Let Out the Djinn E-Book

Jane Aldous

• Herausgeber: Arachne Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 26

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

There is a double meaning in the title to this debut collection from Jane Aldous – Jinn was her family nickname, and writing poetry feels like letting out her wild, mischievous spirit. For Jane, poetry is all about listening, and she invites us to listen to the imagined worlds of hunter-gatherers, star-gazers, mythical beings, wild creatures, the living and the dead, and the real world of a gay woman growing up in the 70s.

Leseprobe

Jane Aldous is an Edinburgh-based poet. Some of Jane’s poems have been published in literary magazines such as Northwords Now and Southlight. She’s been commended in poetry competitions and she won the Wigtown Prize in 2012. Her poems have also been anthologised.

Arachne Press has previously published her poems in the following anthologies

Dusk 2018

An Outbreak of Peace 2018

Noon 2019

Contents

Telegram from Doris Court Nursing Home

Let Out the Djinn

Portland Road

How it Was

Finding Bluebells

Dave off in Five

In the New Leaf Co-op

Crow’s Eye

Watching the Celts on Leith Walk

With Meme on Mellon Udrigle Beach

Death Waiting

Malmesbury

Home Service

Whisper

Lochinver Harbour

Whale Wall

Eel Ghazal

A Highland Ghazal

Black Wing Rock

A Dead Lamb in Polbain

Doggerland

Earth’s Witnesses

The Deskford Carnyx

Sennacharib’s Sculptor and the Winged Bulls

Bridge

La Mer de Glace

Twenty-one Antler Head-dresses, Star Carr

The Death of Echo

Shoe Doll in the City Arts Centre, Edinburgh

Washerwomen on Calton Hill

What’cha

Frosty Leo

Andromeda on All Hallows’ Eve

Goodbye Voyager 1

For Bev

Telegram from Doris Court Nursing Home

Greetings!

Here she is your chick, your slick of blood, skin, bone.

Here they are, your ma and pa, they’re terrified,

she’s sore, he thinks he’s going to drop you.

Congratulations.

Love, Min and Avis.

Stop.

Let out the Djinn

At four she had a snapshot thought,

she was a spinning top

whirling in the vastness of a wide, dark world.

Familiars started visiting, invisible friends,

characters stepping out of books, voices within,

leading her out into swirling haar.

She kissed a girl next door, listened to tales

in the woods by the shore, sat in her bedroom

writing poems and stories.

Sometimes she woke in the night, slippery creatures

on her chest, sometimes she danced with dervish

disco dancers on claggy floors.

But all her daemons slunk away into cobweb

corners, no-one listened anymore. Then

after her mother died, a barn owl flew

and, flinging open all the doors and windows,

out they came, laughing, tumbling about, grinning

like little skulls of garlic bulbs, bumblebees in her brain,

words skittering in the birch tree breeze, the Djinn,

all her familiars, friends, she’d let them out again,

summoned them, returned to herself.

Portland Road

The cat was lost for a week after we moved

to live next door to the Bastow brothers

and their mother on Portland Road.

They kept a tidy workshop, cold chisels clean

as missiles, nails in boxes, saws and drills hooked

on beams. Their vests and long-johns hung in the yard.

One brother never left Babbacombe, the other had

been as far as Torquay. Their mother gave us a wooden-

handled Victorian umbrella to shield us from the sun.

But the stack of girls’ magazines, neatly tied with string

and left by our back door, was the thing that clung

awkwardly between us. They were deemed unsuitable

so ended up as underlay for the Wilton carpet.

How it was

Parcelled up in waistcoat and gun belt,

I killed every adult at point blank range.

I wandered out in sea-fog and kissed

a girl in a concrete shelter.