Friday Poem – ‘Or With Open Window’ by Rosalind Hudis

~ Seren Books

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Or With Open Window’ by Rosalind Hudis from her most recent collection Restorations. Rosalind was recently shortlisted for the Gladstone’s Writers in Residence Award 2022. Judging will take place in October.

Restorations Rosalind Hudis. "If a poem is like a picture, these are history paintings, rich in human detail and many-layered in their brushwork" Matthew Francis

Inspired by the art restorer’s keen eye and by a vivid empathy for people and events, Restorations, is a journey through memory. Suffused with colour, inspired by thoughts of people and places, by artefacts and how the passage of time shifts perspectives and erodes surfaces, these poems are beautifully complex explorations, full of curiosity and the adventure of seeing and listening.

Or With Open Window A Corner of the Artist’s Studio in Paris by Gwen John If she could agree to be this room or the other. Possibility pleats her. Not there, her outline sealed, but spreading, invisible, in two takes: One corner, one window, netted unnetted, above a table that’s the still crossfire where her looking springs out from an open book or coils back into a crease of wired flowers. On a white chair her blue coat streams labile, could let her slide through each frame. Even this one where the window is closed, hard edges inside a stockade of angles. Or with Open Window: the room’s misted; sharp in the distance, she’s hung a tent of reflections and sky. Where she waits can be folded/ unfolded like her paused umbrella, like triangled sunlight on the wall that could pin her to its moment or, warming outwards, paint her into the visible.

Restorations is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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