A poem for International Women's Day

A light-hearted poem from my second collection, IN BETWEEN ANGELS AND ANIMALS, on International Womens Day

JOWL

What shall I do with this body they gave me,

so much my own, so intimate with me? – Osip Mandelstam

Your lipstick meanders

outside the line of your thinning lips.

You leave the house in your current state,

abandon your eyeliner flick;

your come-to-bed eyes

never-got-to-bed eyes.

Everyone knows a woman must

maintain her youthful good looks.

‘Muscle has memory’, you tell yourself,

panting on the treadmill,

willing your thighs to remember

they were flagrantly slimmer.

Are you two dress sizes

from happiness?

At least you feel no pressure

to schedule a vajazzle.

Everyone knows a woman must

maintain her youthful good looks.

You blend foundation into

sagging contours of your face,

wondering when exactly

your pores became craters.

Blusher is your best friend

now you’re blanched like a

bunch of asparagus spears.

Everyone knows a woman must

maintain her youthful good looks.

Will you ever reclaim that alchemy

when your dress expressed you perfectly?

Your jokes were funnier, your hair glossier:

your tresses billowed – now they’re flyaway.

You moved with élan on the dancefloor,

trod lightly, didn’t spill gravy.

Everyone knows a woman must

maintain her youthful good looks.

You will grow old gracefully

except grace is a myth;

the world ignores women

who slide into invisibility.

They already start to cut you off,

in pre-emptive glances at a watch.

So pop open the serum and primer,

remember to drink ten gallons of water,

learn how to be soignée

or choose opacity.

Because everyone knows a woman must

maintain her youthful good looks.

You who were always diffident

about the male gaze,

who never suspected those catcalls

were directed at you, can enjoy

keeping your thoughts intact;

no worries about being leered at,

nurture what is hidden,

focus on seeing anew.

Screw you.

© Emily Cullen

'Girl in Mirror', Roy Lichtenstein, 1964

On poet RS Thomas

One of my favourite columnists, the writer known as Barnaby ffrench, contributes an article to The Galway Advertiser each week, which elevates this free local, commercial paper to glorious heights. (Incidentally, the paper boasts some other wonderful journalists and includes fascinating articles on local and national history, etc). This week, in his ‘Through the Glass Darkly’ column, ffrench turned his attention to one of my favourite poets, the Welshman RS Thomas. One of the first poems I read by Thomas was ‘Sick Visits’. This poem literally stopped me in my tracks with its arresting imagery and the peculiar language the poet uses to describe his visits, as an Anglican parson, to the infirm, elderly women of his parish.

Poet, RS Thomas (1913-2000)

Sick Visits

They keep me sober,

The old ladies

Stiff in their beds,

Mostly with pale eyes

Wintering me.

Some are like blonde dolls,

Their joints twisted;

Life in its brief play

Was a bit rough.

Some fumble

With thick tongue for words

And are deaf;

Shouting their faint names

I listen:

They are far off,

The echoes return slow.

But without them,

Without the subdued light

Their smiles kindle,

I would have gone wild,

Drinking earth’s huge draughts
Of joy and woe.

RS Thomas

The artistic detachment required for the poet to manifest such stark, compelling phrases as ‘blonde dolls’ is offset by his attentive kindness to the women he describes. If, as the Russian formalists have argued, literature and art is created when ‘the familiar’ is defamiliarised’ in artful ways, then Thomas’s oeuvre is surely a case in point; his work transfigures the mundane with its startling imagery. The force of the poet’s humanity is powerfully felt in the last stanza where he discloses his debt to these women with gracious humility. Sometimes the 'subdued' illumination we need is kindled by unexpected sources. The poem demonstrates how we can reframe the world around us and make the best of every situation by looking with eyes of love and harnessing the transformative power of the imagination. It calls to mind Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘The Hospital’ in which the speaker ‘falls in love with the functional ward / Of a chest hospital’. On a linguistic level, I am struck by the syntactical skill of the opening lines where Thomas could have written ‘The old ladies / keep me sober’ but chose a more indirect approach instead, yielding a stronger impact and drawing the reader in. This deliberate ordering of words is reminiscent of W.H. Auden’s opening lines in his ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’: ‘About suffering they were never wrong, / the Old Masters’ (which is included in an earlier post on this blog). The vision of the old ladies ‘Wintering’ the poet is also quietly potent.

A chat with Niamh Boyce about poetry, motherhood, truth

I'm delighted and honoured to be interviewed by award-winning novelist and author of The Herbalist, Niamh Boyce on her blog. We had a fun and diverse chat about writing, motherhood, truth in poetry and imagining Yeats with leaking breast pads! Thank you Niamh! You can read our discussion here

Anatomy of a Genius - some gothic flash fiction to get you into Halloween mood

      I’ve been tuning up my gothic sensibility as Halloween rapidly approaches, and to help get into the mood, I’ve written a short piece of flash fiction which has just been published by The Galway Review. ‘Anatomy of a Genius’ is inspired by real events that took place in 1768 after the death of author, Laurence Sterne. 

Portrait of Laurence Sterne by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1760

      Body snatching by 'resurrectionists' or 'resurrection-men' was not outlawed until the Anatomy Act of 1832. 'Truth is certainly stranger than fiction' in this curious case of life imitating art. By way of a gloss, ‘Yorick’ is the name of the dead court jester whose skull is exhumed by the gravedigger in Act 5, Scene 1, of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The same name was used by Laurence Sterne in his novels Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey as the surname of one of the characters, a parson who is a humorous portrait of the author. Indeed, Parson Yorick is supposed to be descended from Shakespeare's Yorick. 

I hope you enjoy the piece which you can read here.

The couplet as platform for resistance for Afghan women

Imagine risking severe punishment or even your life for just two lines of poetry… Now visualise doing this, not just once, but on a weekly basis. Poetry has become a powerful vehicle of expression for the silenced women of Afghanistan and I was fascinated, recently, to learn about a tight form known as the landay. I confess that the only other poetic type I knew about from Central Asia was the ghazal (a relatively short form of no more than a dozen couplets, which originated in 10^th century Iran and often addresses themes of love) so I was intrigued to learn that the landay is a brief two-line poem, traditionally only performed orally. Each poem has twenty-two syllables: nine in the first line, thirteen in the second and it ends with the sound “ma” or “na.” Sometimes landays rhyme, but more often not. Quite different to the equally compact but even tighter haiku form (which originated in Japan, is typically made up of three lines of 5/7/5 syllables and often draws its power from contrasting the micro and macro on the theme of nature), the landay is driven by vital emotions of anger, heartache or love. Though this couplet dates back thousands of years, it has become a particularly potent lifeline and secretive form of rebellion for Afghan women within the climate of fundamentalist conservatism fostered by the Taliban. Female poetic self-expression, within this culture, implies dishonour and free will.

A Kabul-based female writers group, known as the Mirman Baheer literary society, is empowering women to share these couplets with each other and to resist the culture of muteness imposed by their male-dominated society. The pioneering Mirman Baheer group was founded by MP, Sahira Sharif, to enable Afghan women to communicate with each other and to express their deepest thoughts about their every day realities such as war, the Taliban, American soldiers, sexual oppression, drone strikes and military weapons, social media, love and sex. The groups members range from professional urban women to young girls in remote rural villages, many of whom are forced to participate in secret by phoning into group meetings. Speaking last month at London’s Southbank Poetry International weekend Sharif stated: “If women are writing poetry, it means they are risking their lives. In our community, if a woman writes some words, it is seen as stigmatising family honour. And that’s why she always tries to hide her name and her identity when writing poetry. But this poetry is much more powerful than the sword. It could be our best medium to fight what is going on.”

I was particularly struck by the poignant concision of the following poem:

When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers.


When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others.

Other examples included below were published in an article by Hannah Ellis-Petersen which appeared in The Guardian on 6 June 2015 and also in a feature by Lyse Doucet on the BBC news website, dated 21 October 2013. 

Some Contemporary Womens’ Landays:

You won’t let me go to school. I won’t become a doctor. 

Remember this. One day, you will be sick.

May God destroy the Taliban and end their wars.


They’ve made Afghan women into widows and whores.

Oh my God, all the warlords testing their weapons again
And earning a lot of money out of war - Dr. Masouda

Making love to an old man


Is like fucking a shrivelled cornstalk black with mould

My love gave his life for our homeland.
I'll sew his shroud with one strand of my hair.

You sold me to an old man, father


May god destroy your home; I was your daughter

When we read these landays we can appreciate that they are so much more than just two lines of text - they constitute crucial lifelines, acts of resistance, tools of coping, learning and surviving within a war-torn society. These micro-poems allow us to unpack so much about the every day lives of women in Afghanistan. They remind us, not only of all we take for granted, in our industrialised West, in relation to education, freedom of speech and poetry itself, but also of the unbroken, transformative power of this medium to condense and transmit vital truths that need to be articulated. 

You can read further about the history of the landay and many more fine examples of this art form in I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan, a collection translated into English by Eliza Griswold (who has helped to bring global attention to this poetry) and with photography by Seamus Murphy. 

32 Statements About Poetry by Marvin Bell

      1. Every poet is an experimentalist.

2. Learning to write is a simple process: read something, then write something; read something else, then write something else. And show in your writing what you have read.

3. There is no one way to write and no right way to write.

4. The good stuff and the bad stuff are all part of the stuff. No good stuff without bad stuff.

5. Learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, break the new rules.

6. You do not learn from work like yours as much as you learn from work unlike yours.

7. Originality is a new amalgam of influences.

8. Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate.

9. The I in the poem is not you but someone who knows a lot about you.

10. Autobiography rots.

11. A poem listens to itself as it goes.

12. It’s not what one begins with that matters; it’s the quality of attention paid to it thereafter.

13. Language is subjective and relative, but it also overlaps; get on with it.

14. Every free verse writer must reinvent free verse.

15. Prose is prose because of what it includes; poetry is poetry because of what it leaves out.

16. A short poem need not be small.

17. Rhyme and meter, too, can be experimental.

18. Poetry has content but is not strictly about its contents. A poem containing a tree may not be about a tree.

19. You need nothing more to write poems than bits of string and thread and some dust from under the bed.

20. At heart, poetic beauty is tautological: it defines its terms and exhausts them.

21. The penalty for education is self-consciousness. But it is too late for ignorance.

22. What they say “there are no words for”–that’s what poetry is for. Poetry uses words to go beyond words.

23. One does not learn by having a teacher do the work.

24. The dictionary is beautiful; for some poets, it’s enough.

25. Writing poetry is its own reward and needs no certification. Poetry, like water, seeks its own level.

26. A finished poem is also the draft of a later poem.

27. A poet sees the differences between his or her poems but a reader sees the similarities.

28. Poetry is a manifestation of more important things. On the one hand, it’s poetry! On the other, it’s just poetry.

29. Viewed in perspective, Parnassus is a very short mountain.

30. A good workshop continually signals that we are all in this together, teacher too.

31. This Depression Era jingle could be about writing poetry: Use it up / wear it out / make it do / or do without.

32. Art is a way of life, not a career.

Simple and tasty light veggie meal - Tomato, pesto and chive tart

The Blogosphere probably doesn’t need yet another foodie and I make no claim to be a culinary expert, but as a meat lover who regularly prepares veggie meals for my family (my husband is a ‘fussy vegetarian’ by his own admission) I have tweaked and fine-tuned my trove of vegetarian recipes and discovered a few ridiculously easy, nutritious and tasty meals along the way. This is one light meal I want to share which takes about 30 mins in total: (about 10 minutes to prepare and 20 mins in the oven). I may post a few more such recipes over the coming months if people find them useful. Enjoy!

Tomato, Pesto and Chive Tart

Serves 6

Ingredients

340g shortcrust pastry – use one of the 2 sheets in a ‘Jus Roll’ pack (puff pastry can also be used)

200ml tub of crème fraiche (full or half fat)

2 eggs

2 generous tbsp. green pesto

4-6 ripe tomatoes, sliced

cherry tomatoes, halved (optional)

quarter pack of feta cheese (optional)

snipped fresh chives

green salad to serve

1.     Preheat the oven to 220 C/fan 200 C. Roll out the pastry and use to line the base and sides of your oven tray/Swiss roll tin (about 9 x 13 inches).

2.     Mix the crème fraiche, eggs and pesto together then season. Pour this creamy mixture over the pastry. Scatter the tomatoes on top. My little boy loves to do this! You can also lay your cherry tomatoes in between - they look good mixed in with the regular tomatoes and always give a juicy kick. You don’t need to include feta if you’re not a fan but my family are cheese-lovers so I tend to  crumble feta into our meals a fair bit!

3.     Season and bake for 20 minutes until set.

4.     Toss on some chives and serve cut into big squares, warm or cold, with a green salad.