It’s an immense pleasure introducing this month’s guest poet Ramona Herdman. We met a few years ago on a residential workshop and are members of a group that meets weekly online.
Ramona Herdman’s recent publications are Glut (Nine Arches Press), A warm and snouting thing (The Emma Press) and Bottle (HappenStance Press). Ramona lives in Norwich and is a committee member for Café Writers. She tweets @ramonaherdman
I have selected four poems from Glut, beautifully produced by Nine Arches Press, to give you a flavour of these darkly funny, bittersweet poems. I hope my choices also show their ‘quiet ferocity’ (Philip Gross). Below the poems you’ll find links to a blog about the cover (by Jacky Howson) and to a video with Ramona reading Blackberrying and Congratulations. Glorious is the word!
Blackberrying
Blooded young, we waded
into the hooked shallows of hedges,
caught up and cut in our toddler blundering, dirty
with gritty juice and dotted-line scratches.
We without-ritual British, we atheists.
Hippies’ children, grown up
in the world they believe they changed –
we have blackberrying as our sacrament.
At school, neater children wouldn’t eat the berries,
said their mothers said no, said
they had worms in that would eat our insides
and poke out of our bumholes.
Now we go every year, like it’s Midnight Mass.
We avoid the dog zone at the bottom of the bushes.
Tell each other that by Michaelmas
the Devil will have pissed them bitter.
We take offal-heavy carrier bags of berries
to our parents, too old now for all that bother.
We pick the children out of the tangled footings.
We cook pies and crumbles in our own kitchens,
competently. We placate the gods.
Cuckoo and egg
It’s hard to soft-boil an egg in another woman’s kitchen –
even the water is different.
It’s our first ‘family’ holiday together.
She makes me a soft-boiled egg with a lot of fanfare
and the whole breakfast-table gets involved in the hoo-hah.
And there’s a performance of trust in cracking it –
the risk of a wet white, the opposite risk
of a solid yolk. We’re on the edge
of an ovation when it turns out perfect.
I eat it hot, like a heart.
It’s not me taking the minutes
It’s not me anymore escorting visitors
from the front desk. I don’t fill the water jugs
and make sure the glasses aren’t too dirty.
I sometimes buy the biscuits, now there’s no budget.
It’s not me too scared to ask a question
or supply a fact, wondering if I’m allowed
a view or am just a transcription machine.
A man once told me working with women
had taught him not to interrupt. It’s a terrible world.
I told him working with men had taught me
to keep on talking, slightly louder. Try
interrupting and you’ll get to see
the flying-galleon belly of my argument
as I lift off cathedral-high over you.
Don’t dare to talk over my people,
including the young woman taking minutes,
who is well on her way to wherever she wants,
who could take your eye out with her wit.
The meetings are my meetings now.
Two death in the afternoons, please
Dad, now you’re dead you scare me.
Every time I think about stepping into traffic
I think of you building your glass castle,
cornershop-whisky-bottle by cornershop-whisky-bottle.
I had to do one of those questionnaires recently:
How many times in the last month has your drinking
stopped you doing things you needed or wanted to do?
I put zero, Dad, proud nothing. They never ask
about the times the drink makes living possible.
I think of your kitchen-drinking nights, how you told me
you didn’t get hangovers anymore
and I was too young to reply.
When I’m scared, Dad, I know a gluey-gold inch
of brandy or one gin and tonic’s scouring effervescence
will lift me to arm’s-length from caring, will calm me
in a bubble of slight incapacity.
The old dread, Dad – I think now you carried it
like a wolf in your stomach.
The drink quiets it, but it doesn’t drown.
I recently learned another cocktail by Hemingway –
‘Death in the afternoon’, champagne and absinthe.
You’d find the name as funny as I do.
He recommended three or five in slow succession.
When I make them, I toast him. He’s family.
Dad, you’re nothing now.
It’s only the thought of your life that scares me.
But if there were an afterlife I’d meet you there, happy hour.
It’d be dimlit and we’d sit low in a booth and they’d keep
bringing the drinks in fine heavy glasses
and no one would interrupt to say this wasn’t actually heaven,
this delicious blunting of feeling, this merciful cessation,
and that there was something outside that was better –
like walking out on the seafront together, wind and water-roar
and saying something risky and being understood.
Links:
To buy the book
An interesting blog piece about the design of the cover
Ramona reads Congratulations
Ramona reading Blackberrying
Acacia Publications 