Sacred Hunger
'In full light we are not even a shadow.'
Antonio Porchia
Buried in the dark, lights glowed so much brighter.
You climb up and out only to find treasures vanished.
All things had a presence - an offering to give:
a fairy light, a friend, could mainline hope
in a second - cracked the dark with lightning glimmers
of more, as kintsugi solders fragments with gold.
Any flash was seized like water in a drought.
I bathed in fairy lights' corollas like a child,
as if indoor stars could solve everything.
Light put out their hearts. I miss the austerity
of weakness, so stripped weak it transfigures
to force, as a crucible melts metal from ore.
Where are those who told me, this was the way?
Life - is a long vivisection. You are both
maverick scientist and lone animal
trapped in a fluorescent glare. The choice
was given as life or death, but no one mentions
the third: you can be buried in the light.
A Newer Wilderness is Nicola’s debut pamphlet and all the more impressive for this. There’s a beautiful control to the poems. They’re musical; it’s lyric poetry but it isn’t just interested in local effect, it isn’t showy. Her personality isn’t foregrounded. She’s writing personally and there’s a vulnerability here, a deep existentialist quality, alongside a great imaginative humility. The subject of the body, the individual's experience within it, and the attitudes of others to it, are central themes but they're handled with a rare precision and tenderness, and with startling imagery. ‘You may think this doesn’t matter. / There is little that matters more’, she writes, ‘A flower can save your life / like the most powerful of drugs’.
