Kate’s poem ‘Salvage’ has been selected for Best British Poetry 2013 (Salt Publications, Nov 2013) available now from bookshops. Meanwhile the new Ambit 215, published end of January 2014, includes her poem ‘Bouquet’, marking a young woman’s loss of her lover in WW1. Kate will be at the Ambit launch at The Sun and Thirteen Cantons, Gt Pulteney Street, Soho, on Thursday 30 January.
Category Archives: Poems
Naming the Rain in the Gaeltacht
At the request of a person browsing in Dulwich Books who had heard this poem read on an Irish radio programme here is Naming the Rain in the Gaeltacht written in summer 2007 and first published in the Irish poetry journal, THE SHOp, no. 28, Autumn 2008.
The rains, different every day, different according to the light and the wind speed across Brandon Bay, were incredibly varied in their effects on lanes and tracks and on our forays into the landscape.
Naming the Rain
In your tongue there are thirteen words for rain,
so tell me one
to match the clumsy rush of wet that whooshes
up the lane, inflating and detaching
hedges’ awnings, upsetting fuchsia’s red umbrellas, hurling slip-slop
scoops of honeysuckle,
cramming mouths of field drains with meadowsweet,
and maybe it’s the same
along the coast road, up-flung salted spray which whitens
shoes, rusts bikes, burnishes and buffs
tarmac to mirrors.
Early summer mornings, there’s a rain that sweeps
the bay, rounds up sea-mist,
herds its water into corries
in the saddle of Mount Brandon.
And can you name this rain that whistles, reedy, low,
a tune that wakes us
to no field, tide-line, roof or peak?
For while we slept it rained away
the world that called us to the window.
After the Ban
In 2008, After the Ban won first prize at the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition. Continue reading
Profil perdu
Performed at the Homage to Hepworth on 10th January, 2013, Kate’s poem profil perdu after Hepworth’s Two Forms Divided Circle, originally a sonnet, has been shaped and can be watched as it disappears, on the “profil perdu” page.
Thanks to Trevor Moore for the powerpoint from which the “code” was developed and to Herb Miller, who animated the poem.
The dance piece The Empty Shoes choreographed by Nyron Levy and filmed on the site of the sculpture in Dulwich Park by Andy Humphreys is now on Youtube