Poetry collection prize
A selection from The Limitations of Artificial Intelligence,
winner of The New Writer poetry collection prize
A selection from The Limitations of Artificial Intelligence,
winner of The New Writer poetry collection prize
Red Room, White House, Kennedy restoration
Jacqueline Kennedy's Guided Tour of the White House
The glasses are quite the prettiest,
aren’t they? From West Virginia.
When dinner guests take their seats
the candelabra catch the darks
of Lincoln’s frock coat in the crystal
and throw the baroque golds
of James Monroe’s centrepiece
against the ceiling’s perfect white.
It can crawl with extraordinary shapes:
one imagines a giant kaleidoscope
or being trapped in a Picasso.
Sometimes, here in the Red Room,
I sit at this little Lannuier table
and write my notes. You know,
I can almost hear the matron
at Miss Porter’s: ‘Posture, young lady’.
These chairs we re-upholstered
in Morris velvet at a Massachusetts studio:
Victorian green and Empire yellow.
My favourite piece, though, is by the door,
a Baltimore lady’s desk
of sandalwood and verre églomisé.
The legs need a special Mexican wax.
I’m told it takes a thousand bees
to make an ounce. It’s true,
you can fall in love with the history
as though you’ll never leave.
The Roosevelt china I adore.
If a housemaid breaks a cup
it’s as though something of myself
has cracked. I’m impossible for hours.
There, at the end of the East Room,
we built the sweetest stage for Casals
to play for the laureates. Someone said
he could make the air grieve. Just here,
in spring, from these upper windows,
you can see the blossom, like a cake,
on Andrew Jackson’s magnolia trees.
I confess, after an early morning storm
I can’t bear to look: so many petals,
all torn, clinging to the panes.
Last, and most cherished, of course,
the Lincoln bed. One thinks of him
asleep between the brushed sheets,
those bony fingers on the coverlet,
his half-smile and hollow cheeks.
Third prize Poetry London competition 2006
Published in:
Waiting to Tango (Templar)
Poetry London
The New Writer
Waywiser Press website
aren’t they? From West Virginia.
When dinner guests take their seats
the candelabra catch the darks
of Lincoln’s frock coat in the crystal
and throw the baroque golds
of James Monroe’s centrepiece
against the ceiling’s perfect white.
It can crawl with extraordinary shapes:
one imagines a giant kaleidoscope
or being trapped in a Picasso.
Sometimes, here in the Red Room,
I sit at this little Lannuier table
and write my notes. You know,
I can almost hear the matron
at Miss Porter’s: ‘Posture, young lady’.
These chairs we re-upholstered
in Morris velvet at a Massachusetts studio:
Victorian green and Empire yellow.
My favourite piece, though, is by the door,
a Baltimore lady’s desk
of sandalwood and verre églomisé.
The legs need a special Mexican wax.
I’m told it takes a thousand bees
to make an ounce. It’s true,
you can fall in love with the history
as though you’ll never leave.
The Roosevelt china I adore.
If a housemaid breaks a cup
it’s as though something of myself
has cracked. I’m impossible for hours.
There, at the end of the East Room,
we built the sweetest stage for Casals
to play for the laureates. Someone said
he could make the air grieve. Just here,
in spring, from these upper windows,
you can see the blossom, like a cake,
on Andrew Jackson’s magnolia trees.
I confess, after an early morning storm
I can’t bear to look: so many petals,
all torn, clinging to the panes.
Last, and most cherished, of course,
the Lincoln bed. One thinks of him
asleep between the brushed sheets,
those bony fingers on the coverlet,
his half-smile and hollow cheeks.
Third prize Poetry London competition 2006
Published in:
Waiting to Tango (Templar)
Poetry London
The New Writer
Waywiser Press website
Pocahontas engraving, Simon van de Passe, 1616
Pocahontas Prepares for an Audience at Court
Whenever we looked from the deck
those long weeks
the sea touched the sky on every side,
and some calm nights
as I took the air, the moon laid a path
from the stern.
Now I wake in a room
with a window of frost
whose lattice panes catch the sun
and cast a net across the matting
where I step from the bed.
Each evening my sheets
are warmed with a pan of coals
that scent the dark
like embers of yellow pine,
velvet drapes that close me in
when the maid has gone
are heavy as deerskin,
water in a jug on the trestle
is clean enough to wash mussels.
My lady teaches me how to dress,
to walk in a farthingale,
to tuck the kirtle and carry a flounce,
to drop a curtsy
and sit without choking
in a corset stiffened with bones.
My neck is held in a cage of lace.
So many words I’ve learnt
since the day we sailed
that my husband says I’m ready
to suffer a speech. And yet
these hours my mind turns
head to heel, my tongue stumbles,
my hand trembles like a child’s
as my lady adjusts the cuffs.
I fidget on the backstool
while she combs
the snaggles from my hair.
The oaken floor at my feet gleams
like the tidepool where I swam
with my sisters through eel grass,
catching blue crabs and sea-stars.
And so it is each morning
when I leave my sleep
to the cry of night herons,
eagles lifting fish from the shallows,
then the call of many voices
on a day when strangers come.
Included in Plainsong (Broken Sleep Books)
Commended in Poetry London competition 2005
Part of grouping that won The New Writer Poetry Collection Prize
Published in:
The New Writer
Whenever we looked from the deck
those long weeks
the sea touched the sky on every side,
and some calm nights
as I took the air, the moon laid a path
from the stern.
Now I wake in a room
with a window of frost
whose lattice panes catch the sun
and cast a net across the matting
where I step from the bed.
Each evening my sheets
are warmed with a pan of coals
that scent the dark
like embers of yellow pine,
velvet drapes that close me in
when the maid has gone
are heavy as deerskin,
water in a jug on the trestle
is clean enough to wash mussels.
My lady teaches me how to dress,
to walk in a farthingale,
to tuck the kirtle and carry a flounce,
to drop a curtsy
and sit without choking
in a corset stiffened with bones.
My neck is held in a cage of lace.
So many words I’ve learnt
since the day we sailed
that my husband says I’m ready
to suffer a speech. And yet
these hours my mind turns
head to heel, my tongue stumbles,
my hand trembles like a child’s
as my lady adjusts the cuffs.
I fidget on the backstool
while she combs
the snaggles from my hair.
The oaken floor at my feet gleams
like the tidepool where I swam
with my sisters through eel grass,
catching blue crabs and sea-stars.
And so it is each morning
when I leave my sleep
to the cry of night herons,
eagles lifting fish from the shallows,
then the call of many voices
on a day when strangers come.
Included in Plainsong (Broken Sleep Books)
Commended in Poetry London competition 2005
Part of grouping that won The New Writer Poetry Collection Prize
Published in:
The New Writer
Gaudi Declares His Love for Pepita
It is evening
in the soft Mataró sun,
her room is quiet,
her clock
ticks away his words.
He stands
outside the door,
no flowers in his hands,
just sweat on his palms
and on his clothes
the soft dust of masonry
from the yard.
And then she says come in
and he goes in
and hesitates
and tries to ask
And so she smiles to hide a laugh
and says she can’t
and didn’t he know
and didn’t he know?
And after that
alone
he toils on:
God’s architect on earth,
the great towers
towering in his mind
soft needles
rising
in the Barcelona night.
Published in:
Waiting to Tango (Templar)
Teaching a Chicken to Swim anthology (Seren)
The New Writer
in the soft Mataró sun,
her room is quiet,
her clock
ticks away his words.
He stands
outside the door,
no flowers in his hands,
just sweat on his palms
and on his clothes
the soft dust of masonry
from the yard.
And then she says come in
and he goes in
and hesitates
and tries to ask
And so she smiles to hide a laugh
and says she can’t
and didn’t he know
and didn’t he know?
And after that
alone
he toils on:
God’s architect on earth,
the great towers
towering in his mind
soft needles
rising
in the Barcelona night.
Published in:
Waiting to Tango (Templar)
Teaching a Chicken to Swim anthology (Seren)
The New Writer
The Limitations of Artificial Intelligence
Alan Turing 1912-54
I wanted to make a machine
that could think,
that could count snowflakes
outside the window,
gauge the weight of frost in air.
That whole winter we worked
till we lost all sense
of seasons, rooms hot
as circuits hummed,
cables alive with the rush of numbers.
Soon it would match a master
at chess, measure corpuscles
in blood, the hormones
it takes to shape a gland.
Our machine became famous,
and so did we.
They called us the men
who built a brain.
And so we did. But then
it couldn’t feel
a hand on the pillow,
smell soap on a towel,
taste the crispness
of a breakfast apple
or unplug its own wires
and switch off for ever, like love,
the current running through its coils.
Published in Waiting to Tango (Templar)
The New Writer
Take Tea with Turing, a digital anthology
from Edinburgh University School of Informatics
I wanted to make a machine
that could think,
that could count snowflakes
outside the window,
gauge the weight of frost in air.
That whole winter we worked
till we lost all sense
of seasons, rooms hot
as circuits hummed,
cables alive with the rush of numbers.
Soon it would match a master
at chess, measure corpuscles
in blood, the hormones
it takes to shape a gland.
Our machine became famous,
and so did we.
They called us the men
who built a brain.
And so we did. But then
it couldn’t feel
a hand on the pillow,
smell soap on a towel,
taste the crispness
of a breakfast apple
or unplug its own wires
and switch off for ever, like love,
the current running through its coils.
Published in Waiting to Tango (Templar)
The New Writer
Take Tea with Turing, a digital anthology
from Edinburgh University School of Informatics