Blog
22nd January, 2016
Friday Poem – Elegy for the Living
This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Elegy for the Living’ from Kathryn Simmonds’ insightful collection The Visitations.
In this book, Simmonds infuses with beauty the everyday phenomena that we often neglect: from fleeting moments with strangers on the street, to even that peculiar yet widely recognisable experience of forgetting what exactly we went upstairs to retrieve. Through an innovative and triumphant blend of humour and realism – complemented by its simple yet wonderfully rich language – the collection explores both the truths and the uncertainties of life in terms of faith, the self, and the familial. This creative ambiguity reaches a crescendo in the title poem ‘The Visitations’ in which the divine is effortlessly combined with the domestic. Yet even her more elegiac poems are rarely sombre, but abound with the imagery of homeliness, and an underlying sense of vigour and life.
Elegy for the Living
to find each other
and, lulled into sense,
the curve
with your shirt;
seeded overnight with air.
there’ll be another,
and keep rolling
will roll alone and try to roll
as if I dreamed you, dear,
our touching limbs,
with new wet light.
