Skip to main content

Poem by Cath Nichols

Eyewear is delighted to welcome Cath Nichols (pictured here) to its storied pages this Friday.

Nichols has a new collection out, Tales of Boy Nancy - a pamphlet of poems published by Driftwood (2005). Another recent project has been a film with commissioned music, launched at the National Maritime Museum during last year’s Homotopia festival.

For four years Nichols co-ordinated Liverpool’s Dead Good Poets Society, but has left to pursue her writing career and commence an MA in the autumn at Lancaster University.

Previous roles include mental health work, artists’ model, journalism and waitressing (indeed she has even been a drag poetry waitress).

Her forthcoming project examines the history of various characters associated with the Woolworth’s empire in Liverpool and New York. A full-length collection, My Glamourous Assistant, is forth-coming from Headland Press in 2007. She recently recorded poems for the Oxfam Poetry CD, out in June, titled Life Lines, which I edited.


Calenture

In the tropics some succumb to calenture:
it is a sickness of heat and hallucination,
a home-sickness for verdancy where

lapping green turns grassy. So sailors
in the grip of calenture jump ship
to bathe in meadows sweet

with furling paths and waving trees.
They dream a dappled walk
through lanes of missing memory,

a time before the press gangs came,
stole their lives, and placed them
in the keeping of mermaid droves.

poem by Cath Nichols
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A  poem for my mother, July 15 When she was dying And I was in a different country I dreamt I was there with her Flying over the ocean very quickly, And arriving in the room like a dream And I was a dream, but the meaning was more Than a dream has – it was a moving over time And land, over water, to get love across Fast enough, to be there, before she died, To lean over the small, huddled figure, In the dark, and without bothering her Even with apologies, and be a kiss in the air, A dream of a kiss, or even less, the thought of one, And when I woke, none of this had happened, She was still far distant, and we had not spoken.
Post a Comment
Read more

Poetry vs. Literature

Poetry is, of course, a part of literature. But, increasingly, over the 20th century, it has become marginalised - and, famously, has less of an audience than "before". I think that, when one considers the sort of criticism levelled against Seamus Heaney and "mainstream poetry", by poet-critics like Jeffrey Side , one ought to see the wider context for poetry in the "Anglo-Saxon" world. This phrase was used by one of the UK's leading literary cultural figures, in a private conversation recently, when they spoke eloquently about the supremacy of "Anglo-Saxon novels" and their impressive command of narrative. My heart sank as I listened, for what became clear to me, in a flash, is that nothing has changed since Victorian England (for some in the literary establishment). Britain (now allied to America) and the English language with its marvellous fiction machine, still rule the waves. I personally find this an uncomfortable position - but when ...
15 comments
Read more

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
3 comments
Read more