Four of my poems have been published in issue 262 of PN Review. I’ve admired the journal and much of what Carcanet publishes for a long time, so this feels like something of a dream.
If you’re a subscriber, you can read the poems online here. Otherwise you can purchase a copy of the journal from Carcanet’s online shop.
I thought I would say a little something here about the creative debts of each of the poems.
The first of the poems, ‘Love letters of the Hampstead Modernists’, was written after reading Caroline Maclean’s Circles and Squares and is a surreal collage of love letters between the artists Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, and Eileen Agar and Paul Nash.
Love
you are pebble-headed
and starfish-mouthed,
dark as a lick of brine
and pocket-smoothed.
Love Letters of the Hampstead Modernists
‘Hertfordshire Puddingstone’ is the second poem. This came out of an incredible workshop led by the poet Liz Berry for Dialect Writers. I would definitely recommend looking for events and workshops run by them in the future.
The poem is named after a particular type of conglomerate sedimentary rock found only in the county where I grew up, Hertfordshire, and draws on a number of other local legends and histories.
The third poem is written for the oak outside the window of our former Sydenham flat, which was felled by the neighbours. ‘The Oak is Down’ is written after Charlotte Mew’s ‘The Trees are Down’ and I’m very grateful to a former UCL English student who introduced me to this poem.
The final poem ‘A Legend for Hazel’, is written for my niece.
In the garden all that’s left is a fingerprint
of unvarnished oak, a tall wound of mud
and moss where its shadow once stretched,
The Oak is Down
Francesca Brooks 