Father Myself E-Book

James McDermott

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

Seitenzahl: 26

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

In 2022, James McDermott lost his sixty-year-old father to COVID after three weeks in intensive care. In* Father Myself*, his second collection from Nine Arches Press, McDermott explores his father's complex illness and death; grief; growth and how as a queer boy then a bereaved son, he had to learn to father himself. In clear-sighted and often hard-hitting poems, McDermott takes the reader onto the frontline of the pandemic – documenting the experience and trauma of a COVID-bereaved family with an unflinching eye. Both powerful and compassionate, these extraordinary poems have the capacity to go beyond simply a record of events, reaching sensitively for the human details that matter – the beat of a heart and movement of breath, the touch of a hand, the words we use for goodbye.

Leseprobe

Father Myself

Father Myself

James McDermott

ISBN: 978-1-916760-10-3

eISBN: 978-1-916760-11-0

Copyright © James McDermott

Cover artwork © JulPo, iStock / Getty Images

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.

James McDermott 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 February 2025 by:

Nine Arches Press

Studio 221, Zellig

Gibb Street, Deritend

Birmingham

B9 4AA

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Printed in the United Kingdom on recycled paper by: Imprint Digital

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

dedicated to the memory of my father Shaun McDermott

who died aged sixty from COVID-19

Contents

Admission

Dog and Bone

Oh Father

Fight

Ventilator

Poirot

Patient Board

13.58, January 28th

Family Room

COVID-19 Grief Symptoms and What To Do

Fit as a Fiddle

Mispronounced

Chapel of Rest

Little Monuments

Solid Liquid Gas

Portrait of my Father Without a Face

Black Wheelbarrow

Photographic Memory

Waiting on the Hearse

Carbon Copy

‘He’s in a Better Place’

Dadmin

Fridge

Robbed

Super Spreader

To Have the Virus that Killed my Father

Alive

Shauny Bubble

So Long

Father Myself

Virus

DIY

Play Small

Words Inside Father

Louder Than Words

Dead Time

Clearing Your Chest

Mug

Grief Work

Lucky

Taxidermied Sloth

Measuring the Year Since You Went

James

Last Words

Acknowledgements

Thanks

About the author and this book

Admission

the night of January 7th   you leave

your bedroom door open as if

to let something in or out   you

try to blaspheme and choke your way to sleep

but rasping breath like fireplace bellows

continuous thunder cough   keeps us all

awake   at three   Mum flies from spare double

to call the meat wagon   after five days

begging   warning you   this isn’t man flu

tonight   you don’t object   curled up foetal

white hot   hacking up yellow   green   black phlegm

lips blue   septic skin mottled like corned beef

shaking   I wait outside your room as two

medics affix oxygen mask to your face

stats should be one hundred   they’re sixty-six

but you’re sixty   I’m only twenty-eight

hypoxia asks for an ice lolly

Mum begs me fetch Twister from the deep freeze

cold as a morgue   you suck it like a thumb

when you can eat no more   you dribble done

your feet are helped into Nandad slippers

draped in black dressing gown   I watch all this

reflected in glass of a framed photo

our family hanging on the landing

you’re shuffled past me   splutter see you Jim

I cry take care of yourself   you descend

the stairs to a stretcher   they belt you in

to a twenty-one-day roller coaster

to Norfolk and Norwich   who bell at six

he’s COVID positive   fifty fifty

Dog and Bone

I thumb a text concerning you going

to ICU   copy   paste it   send it

to friends   is it too sore   laborious

to scratch it out seventy times   or just