It is a great pleasure introducing our guest poet Jean Stevens. We met many years ago on a poetry residential. Jean’s writing has featured here before: five poems from Speak to the Earth.
Her new collection Stick Woman, just published by Broken Sleep Books, ‘turns the constraints of an ageing body into a record of restless imaginative motion.’ It ‘is a collection alert to anger as readily as it is to wonder.’
I love the honesty, directness and wry humour. Jean’s bio follows her poems.
Self-portrait
Maybe Picasso, both eyes askew
and everything else equally weird.
Or blocks of colour, courtesy of Rothko,
red for the unexpressed passion,
white for the blankness of unfilled pages.
And black. Black for the deep places.
No, think of me as a Jackson Pollock.
A mess. Madness created by a bicycle tyre
which matches my wrinkles and loose skin,
eyes whose bags have their own dark bags,
and whose flesh is scrawny and just about
covers a sack of weakening bones.
And then there’s the art of children
which maybe captures me most.
I’m a bus with four wheels on one side,
a square with smoke rising
from a wobbly chimney.
The stick woman who needs a stick.
All those poems
All those poems by daughters
about their dying mothers.
Well, I’m old enough to die.
What do I want
apart from to be young again?
I want you to tell me
I got some things right
that I wasn’t impossible
though at times I think I drove you wild.
I don’t want you to grieve
but to gently forgive me,
remember the good times,
relish all those adventures we had,
Grand Canyon, Mount Fuji, the Taj Mahal,
and to praise our flawed and beautiful world.
And yes, dammit, I want you to grieve.
I admit I don’t want to be buried.
I’ve hated and feared the dark
since the moment I left my mother’s
water-cradled embrace and opened my eyes.
Take me to the top of the mountain,
dig a hole in the lowest clouds,
lift me through and into the light.
No angels
The wheels retracted, seat belts were off,
and the plane climbed steeply up the sky.
For the first time she had a window seat.
Looking down on the clouds made her head
whirl. There was nothing above them
except diminishing air. No beyond. No ghosts.
No seeking souls. Just emptiness, like the gap
between what the hospital consultant
said and what he really meant.
The clouds were like snow that would never
melt, and his words hung in the air.
The silence like a knife.
Dream walking
I stir the dhal in the pan.
It’s a dish made by my daughter
when she came over from Woolongong
to look after me. Before she went home
weeks ago, she put it in the freezer
ready for my cold days.
The smell of cumin and coriander
bring her back, along with bounding
kangaroos, hot red rocks and visible stars.
Light and warmth and the dreaming
outback stream from the ladle as I stir.
Biography:
Jean Stevens’ poems have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers including The Bridport Prizewinners Anthology. They have also been broadcast on BBC Radio Three, Radio Four and Radio Leeds, and have been shortlisted and highly commended in many competitions. She has five previous poetry collections. Her plays have been performed at Derby Playhouse, The Edinburgh Festival, Harrogate Theatre and West Yorkshire Playhouse. As a professional actor she has credits for stage, radio, film and television.
