How do love affairs start? Jana Nordmeyer, disfigured by naevus flammeus, has made do without love for much of her life until… well, that’s for those who want to read the book. And it’s been for me to solve. A more difficult task than you might imagine given that I’ve been her dominant, if unrequited, lover for the last eighteen months, finding it hard to let her suffer.Carol Ann Duffy’s Rapture proved a useful handbook. Sixty-two poems, meant to be read in sequence, cover the beginning, middle and end of an affair, Sapphic but that’s beside the point. Love is love, although I wonder about CAD’s former lover, now engaged elsewhere (one hopes), yet able to read this monument to their shared passion at any time of the day or night.
They were modern lovers:
We text, text, text
our significant words.
I re-read your first,
Your second, your third
look for your small xx
feeling absurd.
They were, thank goodness, uninhibited:
…We undressed,
Then dressed again in the gowns of the moon.
We knelt in the leaves,
Kissed, kissed; new words rustled nearby and we swooned.
And when it went wrong:
Learn from a stone, its heart-shape meaningless,
perfect with relentless cold; or from the bigger moon,
Implacably dissolving in the sky, or from the stars,
lifeless as Latin verbs…
Not that I wanted to poach anything from these powerful, unique reflections. Other than the idea that poetry and love might co-exist in A Stall Recovered. Not exactly an original idea but one which I could never have foreseen when I started writing. The first time I’ve felt grateful to a Poet Laureate.
