Grey Time E-Book

Julia Webb

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

Seitenzahl: 43

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

To live is to lose, to grieve is to be human. Part elegy, part lament, part love song; Julia Webb's fourth collection Grey Time is a powerful examination of what it is to love and lose, of our relationship with both grief and the dead. Exploring the many facets and nuances of loss, Webb explores what happens before and after the sudden death of a loved one and how our relationship with them changes over time as new secrets are revealed and old hurts heal. This book is not defined by death, however, as these refreshing, evocative poems study and witness the myriad losses of a lifetime. Julia Webb turns her forensic eye on the complexity of unresolved relationships; on what is said or not said, how people behave under duress, how violence can creep into our lives, as well as exploring her own recently discovered neurodivergence. Grey Time is a revelatory collection that takes bold leaps, binding the strange and surreal to the everyday – to make possible a place where a one mother turns owl, and another mother will teach her son how to fly.

Leseprobe

Grey Time

Grey Time

Julia Webb

ISBN: 978-1-916760-20-2

eISBN: 978-1-916760-21-9

Copyright © Julia Webb, 2025.

Cover artwork: © Natty Peterkin, 2025.

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.

Julia Webb 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 July 2025 by:

Nine Arches Press

Studio 221, Zellig

Gibb Street, Deritend

Birmingham

B9 4AU

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.

i.m Dawn Carol (1945-2010) Neil Webb (1972-2009)

Dominic Campbell (1963-1987) Julian (1972-1976)

Contents

I have spent years falling out of each window

The Hare

A Geography of The Dead

Grey Time

The first time

I remember nothing of the journey

The hotel bedroom looks out over a carpark

The restaurant we choose is an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet

Back on the ward the white is yellowy, piss-stained

I think we might have taken the train home and come back again

The phone receiver crackles with static

The next time I see you you’re at home

This hospital is older, greyer

*

For I will consider my mother

She Died

Wolf on My Back

Funeral Party

It was mother’s ghost, hearing rain, who came to speak of sorrow

owl birth

Lecture

She called her Melanie

A small girl cries on a blue and black tiled kitchen floor

Julian

*

The same mother

everything

My father was in love with his office

St John’s Way

Trying to Make Sense of Things

And maybe I became orange

Even if you’re not

A woman’s hair is trailing through the mud

*

Commune

The Messengers

The Magic Ritual

Mourned

If ever there’s a time for crying

His absence is like the sky, spread over everything

Mourning is a young horse

Essay on Craft

This is about violence

I opened the door and let violence in

If only you didn’t have to shove your living in my face,

You are trying to remember how you got into this mess

*

New

to him who came from my body

son as the city he was born in

always more bird than woman

*

I find my dead lover by the side of the motorway

When you tell me how you feel

You rearrange your face

Hot House

After my brother died, I let my garden get overgrown

This coffee-cup stain on this scrap of paper could be his

I wish something violet would happen

If

without

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the author and this book

“I’ll speak a bit of you to anyone who’ll listen.”

— Joanna Guthrie

“Ever since she died

she can’t stop dying. She makes me

her elegy.”

— Norman McCaig

“Believing that holes can be filled with language is

dangerous—only space itself occupies empty spaces.”

— Kristin Prevallet

I have spent years falling out of each window

the tall building of grief gave me.

Every day I climb to the top of the tower

and let myself fall again.

Even though I have tried to stop,

feeling the guilt of the living

the groove it runs in is too well worn.

Each night as I climb

the stairs of my grief,

I pause for breath at the midway point.

Each night I hope to meet the ghost

of a loved one coming back the other way.

But there’s only me and my breath.

I wonder what my dead would tell me

if I gave them voice—

perhaps, burn the building down?

The Hare

He brings something with him –

a chill that creeps inside the bones

and through the blood.

Winter with all its ice and snow is coming –

I feel it in the air,

hear it in the wind that shivers through the trees.

The hare feels it too.

This hare, that might be a dream or might be real

and is as big as the one I thought was my mother

in the woodland burial ground last summer,

that day when the weather was warm as a kiss

and the foliage densely lush and green,

and the map I had printed out so vague

that I couldn’t find her grave.

But there they were – the hare and the deer –

crossing our path by the badger sett

and just as sudden gone again.

The hare – the biggest I have ever seen;

the same colour as that suit, hung in the gallery,

no buttons or markings – just brown felt.

I wore it in my dreams for weeks after,

my skin naked and itchy beneath its pelt.

A penance perhaps –

for not trying hard enough to find her.

Like that day in the church

when I opened my mouth to speak

and no words came.

A Geography of The Dead

(i)

underground

under root

under badger, fox, hare

under a canopy of green