.png)
C Daventry
back
next
the poet
A linguist, writer and poet living in Scotland, C Daventry has won several awards for her work. These include first place in the Bridport Prize for Poetry (her work appearing in its annual anthologies several times), winner of the 2019 Hippocrates Open Awards for Poetry and Medicine, and The John Ruskin Prize in its inaugural year. A finalist in the 2019 Moth Poetry Prize, she's also chalked up multiple shortlistings and nominations elsewhere. Her work has been published throughout the UK and beyond, and her solo poetry chapbook is titled, The Oligarch Loses His Patience.
the poems
Mother’s Ruin
She comes home and takes gin
gin deadbeat, gin strayed-from-the-fold
takes its own back again,
robs families of fathers, rips
the roof off terraces, shows off mould
and wallpaper in flapping strips
gets inside the cistern, the milk
bottle, the baby’s bottle, filled up
with gripe and mither to the neck
with Dutch courage, gin-Jenever;
make baby silver make her gold
liquid witch, my juice of the juniper
take with you my lumbago
my gallstones my gout
take with you his droop and ague
gin swills in our gutters, our runnels,
swirls down the drains and out
through the grilles, up to the gunwales
mammy’s boots go out slap-slap
on slimy cobbles. Gin is the colour of her moon-clout
her eyes her rouged knees her grey lips
gin with lemon gin with lime
gin will be damned
gin laced with turpentine
will take oranges
to Scotland and pish on England
gin will fackin rhyme if and when it likes
gin and whey out of the teats
of her into the mouths of babes
stiff after three days in winding sheets
gin from the ankles up, bad as brown
apples in the bottom of the barrel
soft ribs teeth like cheese maggots in the brain
in every port be mine in the estuarine brine
croons the seaman biting her tongue
I’ll give you gin up your skirt for your pains
dump the bairn come away to Mandalay
to the East Indies to the straits so
she gave him a dose of gin to take away
for my Valentine
in an fMRI scanner
Beloved,
it’s because of the way your parahippocampal gyrus
glows green under pressure. The way your parietal lobe
(which, try as I might, I can’t see as inferior)
shows hyperactivity when I whisper sweet nothings.
For this alone I want to sail away to your bilateral insula
in a precuneus coracle, drag it high on white sand, dance
the cingulate cortex breathless and wild,
then pull you close and do the fusiform gyrus
as the fiery plate of the sun drops
below the horizon.
You are my frontal and limbic regions of interest.
You alone are my dorsal hypoactive cluster.
You have declared cerebellum on my own amygdala,
o, stroll with me under the globus pallidus of the moon.
I do not appear
in photos
anymore. There was a time my face
was green hills covered in buttercups,
I walked with bees hovering
above the clover of my hair
which was perpetually ruffled
by the light breeze of your breath,
of anyone’s breath, of the breath
of a man standing over me on the bus,
his feet planted too near the saplings
of my legs, the hive in my belly,
the bird of heart in my feathery breast,
us swaying a little; everything I owned
slung over the waterfall of my shoulders.
My bangles had the clink of pebbles
in a burn, and me, averting my eyes
– changing direction quick
as a shoal of silver fish
– from my own aristocracy, my neck
a stalk of willow under the heavy crown
none of us ever knew we wore.
Publishing credits
Mother's Ruin: MAGMA (No. 67)
for my Valentine in an fMRI scanner: 2019 Hippocrates Prize
Anthology (The Hippocrates Press)
I do not appear in photos: shortlisted for
S h a r e