It is a great pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet Rebecca (Becky) Cullen. Her poem February appeared last month. Becky and I met on a poetry workshop where I bought A Reader’s Guide To Time. This was the winner of the 2021 Live Canon Collection Competition.
Here is Becky’s biography:
Rebecca Cullen has a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing. She was the second poet-in-residence at Newstead Abbey, ancestral home of George Gordon, Lord Byron. Director of the Writing, Reading and Pleasure (WRAP) extracurricular programme at Nottingham Trent University, Rebecca also curates and presents the Notts TV Book Club.
The collection is divided into eight sections, each representing a different kind of time. Becky ends her prologue with It’s time I love, winding as a cat wraps round an ankle. Here are four poems from Historical Time (n.b. timelines, clocks), Deep Time, Poetic Time (also ‘of Reading’) and Subjective Time (‘of our lives’), respectively.
Paris, Grands Passages
To enter requires trust: you can’t see the end
from the beginning. You can’t see the next beginning.
Shop names are the contents page; each entrance
is a diorama. Post yourself into the future.
At Hotel Chopin, climb the three red stairs.
Would you like to buy a sink? A model of a carousel?
The tiles are monochrome and harlequin.
The gates can keep you out, or keep you in.
In the window of the librarie, two wax children
read a book, sitting in a rowing boat.
Claim a tall-backed chair at the café draped in vines,
warm beneath the glass roofs pinched like fish spines.
The taxidermist stitches swans’ wings to a fox.
Come, watch the past play, hear your heels knock.
Night Fragment
He wakes her with a ball of sorry.
He wants her to hold it, keep it,
as brash and bold as the coin in her lungs.
His sob comes, warms her gut,
the flex of his young arm gone.
In the four o’clock light,
her face is crumpled, dirty.
Peacocks at Byron’s Pile
I had a dream of Newstead Abbey,
that I was drifting through the garden
and the blowsy flowers were heavy on the walls.
The words are just ahead of me this morning,
the word for a large purple or white blowsy flower,
a climber, and a tree’s branches so they grow
outstretched in two dimensions. Espalier.
Both these things are in my head, somewhere,
but the sparrows roost near the monk’s pond,
which also has its own name,
and overlook the stump of oak on a lawn
where a raven has been adopted by two geese;
they are always in correspondence, everywhere
the remnants of a godforsaken kiss,
the three of them, like this. Clematis.
My Father and I
Sometimes we didn’t get on. The songs I sang
would please his ear. But I would over-act, embarrass him.
Now we go to appointments more often than we go for lunch.
After the last tests he couldn’t be left alone. I spread across one sofa,
he slouched on his, and we watched a documentary on Howard Hughes;
I didn’t know about the aviation or the Hollywood years.
So. We both kept turning up, not giving in.
Lately, I’ve taken to calling him daddy.
