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Poetry Focus On: PHOEBE POWER


Phoebe Power received one of the 2012 Eric Gregory Awards, just announced last week. She was also a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2009, and her poems have appeared in OrbisPomegranate, Domestic Cherry and FireLast year, she had a poem iced onto cake by Poetry Digest. She is based near Penrith, and is currently studying English at Cambridge. You can read her poems atphoebepower.blogspot.com


Mr –

Always in my back room.
Swinging landscape painting,
this woollen, curlsome mass.
Caught in the seams of a shadow or stencil
it’s him, the familiar place.

I would burst past handwriting,
be wrapped in voice and eyes, but
flotsam, sharp stones. A dam.
My head gongs metal, and spins
dizzily away. I have rehearsed this

for five years, killing myself
very slowly. My body
would mature but its new growths 
denature, deform
as I ram and ram against him,
through every second’s pore,

while he smiles at the wall like a buddha
backlighting the studio of my mind.
If he was a god, I could believe in him.
But



poem by Phoebe Power; published online with permission of the author

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