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26th November, 2021

Friday Poem – ‘Eva’ by Carolyn Jess-Cooke


This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Eva’ by Carolyn Jess-Cooke from her new collection We Have to Leave the Earth.

This cover shows a photo of a balled up piece of blue fishing-twine lying against a pale pink and blue background.

Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s most recent collection We Have to Leave the Earth deftly interweaves the personal and the political. Climate change is confronted in a sequence about the Arctic; poems that are vividly descriptive of an extreme landscape, sensitive to the effects of global warming. A second sequence, The House of Rest, is a history in 9 poems of Josephine Butler, (1828-1906) a pioneering feminist activist. There are also tender poems about family.

Eva Then you were here real as a wound. They placed you in my arms with such care I thought you a parcel of feathers that might fly away. I stroked your face – your eyes were midnight blue. Time bended to you, language re-strung its instruments to sound your name. Visitors admired your lace- ears, your peony fists, but they could not see you as I did – you slid from your skin just as you had slipped out of me and became a shard of morning light, turning cobwebs to crystal thread, the windowsill a gold bar, dew on hedges constellations of delicacy. I knew then this love was alchemy. Our bond is not made of that loose wet rope they cut but of instruments that show the unseen and sound the silent, the heart’s infinite missions harnessed in flight.

We Have to Leave the Earth is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

Join us online for Virtual First Thursday on 2nd December from 7:30pm GMT where Carolyn will be reading from We Have to Leave the Earth alongside Jeremy Dixon. Tickets are £2 plus Eventbrite admin fee. Buy yours here www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/216146057677.

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