Here are some poems which I'm currently working on. Please do give me your feedback. I'm just beginning to feel my way into material for a third collection. Interiors are still influencing my poems but I'm currently writing more about light and also the idea of visitation and vision, as in the first poem which imagines what might have happened if Mary hadn't been in 'the right place at the right time' for the Annunciation. The second poem grew out of an artists' residency which I became involved in at the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture based at the University of Middlesex. The artists in question, Barbara Dean, Hilary Kneale and Anne Rapstoff, used the museum's collections to create art and events around ideas of the domestic space, the results can be viewed on the residency website. I took part in a workshop which involved participants bringing along objects which had a story attached to them or some personal significance. This got me thinking about those items which have lost their specific history: they may bear the marks of usage but how they were used and why they were kept has not been recorded. I've always been attracted to Dutch still lives and the way they capture both a sense of history and of timelessness. In this poem, 'After Life', I consider how the women who used these objects have also faded from memory but how their lives continue as a kind of echo in the simple objects that formed part of their daily routine.

Among Women This evening I came back home and everything was just as I'd left it - except the bowls gleamed with a new knowledge, the cat wore her yellow gaze like a mask and I sensed the house had been visited, saw sun streaming in through the spare room window, a square of gold on the empty floor: the clock had lost a minute it never regained. I was blessed with children anyway, I shook my life out like a cloth, yet I am different for not being chosen: on summer mornings I slip into the garden before the dew has lifted - I have the blue sky to myself, a full moon melting like a wafer on the tongue.

 

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