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Nichola Deane
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the poet
Nichola Deane’s first collection, Cuckoo, followed on from her pamphlets Trieste, a Laureate’s Choice, and My Moriarty, which won the 2012 Flarestack Poetry Pamphlet Prize, and was The Poetry Book Society’s Autumn Pamphlet Choice for 2012. Nichola’s poems have appeared in Poetry London, Archipelago, Magma, Oxford Poetry, The North and elsewhere. Michael Mackmin describes her work as ‘amazing’, while Carol Ann Duffy says Nichola is a poet who is ‘sophisticated and lyrically charged, precise and daring.’ Douglas Dunn goes further, calling Nichola ‘a future English Elizabeth Bishop.’
the poems
‘Hotel de la mer’,
‘Hotel de l’Etoile’
After Joseph Cornell
I have arrived here with my suitcase, full
of the sea wind.
I am unpacking, laying out on the bed,
Black Rock, Port Madoc, Rhos Neigr, Caldey:
small hotels of my childhood, rickety
static caravans, the last pinks and purples
in the west, the tracing of lines
and faces and first names
in darkening sand.
I am looking at all that I made
with mere pebble and shell
in those fading oases.
I am looking at my hopes
and can smell salt.
Cuckoo
When the buds
on the birch
disappear
I appear
so spooked,
het-up,
heaven-fretted,
bejesused,
souped up
with all the may-
bees in May,
the new
plight of the new
(Cuckoo,
Cuccu)
to haunt us
back,
to the sleeping
greenwood
(like that? how so?)
with a – wake for a voice,
my loopy echo,
a bit of
locus pocus
Anubis
January, 2015
The heart will weigh – what
after all its watching?
Less than a sparrow’s,
and then,
then
nothing at all:
heart-in-the-branches,
heart-in-the-split-bark,
heart-in-the-nodding-wind.
Publishing credits
'Hôtel de la Mer', 'Hôtel de L'Étoile': The Rialto (No. 84)
Cuckoo / Anubis: Cuckoo (V. Press)
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