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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

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                  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

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                  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

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                  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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