Egg/Shell E-Book

Victoria Kennefick

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 65

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The Poetry Book Society Spring Choice 2024 A Telegraph Book of the Year 2024 Winner of the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2025 'It is hard to hurt and then explain the hurt away / so as not to hurt anyone. But have you seen / my life?' ('Child of Lir') The lives depicted by Victoria Kennefick alter, shatter and recombine in stunning monologues, innovative hybrid forms and piercing lyrics: her second book Egg/Shell is a diptych, a double album, which explores early motherhood and miscarriage, and the impact of a spouse's gender transition and the dissolution of a marriage. Acclaimed as one of the boldest poetic voices to emerge in recent years, Kennefick, in the follow-up to her best-selling Eat or We Both Starve, breaks new ground with generosity, emotional complexity, formal ingenuity and wit.

Leseprobe

EGG/SHELL

Victoria Kennefick grew up in Cork and lives in Kerry. Her debut collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet Press, 2021), won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the Butler Literary Prize. She was the UCD/Arts Council of Ireland Writer in Residence 2023 and Poet-in-Residence at the Yeats Society Sligo 2022-2024. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, New England Review, PN Review, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere.

Every effort has been made by the publisher to reproduce the formatting of the original print edition in electronic format. However, poem formatting may change according to reading device and font size.

First published in Great Britain in 2024 byCarcanet Press Ltd,Alliance House,30 Cross Street,Manchester M2 7AQ.

This new eBook edition first published in 2024.

Text copyright © Victoria Kennefick, 2024. The right of Victoria Kennefick to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act of 1988; all rights reserved.

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Ebook ISBN: 978 1 80017 384 2

The publisher acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England.

CONTENTS

Ram

EGG/

Chicken

Nightbaby

Lullaby!

On Being Two in the Anthropocene

Making Monsters

Teaching My Daughter How To Break an Egg

The Wild Swans at The Wetlands Centre

No. One: Ivy

Ode to Self-Loathing

Are You Going to Have Another Baby?

And Another Thing

I Do an Egg Cleanse Because I Must

No. Two: Fern

Mousie

No. Three: Willow

O Brigid, O Exalted One, Listen to My Plea as I Celebrate You

Cup

Potion

Incomplete Recipe for Custard

Bad Egg

No. Four: Sage

Wild Swans Again

Dead-In-Shell

Failed Translation of A Pigeon’s Coo

A Child’s First Experience of Planting Seeds

Le Cygne, My Spirit Animal

Halloween

Paper Thin

To All The Babies I (N)ever Had

Trying To Explain My Attention Span for The First Time

Unasked for Advice Is Criticism

A Séance to Contact My Dead Babies

A Brief History of Easter Eggs

Ultrasound on Valentine’s Day

Metamorphoses Book XV Cheat Sheet

Special Topics In Commemoration Studies: The Kerry Archives

I Suppose It’s Pointless to Think of You at All

/SHELL

Watching Your Egg Crack

Björk on Björk’s Swan Dress

The Husband Suit

On Wondering Whether to Expunge The Word Husband From My Previous Poems

Vault of Obsolete Pronouns And Defunct Descriptors

Crosswalk

Silver Swan Automaton

Spilt Milk

Allow Me to Explain Through The Medium of Metaphor Just How Badly It Hurts

‘Humilated (Swan)’ 2013 by Tracy Emin

Hedgehog Practises Being A Woman

Super King

Ark of The Convenient

The Ego is Crushed Like a Snail Shell Under a Stiletto and is Begrudgingly Divested of Its Own Smugness

Obligatory Instagram Found Poem

Lessons in Neuroplasticity When Changing Your Name to Your Name

To The Swan That has Fallen in Love with a Pedalboat in Germany

Art Gallery Easter Eggs

Listening Back to Phone Recordings I Made in the Car While Trying to Drive Away From My Life

Poem in Which I Wish I Wore Emily Dickinson’s Dress Instead

Victoria Re-Enacts The Stations of The Cross. (Don’t We All?)

Modern Crucifixion

Census Night Poem

Orientation: A Tragedy

Pelvis

Mad Honey

Cygnus, The Swan in The Stars

Tempera

Child of Lir

Swan Song

Acknowledgements

For V

‘I fell in love with a swan.My eyes were filled with feathers.’

– from ‘Lord of the Reedy River’ (Donovan, arr. Kate Bush)

‘…who would believe that they could come from the inside of an egg, if he did not know that it happened?’

– Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. by Mary M. Innes (1955)

EGG/SHELL

RAM

It’s on the kitchen table,

the ram’s skull.

He came in cradling it in his arms, Don’t worry,

it’s been dead for ages, he whispered, then touched my cheek,

a circuit forming between him, me, and the Ram

that flooded my body with crackling winter fire.

He plonked the skull down

before vanishing,

as he does, into his head and left this head,

still on the wood, just bone and horns.

And oh, what horns! I imagine his admirers’ eyes –

dark slits expanding to take them all in.

The curve of them,

looping, intentional things –

ridged, strong – I can’t look for long, can’t reach out

to touch them though it’s all I want to do.

To be honest, I am scared – of the narrow brittle skull

between two magnificent coronets –

a sliver of bone, and in its empty

sockets, a black blankness.

It is the devil, no doubt, here on our kitchen table

like a vase. It vibrates, I can almost hear its ancient bleats.

Every time I make tea, load the dishwasher, stack plates,

it is there –

weird

exhibit –

I’ll take it to show her, he says when he returns,

meaning our two-year-old who has been asking about bones,

can smell death in the house. She runs in,

her teething cheeks hot and red,

Mama, the baa baa doesn’t need

its head anymore.

The three of us and the Ram –

its presence a whisper from the future,

stubborn, yes, and unapologetic. It’s on the table even now.

Tomorrow it will disappear to his laboratory

but tonight, I can’t stop thinking about

those hollow orbs –

the thin fragments of skull clinging

together to give shape to an idea –

Ram, silhouetted against all the objects, against

all the light. Ram, who am I supposed to be in all this –

the floral blinds, the recipe books, the porcelain floor tiles?

Oh Ram, let us bash our heads off them and weep.

EGG/

CHICKEN

At night I dream of chickens.

In this first year of marriage, I am deranged.

In the dreams, I try to teach the poultry to touch type

while they insist on giving birth at my feet.

They’re impossible so I swallow

their eggs whole. They hatch inside

until I ovum my mouth, downy full-stops pop out –

a magic trick I do at the end of sentences.

Should I chop off their heads with an axe? Maybe.

Arrange the corpses to look like they’re flying? Perhaps.

Or I carry their skulls in my pockets like clanking marbles, stuff

yellow fluff up my nose, breathe feathers.

Oh, but they enact their revenge before the alarm goes off,

peck me into a board like a key until I spell something out.

Or shrink me until I am no bigger than a seed. Or I dream

that I survive for weeks after my head’s cut off.

I scream, CHICKEN!

I want to count every last one of the paltry lot.

Tell me about it, my husband says, plucking feathers

from my hair like air quotes, or sleep.

I want to tell him, I do. But I’m all out of luck

so I cluck, and cluck, and cluck –

Gallus gallus domesticus.

NIGHTBABY

I’ve never thought about the moon so much,

considered it sister-like, watching us learn