last update:
5 Jan17
photo by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey
e-mail Susan
Susan Wicks at:
Bloodaxe Books
British Council
Poetry Spotlight
Three Monkeys
and in the shop…
joint collection, poetry & art –
“Lace”,
Stonewood Press;
collections –
“House of Tongues”,
“De-iced”
and
“Night Toad: New & Selected Poems”,
Bloodaxe;
“The Clever Daughter”,
“Open Diagnosis”
and
“Singing Underwater”,
Faber;
stories collection –
“Roll Up for the Arabian Derby”,
bluechrome;
novels –
“A Place to Stop”;
Salt;
“Little Thing”
and
“The Key”,
Faber;
memoir –
“Driving My Father”
Faber and Basic Books, New York
as translator –
“Cold Spring in Winter”
and
“Talking Vrouz”,
(both Valérie Rouzeau),
Arc
Runner
You’d hardly call it running, yet he runs
low to the ground, a sort of fluent
hobble, in the shallow valley of the gutter,
trusting the cars and buses
to see him and steer round him, while his feet
push gently against the tarmac over and over
and the earth shoves back, as if
to say I’m here, still running, look, and you will never
beat me, bone and ligaments and cartilage
at ankle hip and knee
crunching to hard hot lumps, and in his legs an ache
pulsing like veins from heels to lower back –
as if he knows all that
and more. As if he’s run for miles already,
days or weeks or years, in every kind of weather,
unfazed by the downs and ups,
the roads and red-brick paths, the way the rain
has soaked his singlet to a new transparent skin,
the way the winter sun
closes his weeping eyes, or frost
surrounds him with a cloud of breath,
the way he looks
for turning bikes and dawdling kids with bags
and knuckled roots, how after a few weeks
he hardly feels
his body, those familiar knots
of flesh and blood, but only the cold scatter
from his water-bottle as he raises it
and glugs, the way it falls back lighter.
Susan Wicks
in collection, The Months, 2016, Bloodaxe,
ISBN 978-1-7803729-0-7
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