People E-Book

Ruth Irwin

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

Seitenzahl: 40

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

The debut poetry collection from a talented, fresh-voiced poet, People: Unfinished Poems is a lyrical, thought-provoking and moving selection that observes and enjoys the beauty and strangeness of people, exploring their connections to themselves, each other and the places in which they live. With particular attention paid to family, friendship, love, belonging and acceptance, the collection is a real celebration of human individuality and connection. Following a late diagnosis of ADHD, one strand of Ruth's poetry explores and foregrounds the condition; the reader is invited into a mind that is endlessly thinking and never truly at rest. For Ruth, one result of this is intricate patterns and fragments of poetry sprawled across endless notebooks. This collection includes several poems presented in the poet's own handwriting, decorated in much the same way as her notebooks, giving the reader an intimate insight into some of the artistic and creative aspects of neurodiversity.

Leseprobe

people:Unfinished Poems

ruth irwin

renard press

Renard Press Ltd

124 City Road

London EC1V 2NX

United Kingdom

[email protected]

020 8050 2928

www.renardpress.com

‘Central Line Sonnet’ first published as ‘London Sonnet’ in Earth-Quiet: Poems from Tower Poetry 2012 by Tower Poetry, Oxford in 2012‘Dig’, ‘Capital Story’ (originally titled ‘July’) and ‘On Those Cold December Evenings’ first published in Goldfish 2015 by Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2015‘The Greenfinch in the Garden’ first published inRed on Bone by Poems Please Me in 2015

People: Unfinished Poems first published by Renard Press Ltd in 2023

Text and illustrations © Ruth Irwin, 2023

Ruth Irwin asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Renard Press is proud to be a climate-positive publisher, removing more carbon from the air than we emit and planting a small forest. For more information see renardpress.com/eco.

All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, used to train artificial intelligence systems or models, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the publisher.

EU Authorised Representative: Easy Access System Europe – Mustamäe tee 50, 10621 Tallinn, Estonia, [email protected].

Contents

Why Do I Never

Friendship for a Season

Sometimes I Wonder

The Greenfinch in the Garden

Poem for an Unheard Child

Cley Beach

The Dream

In Crovie 

Holkham Beach

What Remains

Dig

Lady Macbeth

Bombay Bike Ride

Urban Hunting 

On Disobedience

Sonnet for Johnny

On Those Cold December Evenings

Evening Song

A Song for the Solstice

Home for Christmas

The Scan

In the Spiky Days of Spring

Doggerel Days

Internet Litany

Goggle Box

Ready or Not

After Winter

For Xanthi

Clementine

Composer

In the Early Morning

What’s a Trap?

Restoration Works

You Really Should End this Thing

A Capital Story

Central Line Sonnet

After Death of a Salesman

Too Long in London

Choir Away Weekend

Decisions

Late Diagnosis

It’s Quiet in Here

Acceptance

Pandemic Diary

Still Lockdown

Returning Song

Settled

Finally This Feels Right

Hopefully Not an Elegy

Acknowledgements

people:

unfinished poems

chapter 1

Why Do I Never

Why am I never doing

what I’m supposed 

to be doing?

I could be writing a poem –

should be writing a poem.

This better not become a poem

because then I’d be doing

what I’m supposed to be doing

and I’d stop.

Friendship for a Season

We lay all night on the cold grass

under sharp stars

and talked, 

and as we talked

discovered how different 

we really were.

This was the closest we had ever been

and the start 

of our friendship’s unravelling.

Funny, really, how we both went

from that pin-bright moment

into such separate lives.

Sometimes I’m sad

I could not love you. 

But both of us have 

that night –

that wide open talk,

those stars.

Sometimes I Wonder

if the people who educated me so well

stole a capacity for believing,

left me grieving the parts I was 

told I had to lose.

I was too weird, too scatty, too confused

by the need to draw an A4-sized grid

and fit the figures neatly into it.

I’d rather let a daydream

comfortably defeat me than

grapple with a straight-line graph.

I learned, in the end, 

as all good girls must do.

But I still wonder, sometimes, 

how many poems

were lost to the strictures of

assessment objectives and analytical paragraphs,

how many drawings were defeated

by the need to solve a simultaneous equation – 

an intellectual operation I managed simultaneously to 

achieve and forget, the knack of it slipping 

promptly from my head the moment I left the last exam.

I’m grateful to those people – please don’t get me wrong – 

many of them cared, and most of them tried to –

but I wonder if there’s maybe irrecoverable treasure 

that their didactic scales weighed as trash

to cast away.

I wonder if I do the same thing 

to the minds I measure every day.

The Greenfinch in the Garden

I was five the day I first discovered death.

A cat-got songbird on the lawn, frail, prone,

some final beauty to a mangled chest

that had been crushed mid-flight, a life undone;

I found a counting in my numbered breaths.

I carried the body about with me,

smoothing short feathers on the perfect head,

alive with a new-born empathy –

and then Dad saw us. Wash your hands, he said.

Instead I made a grave by the chestnut tree.

Once burial was done, I fled to my room,

sat cross-legged by the boarded fireplace

and one by one imagined every future tomb,

each person I loved in a cold, tight space,

their eyes limed over into sightless stones.

I stayed, there stuck in this enormity,

until, again, Dad came along, saw tears