Frieze E-Book

Olga Dermott-Bond

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

Seitenzahl: 42

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Frieze by Olga Dermott-Bond is an astonishing and spellbinding debut poetry collection. Goddesses, saints, dead girls, creatures, mothers, and muses all gather in this collection to confide their secret histories and desires. Voices are recovered from canvas, from behind museum glass, from the pages of literature and the tales of Irish folklore, to explore what can be recaptured and what remains still out of reach. 'In these tender poems, Olga Dermott-Bond conjures a gallery in which we enter every painting, a museum where we slip inside glass cases and come out changed.' - Miriam Nash From a bold voice in women's poetry. Frieze is art obsessed and darkly magical, with a touch of gothic. Akin to poets like Victoria Kennefick, Helen Ivory and Pascale Petit.

Leseprobe

Frieze

Frieze

Olga Dermott-Bond

ISBN: 978-1-913437-80-0

eISBN: 978-1-913437-81-7

Copyright © Olga Dermott-Bond, 2023.

Cover artwork: ‘Bird Blue’, February 2020 © Harriet Horton.

www.harriethorton.com

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.

Olga Dermott-Bond 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 October 2023 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 on recycled paper by Imprint Digital.

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

For Oliver and Clemency

Contents

Silent Conversation

God was so small and inside me then

We don’t need infinity

Losing Galileo

Mouse

Ophelia’s head is finished

The rest is silence

M25/ turning

Sanctuary

Flower Press

Outrunning the dark

Axe

Some things are buried too deep to come out quietly

Awaiting Trial

Yellow

You were to me

Milk bottle

Chardin’s woman

My Heart

Morning prayer

Spin the bottle

Valentine’s weekend in Paris Rushall

Cutting back the roses

Tapetum Lucidum

Five sleeps till Christmas!

Strange creatures

Somewhere over the rainbow

kintsugi

Hare

Dead Bird

Possession

Personal Touch no. 429

Bury her softly

Taming the wolf

Sonnet of swimming parts

Yellow Penguin

Excision and Eidolon

Aftersun

Silk

Wardrobe

Paper boats

Picking Raspberries

Kate Fox writes to Mr Splitfoot, New York, 1892

Moderate Trousseau

On Borders

Miscarriage

I remember that I, too, have seen a bat crawl by daylight

All week I have been thinking about the painting The Reverend Robert Walker skating on Duddingston Loch

From a distance a starling looks black

No peace yet for my animal heart

Notes

Acknowledgements and Thanks

About the author and this book

‘She stood at his

burnt windows

until she saw herself

answered in their dark,

the way glass gets

blacked at night

in a lighted room.’

Silent conversation

The first time we texted, I was standing

next to a dead girl. I had been staring

at her skeleton, seeing how copper had seeped

through soil to paint a belated metamorphosis,

as if peacock feathers and forget-me-nots

had been steeped inside her pelvis, hips.

Time plays interesting tricks; I didn’t know

we would exhume bodies of light together,

that you were the one who was going to

uncover my bones, make them a tiny bit

beautiful, over and over, let me lay out

my regrets, unearth blue sky under my feet.

I studied the cathedral ruin of her ribs,

a leaking roof for a heart long-since

crawled through and vanished.

Our silent conversation thrummed

under my fingers, still years away

from your voice, our first touch.

God was so small and inside me then

After ‘Annunciation 2: After Fra Angelico from the brass tacks’ by David Hockney

God was so small and inside me then, weeks

before I would feel the first flutter, months

before his fist or elbow would gargoyle itself

under my ribs. We’d better sit down, the angel said –

quite serious – as if he had forgotten about his wings

spreading behind him like sugared light. We leaned

into each other, me perching on a kitchen stool, edges

of the house cut clean away. In the painting we look

like we’re on a merry-go-round, the water full

of pink flowers, but I do remember a blue wall stretching

away so quickly, bright shock, full of slow motion

and split seconds and empty speech bubbles. Gabriel bent

almost in apology – he knew he’d had the easy job.

There I was, fretting already about what to tell Joseph

and my dad, picturing myself trying to explain that things

don’t always happen in the right order. We definitely

didn’t have haloes then, just bright space around our heads.

We don’t need infinity

Zvezda space suit model number KV-2 No 167 used by Helen Sharman

Earth-slight and beautiful, she climbed

inside me, past every seam that was made

for her; how she gazed through

my eyes, how we made continents disappear

by moving her thumb a little to the right.

For seven nights her breath fluttered

against my glass cheek, a mechanical

butterfly. Now, I wait for her bed

to tangle itself into a love knot, up and up and up

out the window, shedding clothes

as I steal an old rocket to make it sing

so she will meet me, naked, our milk-and-stars

folklore shaped around us, the curve

of her spine against me. I will gather

her to me like a wedding dress, bury

my face in a crush of silk, let pins

and needles of days and years fall

to the floor that we will never need to walk

over, turning bright cartwheels in our orbit.

Losing Galileo

I like to imagine Galileo,

his heart swinging like

a chandelier, watching