.uk

Distributed by NBN International, 1 Deltic Avenue,

Rooksley, Milton Keynes MK13 8LD

The Poetry Business gratefully acknowledges the support of Arts Council England.

Contents

Hamime: My Mixed Language is My Mixed Identity

Framed By Wood Grain

A Confluence of Reds and Silks

A Love of Flesh

My Mother’s Professional Rituals

Of the Men who Came as Shadows in the Night

Arriving at the Home for Crying Children

Mageripen: The Rules of Hygiene

Dear Faye,

Triggers

The House of Locked Windows

Talking With a Mouth Full of Stars

Dear Faye,

Places I’ve Nashed From

Dear Faye,

Mi Loki Gili : My Song of Life

Acknowledgements

Hamime: My Mixed Language is My Mixed Identity

A Coupling with Henry Mayhewafter Karen MacCarthy Woolf

The cant or slang of the patterer is not the cant of the costermonger, but

my Romani tongue, a wayside patrin of twigs and leaves, rustles

a system of its own. As in the case of the costers, it is interlarded

with secrets on bitti-barvals from distant shores. Scattered

with general remarks,

traces of the Indic spark its musika-hamima

while ordinary language is so smothered,

within the dominant vernacular, its patois, mother-tongue,

so subdued, that unless when professionally engaged

weaving tales of a Romani family

and talking of their wares,

their transient lives where only Romani blood ties

they might almost pass for foreigners.

because travellers are foreigners everywhere.

Patrin (pateran): Romani wayside signs made from leaves and twigs, also leaf, or pages of a book depending on context.  Hamime: fused, blended, adulterated, as in hamimé-ratêsko, mixed blood. Bitti barvals: breezes. Gry: horse.

Framed By Wood Grain

i

After the shock of discovery, the police

arrive, an ambulance must come and go, leaving

space where his body had been. Neighbours you never

liked gather outside watching the soap opera, say

Well, what do you expect with their sort in the road?

You become a rag doll; blank face stitched with button

eyes, fixed on the empty sag of his chair, the gap

at the table where his head had been. You question

But did I see him breathing? In stillness you hear

a train rush in your ears, feel your palms as prickles.

A bottle throws rainbows at the wall. Everything