Judith Bishop

There is a shimmering, ludic intelligence to this collection of poems, Philip Mead’s first since 1984. The word ‘comeback’ is apt, with its grace note of gladness for renewed possibilities. Opening any new work, the anticipation is acute: will I be changed by reading this, and if so, how? What might I think, feel, or recognise ...

Judith Bishop’s Interval appears just over a decade since the publication of her first book, also using a one-word title, Event (Salt, 2007). This gap seems far too long. Certainly, there have been two chapbooks in the intervening years – Alice Missing in Wonderland and Other Poems (2008), in the Wagtail series ...

Bold shades of autumn leaf – or blazing embers’ light,
bright to extinguished, as if fires set
in hearths huddled closely in the dirt were offset
by pallid oceans with their artificial light.
Are the colours fire-signals to a planetary eye
that, like Atlas, feels the weight of earth,

The far city must make itself known
even here in the sitting room and
barred by winter branches. The skyline

The far city must make itself known
even here in the sitting room and
barred by winter branches. The skyline ...

You are seething; I am worried.
We have read the Greek myths.

This anger of yours feels like
a distant thunderclap

Night’s the ground beneath my feet
since I learned to walk with you.
Scented guide with birds and flowers on your breath,

I could say hello to things.
Theodore Roethke

i.
The hand’s wave,
when it comes –

Where the mind comes from,
where it goes,
when the moon rose,
where among the stars the light was seen
as you were born:
if it glistened in the tracks
stamped on leaves across the park
where we walked the early afternoon, alert,
listening up,
hearing how the plovers
pipe back and forth across the grass …

But desire is foolish / In the face of fate. / Yet the blindest / Are sons of gods.

Hölderlin

Flying crow-wise over Germany to Russia, we have
set down in a hangar. The children stare at us.
Our persecution is a memory. I’m curious to know,
now we fly from land to land seeking comfort,
what it takes to cure lack once and for all.
Coveting, they say, is the chief antagonist
to any blooming of the heart’s contentedness –