Friday Poem – 'Borders Gothic' by Polly Atkin

Seren Books

Oct 7

This week's Friday Poem is 'Borders Gothic' by Polly Atkin from her collection Much With Body. You can hear Polly chatting about her poetry in episode 1 of The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows a painting of a woman floating on her back in a blue green lake. The text reads: Much With Body. Polly Atkin.

Much With Body is a startlingly original second collection. The beauty of the Lake District is both balm and mirror, refracting pain and also soothing it with distraction. Much of the landscape is lakescape, giving the book a watery feel. Atkin also draws on the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, from a period late in her life when she was often ill. In common with the works of the Wordsworths, these poems share a quality of the metaphysical sublime. Their reverence for the natural world is an uneasy awe, contingent upon knowledge of our fragility and mortality.

Borders Gothic You will meet it as a corner you cannot turn, a gate flung open, a muffled struggle offroad, in the woody murk where the old track hums under mulch and brambles. You will be a traveller in the midst, alone. It will throw itself into your bag as a weight so heavy you cannot go on. It will block your path in the body of a bone white calf, or lady, eyes like swollen moons, its voice the splash of stones thrown in deep water. It will howl. It will sit at your feet and sink through the bog of the tarmac with a glug like a rock or a woman being dropped in a mire. It will cry three times from the shore. It will carry its coffin or its head or its child in its hands. It will follow you home. It will make you promises. You will try to rid your house of it – the radiant boy of it, heirloom drab of it – you will take it still screaming, to sea, and drown it, you will bury it day after day and find it always back where it started, its lamp casting light through every window, its small skull shrieking I know I know I know

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Episode 1 with Polly Atkin is available to listen to now.

https://open.spotify.com/show/6B7qqkSYira1spETGHp4Ml

Simply search 'The Seren Poetry Podcast' in your favourite podcast app and follow or subscribe to have all future editions delivered straight to your podcast feed. Available on all platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

Much With Body is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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