The Telling E-Book

Julia Webb

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

Seitenzahl: 48

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The Telling by Julia Webb is a distinctive and acutely-observed collection of poems that unravel the intricacies at the heart of human relationships – an insistent, quietly fierce tour de force from this Forward Prize commended poet. Moving and dark, we uncover the things that go unspoken between people despite their closeness. In turning her forensic focus on what makes us human, and in particular what it is that glues us together or causes us to come apart, Julia Webb's poetry examines the wreckage of complex lives to understand where the fault lines and fractures lie. What are the stories that construct our families and relationships, and who gets to tell them? Can we trust the stories we inherit, and what happens when we recover the right to tell things for ourselves? These compelling, taut poems crackle with the electricity of the untold – of flawed humans and hurt, of daring and being, of reclaiming and persisting.

Leseprobe

The Telling

Also by Julia Webb:

Bird Sisters (Nine Arches Press, 2016)

Threat (Nine Arches Press, 2019)

The Telling

Julia Webb

ISBN: 978-1-913437-36-7

e-ISBN: 978-1-913437-37-4

Copyright © Julia Webb, 2022.

Cover artwork © Natty Peterkin, 2022.

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 May 2022 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 by:

Imprint Digital

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

Contents

Crash Site

We weren’t as connected as we could have been

The Telling

Since she died bits of me are missing

Prayer for the Lack

Difficult Relationship

Clairvoyance

Eventually the honey wasn’t enough anymore

The future died inside me

Dear Ghost,

My father, bored as a parrot

what hides inside war

You assure your father there will be no homecoming

Daddish

My father says he has forgotten how to make a storm

Rules of the Liar Family

Girl was born

All that Water

Grandparents

Relativity

Grandma

To whom it may concern

Here is the house made of light that you longed for

You hit her harder than you meant to

Your sister is blaming you for the rain

Ten Excuses for Not Phoning

Comet and Moon

When I was made of concrete

Jewel Thief

A perfect square of blue

I don’t believe in death

That year there was a hurricane inside me

After the Wedding

And then I married Scotland

The Hunt

When he opened his head to the crows

If only someone had told me the rules

In the hospital they pricked my bright new boy with pins

Unlucky

Duplex

We had nothing but love for the bird he had become

New Love

You see love as a bonus

That day I was a picnic rug

Birding

Escape

Dear Ex,

An Insomniac Dreams of Sleep

Women as collateral damage

My glasses say

The heart is a stranger

Fuck Body

Selves   (non existent)

The Visitation

DIY

Giving Thanks

This

Remaking Mother

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the author and this book

“I have fashioned you in joy and sorrow,

through so many happenings, out of so many things.”

– C. P. Cavafy

“I wanted to touch them into words.

A perverse and solitary desire.”

– Michael Ondaatje

Crash Site

We remember only vaguely now the wreckage of our mother –

her damaged fuselage suspended precariously

between two broken pine trees;

how carefully one had to tread

so as not to bring the whole thing down,

and everywhere the stink of spilled aviation fuel –

at least in the beginning.

We never did find that black box

so it was always unclear exactly what had happened,

and each survivor told a different story.

But the wreckage was there for all to see –

seats and belongings scattered far and wide,

things broken open,

life jackets snagged on jagged branches.

Though our mother’s windows

had popped out with the pressure,

she sometimes talked affectionately about the plummet,

but swore she could remember nothing

of our other life, before take-off.

Our first memory was the screaming of metal

and the silence which came after.

We weren’t as connected as we could have been

some days the distance between us

became whole galaxies, oceans, even –

our voices were garbled

as if we were speaking underwater,

fishes swam from our mouths.

I did not speak shark and you did not speak whale

but we each had harpoons

and we weren’t afraid to use them.

Other times heavenly choirs hovered above us,

the distance rolled itself up like a rug.

Flowers fell from our mouths as we spoke,

and precious stones, fancy cakes,

delicate sandwiches with the crusts cut off.

This is real connection, you once said,

and your words smelt like that yellow rose

in our old garden, and tasted like blackberries.

The Telling

My mother was crying on the phone

oh my poor, poor boy, she said, my poor, poor boy

and there were all those

miles between us

and no car to drive there

and no money for the train

and my son in school oblivious

and nothing I could do but stay on the phone

with the miles between us

eaten up with her grief and my misery

and the guilt we don’t speak of

and my father’s words piling up behind me

shoving me over the precipice –

you tell her, you tell her,I can’t face it

and me just a kid for a minute

but sucking myself back to adult

picking up the phone –

standing there, a rabbit in the headlights

inviting her grief to mow me down.

Since she died bits of me are missing

I still look like a clock

but my hands are permanently stuck

on the wrong time mid afternoon

or maybe the middle of the night,

and that telephone inside me

rang so long and hard

they had to cut it out.

There are no dreams on the operating table

I can tell you, not even a slow falling darkness,

just a nothing – like a box open and shut.

Later they pointed lasers at my eye sockets

to stop my head from exploding

and coated my eyeballs with plastic

so I could see more clearly – though I can’t.

If this body was a wish, it would be a bad one;

one made in haste and not thought through.

Someone once told me that as long as