Pascale Petit’s ‘The Second Husband’

The Second Husband
Pascale Petit
 
After what feels like two thousand years
     I find you under the permafrost.
I dig and dig until your twelve frozen horses
     spring up in their red felt masks and ibex horns.
You must have ridden each one to heaven

in your high headdress with its gold foil frieze
     of Celestial Mountains, your crest
of winged snow leopards and antlered wolves
     with eagle tines. When you ask me to stay
I know this is the afterlife.
 
 
 
from The Treekeeper’s Tale
 

Listen to Pascale reading  ‘The Second Husband’ here.

T S Eliot

” … This is one moment
But know that another
Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy …”

– T S Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

An interview with Megan Hall

 
Megan Hall was born and grew up in Cape Town and studied at the University of Cape Town.  She has worked in the publishing industry since 1995 and is currently publishing manager for dictionaries and school literature in English at Oxford University Press Southern Africa.

Her poetry has appeared in various local journals since 1991, as well as in the school anthology Worldscapes.  A short story was published in Botsotso 14 and an essay of hers was included in Leaves to a Tree, edited by Robin Malan.  She has also edited poetry and fiction for New Contrast and taken part in both Young Voices (the 2004 South African Online Writers’ Conference hosted by LitNet) and the 2005 Crossing Borders programme, a British Council-sponsored writer’s mentorship.  She lives in Cape Town with her partner, daughter and cat.

Read the interview here.

Read Megan’s poems on the Poetry International Web.

Postcript:  Since our interview, Megan’s collection, Fourth Child (Modjaji Books, 2007), has been awarded the 2008 Ingrid Jonker Prize for the best debut collection of Afrikaans or English poetry.

Naomi Shihab Nye

 
Reading Rumi in an Uncertain World #1 (with Robert Bly)

Reading Rumi in an Uncertain World #2 (with Robert Bly)

“Boy and Mom at the Nutcracker Ballet”

“The Art of Disappearing”

“For Mohammed Zeid of Gaza, age 15”.

Between the lines: Andrew Motion’s advice to the next poet laureate

“Be warned. If you interpret the job as I have done – that being poet laureate means not just writing poems but trying to champion poetry – you will find there is an unimaginable difference between leading a relatively private life and the public life suddenly required of you.”

Andrew Motion speaks to Charlotte Higgins here.

Read The Guardian article, ‘Poet sought for job quite fraught. Critics may make merry; at least the pay is sherry’, by Mark Brown here.

Browse through The Poetry Archive.

Colette

“You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.”

– Colette

Amédée Ozenfant

 
“Simplification, distortion of forms, and modifications of natural appearances, are ways of arriving at intense expressiveness of form.”

– Amédée Ozenfant

Helen Ivory’s ‘Office Block’

  
Helen Ivory won an Eric Gregory Award in 1999.  Her second Bloodaxe collection, The Dog in the Sky, was published in 2006.  She is an editor for the Poetry Archive, a judge for the PBS Pamphlet choice and teaches creative writing at UEA, at Norwich University College of the Arts and for the Arvon Foundation.

  
 
Office Block
Helen Ivory
  
The palace of windows is burning tonight
and the city is the colour of amber.
  
Firemen scale the impossible walls
to rescue rats and spiders.
  
The staircase that curls like a shell
makes a fine spectacle
  
as if this were the flaming stairway
to all hell itself.
  
To the very hell that turns glass
into piles of sand that must be swept
  
and swept again, and still again
forever through windy corridors.
  

  
 
Order The Dog in the Sky (Bloodaxe, 2006) here.

Six Seren poets read

 
Sarah Corbett reads “Killer Whales on a Beach in Fiji” from Other Beasts here.

Kathryn Simmonds reads “The Woman Who Worries Herself to Death” from Sunday at the Skin Launderette here.

Sheenagh Pugh reads “Webcam Sonnet 4: Now” from Long Haul Travellers here.

Carol Rumens reads “Women, Veiled” from Blind Spots here.

Robert Seatter reads “Learning Happiness” from Travelling to the Fish Orchards here.

Paul Henry reads “Daylight Robbery” from Captive Audience and “The Black Guitar” from Ingrid’s Husband here.

Mary Oliver

“Dancing happens not only with the body but with the mind.  What you write down on the page, your succession of words, is the music of the dance.”

– Mary Oliver