Featured Poet: Sarah Howe

Eyewear is very pleased, this hot Friday in London, to welcome British poet Sarah Howe, pictured.  Howe was born in Hong Kong in 1983. She studied English at Cambridge and as a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard. She is currently finishing her PhD on Renaissance literature before taking up a Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 2008, she won the inaugural London Review of Books Young Reviewer Competition. Her debut pamphlet from Tall-lighthouse, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia, won an Eric Gregory Award this year.  She is one of the emerging poets to watch.

Woman in the garden

after Bonnard

What you see on entering a room –

            the red-checked

blouse, burning

on a chairframe in the attic crook,

            will last a lifetime.

 She smiles to see her slim form continue

            in the sunlit legs

of the stool, the lilac towel fallen across its face,

            and she thinks –

wisteria peeling from the house one mid-April –  

            head cocked

as if marooned on the way to a word.

           

            Mustard flashes

wildly up the wall: the mirror

            is a locked garden

and sometimes she visits that country.

            Through its keyhole

            the stool in miniature

wades a cobalt sea, or some accurate idea of sea –

            a greybird

            with salmon feet

engaged in telling things new

            a song veined

with rust from the throat.

           

She wants someone who will teach her the names

            of trees

their alien natures: the mimosa’s trembling

            yellow and the ornate

mainmast of the ash. The only thing she ever

            longed for

was an enamel bath, the running water

            tinged

with cochineal, a window, somewhere

            heightening the tone –

            the bay at Cannes,

the mountains of the Esterel.

poem by Sarah Howe