GO TO MLC HOMEPAGE

ONLINE BOOKSTORE FEATURED TITLES

Best of Irish Poetry 2010
Editor: Matthew Sweeney

Songs of Earth and Light
Barbara Korun poems translated by Theo Dorgan

Done Dating DJs
by Jennifer Minniti-Shippey
Winner, 2008 Fool for Poetry Competition

Richesses: Francophone Songwriter Poets
Edited and translated by Aidan Hayes

Munster Literature Centre

Create your badge

SALLY READ

Sally Read was born in Suffolk in 1971. She trained and worked as a psychiatric nurse in London while completing a BA with the Open University, and went on to earn her Master of Arts at the University of South Dakota, USA. She has since taught English in both London and Sardinia, and divides her time between Italy and Suffolk. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2001. Her two poetry collections with Bloodaxe are The Point of Splitting (2005), which was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize, and Broken Sleep (2009).

Jack

Blue sky! Lovely out.
Here’s tea, chivvying in its saucer.
Plash, tink tink tink of tea.
No birds. No birds. Blue sky.
Lovely out. Whassya name?
Whassya name? Whassyname?

Wife

Would you know the shape of thought
without words.

Would you know what presses in the throat,
and stern of head
has taste of coal or earth or sex or metal
presses backs of eyes.

No birds. No sounds in the brain
that join and cradle and make
a circuit snap.
Parts that don’t conjoin.
Cogs, pistons
come apart.
                       Then—
                       metal worked with lathe.
White sparks, white heat. Once,
for a minute, I left the goggles off,
woke that night and couldn’t see,
the film of vision scorched
memory of blindness
paralysed
in a jagged black room    
arc-eye

Something burnt off. Clean. Like grease
under hot water. Like baked fish-skin
puckered,
leaving tender flesh. Pass the salt!
I say, pass the salt! What’s ya name?

How quick a man’s mind
picked clean.
Down the dock.
Down the dock. Down the dock.
Clank. Fast-moving feathers, smell of mud
and fish, crack of ice, pint of bitter,
a hot black window.

Nothing sticks.

I wake, blind.
I open my mouth, silence.
I hear, rubbish.
Rubbish rubbish rubbish

Then, a flash! Bob’s your uncle:
Maureen, more tea!
Nailed it.

There’s something at the core, the rough
breadth of chest, like blood,like cables,
snakes eighty years.
This is all I know when knowing is no more
When there are no badges
to tell who or where
or how long
Only a thing without a face
without an age
and
words charred to black
and come apart.

What sticks?

She ambles in with tea-cups,
a way of leaning on a hip,
Where’s the baby? I say, where’s she put the baby?

How quick a bloke goes.
No talk of soul.
Nothing whole.
Chemicals firing
a picture, a word;
dying.

©2010 Sally Read

Author Links

Sally Read at the Poetry Archive

Bloodaxe's Sally Read page

'Peony': Poem by Read in Eyewear Literary Magazine