Other Wild E-Book

Emily Zobel Marshall

• Herausgeber: Peepal Tree Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 69

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

This outstanding second collection explores the lives of errant women and creatures who refuse to adhere to official paths, and the liminal, boundary-crossing wildscapes of the land and heart. These tender, lyrical, daring poems learn from the natural world, through immersion and observation, to find new ways to reflect and adapt, as they celebrate the ways our beings and bodies are inextricably entangled with the ever-changing landscapes and heartscapes of the dark woods, glittering rivers, windswept moors and towering mountains.

Leseprobe

EMILY ZOBEL MARSHALL

OTHER WILD

CONTENTS

Section I: Everywhere River

How to Get Back into Your Body

How you Rose

Poem for Rose

Lemons, Tomorrow

Otter

Come, Mami Wata

Goldfinch

You Come to Me in Birds

Through Road

Siesta

Us

Chernobyl Birthday

Only the Bracken Remembers

On My Side

Rock Cakes

When I Return

Sky Claim

The Dive

Son, Paused

There Are Days

Night Rain

Sky Light

Somewhere Between Us

Looking for Answers in the Fog

In Hope of Lightness

The Island

A Prayer for Light in Lisbon

Pause

Petrichor

Chesil Beach

Grading Benches

To Gather Moss

Waterfall Scramble

Toad

Small Boats

White Egrets

Song of the Archive

II: The Shape of Trees

Blind Night

Block

House Martins

Wooden Boulder

Dreaming Trees

The Shape of Trees

Frost Flowers

Ashes to Ashes

Synoptic Forecasts

Now, She Plants

All My Lovin’

Why I Hated You at the Bus Shelter

No Point Crying over Spilt Milk

I Live Here

Mami’s Visit

J’étais Belle

On Staying Close

Birthday Card

Disappearing Dad

Für Elise

Things We Might Have Done on Your Birthday

Smaller Things

The Autumn Wind Blows Through the Sycamores

Retreat

III: Other Wild

Left

The Ptarmigan

Tall Tale

Breeze

Elsewhere

Hide and Seek

Nurse Charlotte

Cartwheeling

Oluwale Rising

Witch

You Show Me Yours and I’ll Show You Mine

Lane Share

Dick Pic

To the Range Rover Asshole

Conduit

To Smell Like Sky

Mardi Gras Under the Freeway

I Need Milk Too

Martinique, I Hear

Blodeuwedd

What To Call Me?

Women are Only Free

You Tell Me a Desire Line

When I Emptied My Moon Cup on the Mountain

Let Me Map You, He Said

Acknowledgements

I: EVERYWHERE RIVER

HOW TO GET BACK INTO YOUR BODY

Sometimes, when you need to return to your body, a frozen river can help.

The burning cold can cauterise the wounds etched on your flimsy heart, call the body back.

Break thin ice and wade. The river-pull will tug flesh and bone, unknot ankles, grasp

the curve of your hips, pinch your nipples, clutch your ribcage so tight

you are lung-squeezed to take a breath so deep your wandering body returns.

Listen. You can hear your new sub-aquatic

blood-coursing rhythms. They sound like hope. Like rivers.

HOW YOU ROSE

For Rose

When you swim you send snakes of Spring sunlight slithering across dark waters from bank to bank.

Entranced by your circling stroke, I wonder at how you rose cleanly from the suck of treacherous currents over and over again.

While Dad and I knew all the timings, memorised the names of drugs, it was you who learnt to move your body forwards.

I see the tight muscles in your back, the surprise of slick long hair;

your healing was determined by your own stroke.

I slide into the river, tail you as you move through dappled rays, your strong bare feet kicking great kaleidoscopic arcs of spray, skywards.

POEM FOR ROSE

If I was tempted to write the same poem over and over again, it would be one which maps your body, the way your little toe bends inwards (a baby slug curled into a lettuce leaf) or details how every hair on your head surprises in its swinging straightness, how I am stilled watching the tiny flare of your sleeping nostrils or tracing the galaxy of summer freckles settled on your nose.

But when I hold the sweeping slope of your brown back in the crook of my arm and see distant clouds reflected in your eyes, I think, perhaps, you are my poem and I should rest my pen.

LEMONS, TOMORROW

Early December, I walked a muddied footpath along the River Wharfe to forget your diagnosis, and I remembered the lemon trees on that Greek island after the rain – citrine gems throwing fresh antiseptic scents into sapphire skies, mingling with the tang of goat dung, fruit winter-ripened, storing last summer’s heat, crystal droplets clinging to sunset rinds, their perfume on the breeze long after the clear disk of the Spring moon has pierced the ocean’s skin.

So I brought you lemons, grated and squeezed, added amber honey, a steaming bedside brew in an NHS mug. You wouldn’t drink much, but through nose and throat I hoped you’d travel to a small Ionian island, ripe lemons after the rain, a clean smell of hope, not hospitals.

OTTER

Arms encircle dark waters – suddenly she is there, fresh pelt glistening, mouth all teeth and bite.

She swims dog-like, head above water, fish-like below; my body next to hers clumsy in brown flesh.

She leaves, bank slithering unhurried, body looping like a shining alphabet S.

Nothing left behind, only cotton clouds drifting across a mirroring river, its ripples steadying.

COME, MAMI WATA

Come, Mami Wata, charmer of serpents, calmer with water-cool hands, siren signaller of sailor-death, Middle Passage guardian, womb-space warden, healer of diasporic agony, I see you man-strung, tired, dragged to the surface of boiling seas.

Come, you are safe in the slipstream of this girl-river-swimmer, daughter of land, at home in Yorkshire waters.

Come, many-faced African womanfish, push upriver from grey Northern seas; with migrating salmon energy, you’ll find me.

I’ll adorn your riverbank bower with marsh marigolds, waxy silver lilies. My son will fish you minnow suppers. I’ll show you where otters play; you can stroke their shining, muscled pelts.

Crowned with cow-parsley, come rest in my pool, lying on your back, river currents tickling your knotted spine like a lover, watching a mango-ripe sun pour golden over the Wharfe.

GOLDFINCH

In your final days, when you’re in the mood for chat, you tell me that you’re so content you could embrace yourself;

you’ve seen the world and watched your grandkids grow, your kids will be okay without you, that you know.

We’ve wheeled your hospice bed outside to catch the sun; the fountain sparkles in its rays; in the oak a goldfinch chirps.

Nurse brings you a lolly; I prop your head and help you slurp and think that even if it’s just the morphine kicking in,

there’s little more to wish for, in our final days of travelling, than to feel contentment and to want to hug ourselves, as we listen to a goldfinch sing.

YOU COME TO ME IN BIRDS

When I see no line of flight between the clouds, and all my dreams are long deferred, you come to me in birds.

When my day is slate-slab grey and shadows prey, when all is dark and I am bruised with aching for your touch, you send a wren.

It lands so close it must be there to speak, trembling beneath the broadening leaves of beech, and so I rise to greet this song from your beyond.

Perhaps a mirage of the mourning heart, but with every bird you bring I hear the messages they sing.

I’m listening.

THROUGH-ROAD

This dream was about a through-road, not a shortcut, insisted my dream-narrator, but a through-road.

In the moment when my body was hollowed from aching for your touch, and my ears strained to catch the song of your voice, I took a through-road from anywhere, from elsewhere, travelling sure as a summer swift back to you.

SIESTA

The forest relents and wilts, baking earth sleeps, only the cicadas chirp into syrupy air as heat-drugged fat black ants zig-zag their way up the whitewashed bedroom wall

In the shuttered house time for the infernal siesta, my family spread-eagled on tangled beds, limbs twisted in damp sheets willing the whirring fans to cool their fevered hours.

I long for escape

from Mami’s thick-walled cloisters, railing against the afternoon nap and enforced sleep, dreaming of sweet release

in the cool currents of the Gardon river, of the soft-mouthed feel

of minnows nibbling ankles, of sinking down to the riverbed, of lying looking up through the blurring flow to the relentless sun

blazing in the blue, knowing it can’t find me and burn my cool, suspended limbs

I float like this in visions

until evening and the promise of cooler air begins to whisper across the Cevennol sky.

US

When it’s morning, we don’t know where our limbs begin and end – skin is the only thing between you and me