Friday Poem – ‘Sailing by Silvership’ by Polly Atkin

~ Seren Books

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Sailing by Silvership’ by Polly Atkin from her most recent collection Much With Body.

This cover shows a painting of a swimmer floating on her back in a blue-green lake.

Much With Body is the startlingly original second collection by poet Polly Atkin. The beauty of the Lake District is both balm and mirror, refracting pain and also soothing it with distraction. Much of the landscape is lakescape, giving the book a watery feel. There is also a distinct link with the past in a central section of found poems taken from transcripts of the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, from a period late in her life when she was often ill. In common with the works of the Wordsworths, these poems share a quality of the metaphysical sublime. Their reverence for the natural world is an uneasy awe, contingent upon knowledge of our fragility and mortality.

Sailing by Silvership The moon is a ship and we are sailing in her how can we not talk about her? She glistens and we glisten she throws out nets of herself, trailing clouds like weeds and we walk them as bridges to the stars, arm in arm, singing. And the stars themselves are glistening aren’t they? like specks of quartz in dark rock, spangling the great unknowable expanse as it squeezes into this particular wedge of night the swell of this road the dark fell sea soon, we will be there, sister waving from the deck of the one you call dipper – so big we can sit in it! – no so big it will carry us away.

Much With Body is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.