AllotmentThrough the window you trace out the plot:
from the corner to the shop
maybe further,
and cause soil and weeds to settle on tarmac
with the manure you had delivered one weekend,
and dug in the next.
The shed is under the lamp post. Its door,
you tell me, will need repairing.
I love the words you use:
Pentland,
comfrey,
main-crop, earlies,
fish and bone.
Measuring your steps along the road, I watch
as you count the brittle seeds
from the boat of your hand into the earth
- four at a time, four inches apart.
They are the colour of sycamore wings,
and flat, like lentils.
Afterwards
we leave and the rich earth
becomes street again;
unturned potatoes below the tarmac;
white as eggs.
© Liz Bassett 1997
Grasshopper Warbler
BTO ring: J593979
We opened your wings to count the feathers,
to note how each overlapped the last;
and they held the light like a paper fan,
like a hand of cards inviting the air:
Here, take one. Don't tell me what it is.
Now place it in the pack.
This evening, as you run your coded message
out across the Fen, your call unwinds
like a fishing reel,
like a freewheeling bicycle:
Pick a number. Don't tell me.
Keep it in your head.
© Liz Bassett 2005
No Place won a supplementary prize in the Bridport Poetry Competition, 2009. Anthology available from: The Bridport website.
The Orange and The Consultation were published in The Red Wheelbarrow 17, available from: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~redbarrow
The Consultation was published in The White Leaf Review 10: http://whiteleafpress.co.uk/issue_10_17.html and Poets from Britain and America (White Leaf Press). Copies available from Amazon.
Allotment, Grasshopper Warbler, and Lovesongs are published by Templar Poetry in the Anthology Solitaire. This can be purchased via: http://www.templarpoetry.co.uk/Solitaire.html
First Love, Clegg Street E1W, and John Virtue's London Paintings are published online in Agenda's Broadsheet 9:
http://www.agendapoetry.co.uk/documents/Broadsheet9.pdf
Washday appears in a small collection called My Mother Threw Knives: poems about women’s lives. This is published by the Second Light Network and is available online via: http://www.poetrypf.co.uk/secondlight.html
Waterpaint appeared The Red Wheelbarrow 5, (University of St Andrews) in 2001:
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~redbarrow
Allotment won a supplementary prize in the Bridport Poetry Competition in 1997.
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“… something elegiac as well as beautifully precise…”
(Roger Garfitt, The Bridport Poetry competition 1997)
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“Technically very interesting… a distinct and persuasive music that does not rely on the too strict notions of form that sometimes limit English poetry…”
(John Burnside, Guardian Poetry Workshop)
