Amy WilcocksonComments Off on BARS Open Fellowship 2025 awarded to Dr Christina Morin
In addition to our existing funding schemes, BARS launched a new initiative in 2024: the Open Fellowship, which is available to scholars at any career stage undertaking exceptional work at the forefront of Romantic studies.
We are thrilled to announce that the recipient of the second BARS Open Fellowship is Dr Christina Morin. Christina’s project is titled ‘Irish Gothic in the Global Nineteenth Century’.
Christina Morin is Professor in English and Assistant Dean of Research for the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Limerick. She is the author of The Gothic Novel in Ireland, c. 1760-1829 (2018) and Charles Robert Maturin and the Haunting of Irish Romantic Fiction (2011), and co-editor of the collections Traveling Irishness in the Long Nineteenth Century (with Marguérite Corporaal, 2017) and Irish Gothics: Genres, Forms, Modes and Traditions (with Niall Gillespie, 2014). Recent publications include a special issue of the Irish University Review on ‘Irish Gothic Studies Today’ (2023; co-edited with Ellen Scheible) and Irish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (2023; co-edited with Jarlath Killeen). Tina is Chair of the International Association of Irish Literatures (IASIL) and co-editor of Eighteenth-Century Ireland. You can find Tina on BlueSky @drtinamorin.bsky.social.
Click here for more information on the BARS Open Fellowship scheme.
Amy WilcocksonComments Off on BARS President’s Fellowship 2025 awarded to Dr Suchitra Choudhury
In June 2020, the British Association for Romantic Studies announced its unequivocal support of the Black community, its condemnation of all forms of racism and its commitment to practical action. In response to the enduring and systemic damage caused by racism, the BARS Executive commenced a programme of initiatives focused on the histories and literatures of People of Colour. Among these initiatives is the BARS President’s Fellowship.
We are delighted to announce that the recipient of the BARS President’s Fellowship 2025 is Dr Suchitra Choudhury. Suchitra's project is titled ‘‘Thingy Romanticism: Commodities from India in Visual Satire and Literature’.
Dr Suchitra Choudhury is a Researcher Affiliate at the University of Glasgow. Her monograph Textile Orientalisms: Cashmere and Paisley Shawls in British Literature and Culture was published with Ohio University Press (2023). While it investigates how Romantic-period authors such as Eizabeth Inchbald, Walter Scott, and Jane Austen engaged with India, its chapter focussing on the Scottish-Canadian writer Frederick Niven received an Honorary Mention in Jack Medal Prize by the International Association for the Study of Scottish Literatures (IASSL). Suchitra’s wider interest approaches the display of subcontinental objects in museums. Her current research includes book-length projects on shawls in art, and India in Scottish literature.
Click here for more information on the BARS President’s Fellowship scheme.
Amy WilcocksonComments Off on Incoming BARS Digital Events Officer
We received a number of very high quality applications for the BARS Digital Events Officer position for the next election cycle. The Executive Committee are delighted to announce that the incoming Digital Events Officer is:
Dr Roslyn Joy Irving
Roslyn Joy Irving completed her PhD at the University of Liverpool and Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. Her research explored method and literary historiography through Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791). Roslyn's postdoctoral project focuses on topographical poetics from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. She is currently based at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz.
The BARS Digital Events Officer will take the lead in co-ordinating our ongoing series of digital panels and roundtables and to contribute to the Exec’s future planning around digital engagement. The Digital Events Officer’s primary responsibility is to be the lead organiser for a regular series of digital events, which can include panels and roundtables solicited via calls issued to the BARS membership as well as collaborations with partners and directly programmed events. BARS Digital Events seek to include a diverse range of voices; all line-ups must feature at least one postgraduate or early career scholar.
Keep an eye on the BARS Blog and social media pages for calls for future Digital Events.
Adam NeikirkComments Off on CFP: Plants and Their Perceptions: Vegetal Agency in the Global Eighteenth Century
Eighteenth-Century Plant Studies
This projected volume is a collection of interdisciplinary humanities essays on how plants were perceived, represented and understood in the long eighteenth century, with special attention to new ways in which texts from this period can be discussed and understood in the light of twenty-first century advances in plant sciences, plant studies, and the philosophy of plants.
Deadlines: Proposals and abstracts for essays of between 5,000-7,000 words by 15th March 2025 (full essays by 31st December 2025).
For this volume we seek new and current work which puts eighteenth-century plants, as represented by word and picture, under the lens of any aspect of Plant Studies and the ‘vegetal turn.’ We welcome work which understands vegetal life not as a passive commodity for human use, but as being – in Michael Marder’s words – ‘coextensive with a distinct subjectivity with which we might engage’ (Plant Thinking, 2013: 8). Famous stories of European plant discoveries and exploitation – such as that of Captain Bligh’s breadfruit and of deforestation for naval defence – have had some scholarly attention, as has Enlightenment categorisation and instrumentation of plant life, and there has also been attention to the contributions of female botanists in the period, but we are soliciting work which is energised by the kinds of inversions and revisions suggested by thinking through plants and their kinds of agency.
The projected volume is a collection of interdisciplinary essays on how plants were perceived, represented and understood in the long eighteenth century, with special attention to new ways in which texts from this period can be discussed and understood in the light of twenty-first century advances in plant sciences and the philosophy of plants. If the long eighteenth century was really the era in which a plant came to be seen, understood, named binomially, and categorised as an ’efficient assemblage of interlocked cellular constituents’ (Ryan, Plants in Contemporary Poetry, 2018: 67), how do the texts discussed in this volume demonstrate, refute or undermine that claim?
Plants and Their Perceptions: Vegetal Agency in the Global Eighteenth Century
Further information:
We are open to any work which investigates primary material from the long eighteenth century (1660-1832) in the light of recent plant studies and/or vegetal agency. Essays are welcome which may encompass form, content or both, and also those which might ally any other fertile critical perspective with Plant Studies. These may include in various degrees and combinations the following: decolonization; aesthetic or literary theory; eighteenth-century history, politics and culture; rhetoric and literary form; art methodologies and artistic practice; modern and/ or Enlightenment philosophy; network theory; ‘plant thinking’; feminism; ethnobotany; queer studies; posthumanism; plant personhood; individual author studies; vegetal geographies; transatlantic and/or global studies; and eco-criticism including ‘deep ecology.’ We seek work which is ready to make that shift in which what are taken as objects ‘might themselves be thought of as subjects,’ in Malcolm Miles’s useful formula (Eco-Aesthetics, 2014: 3).
A noteworthy feature of this book will be its inclusion of reproductions: the texts under discussion in each essay will be reproduced in the volume alongside them. These could include paintings, drawings, poems in their original publication format, reproductions of periodical pieces, photographs of eighteenth-century objects or artefacts, and more –we are happy to discuss all suggestions. We are already working with a scholarly press who has expressed strong interest in the project.
Adam NeikirkComments Off on CFP: 49th International Byron Conference
“The Years That Followed”: The Afterlives of Lord Byron
In the year after the poet’s bicentenary, the 2025 International Byron Conference to be held in Pisa (30 June – 5 July 2025) will focus on Byron’s richly inexhaustible legacy from the immediate aftermath of his death to the twenty-first century. The Conference aims to investigate Byron’s ideas about all kinds of futurity – historical, political, personal, and spiritual, among others – as well as the place he and his works have held in culture and literature since 1824, both in Britain and overseas. Byron’s long shadow touches many traditions: this Conference welcomes critical explorations of his legacy in all its transnational and interdisciplinary dimensions.
The Organising Committee invites paper proposals of 250 words, together with a short bionote (roughly 150 words), on topics including, but not necessarily limited to:
• Byronic prophesies and/or curses • Byron and/on Futurity • Byron and/on posterity • Byron and/on death • Byron and/on afterlife celebrity • Byron on the translation/reception/value of his own work • Byron and/on the future of politics • Byron and/on the future of Italy • Byron and/on the future of Greece • Byron and/on the future of Europe • Visions of the future in the Pisan Circle • Reactions to Byron’s death
• The editing of Byron’s poetry after his death • Writing the Poet’s lives: Byron and his biographers • Byron in world literature • Byronic heroes • Translating Byron • Anglo-Italian and Anglo-Greek Byron • Byron as a cultural icon • Byron in the media • Byron and/in music • Byron and Tuscany • Byron and Italian tourism
The Committee welcomes submissions for both individual 20-minute presentations and roundtable discussions. Roundtable session proposals should include a description of the topic as well as a list of participants (along with a short bionote for each participant).
For further information, including an extended version of the Call for Papers, General and Academic Program, Venue, and more, visit http://www.iabsconferencepisa2025.com
Amy WilcocksonComments Off on Call for Papers: 2025 Conference of the German Society for English Romanticism (GER)
2025 Conference of the German Society for English Romanticism (GER) Negotiations of Value in the Romantic Age 25-28 September 2025 Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg (Campus Erlangen)
Several scholars have proposed that the turn of the 19th century saw a paradigmatic shift in the understanding of the concept of value. In Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (2008), for instance, Mary Poovey argued that, during the 17th and well into the 18th century, aesthetic and economic conceptions of value were not yet seen as inherently opposed to each other. On the contrary, one of the functions particularly of what she refers to as ‘imaginative writing’ had been to convey the meaning(s) and mechanisms of the credit economy as it had gradually developed and gained in importance during the early modern age. With the economic discourse becoming more and more dominant in the growing consumer societies of the Western world, however, economic value began to be singled out. At the same time, those invested in the aesthetic and ethico-philosophical domains also aimed at distinguishing their respective disciplinary positions, including distinctive notions of what counted as valuable, as being of worth. According to James Thompson, from the 18th century, “the concept of value underwent profound transformation and was rearranged into the various humanistic, financial, and aesthetic discourses that we know today” (1). Accordingly, it is only at the beginning of the 19th century that the philosophical subdiscipline of axiology – the theory of value and valuation – began to take shape (cf. e.g. Krobath). At the same time, writers such as William Wordsworth developed a specific ‘Romantic ideology’ (McGann) of their own with which they sought to offer an alternative value system: literature was conceptualised as having a value that could not be measured by the logic of economic exchange. While these writers, especially in their poetological works, took pains to characterise Poetry – capital-lettered ‘Poetry’ was understood to include not only poetry in the narrow sense and imaginative literature as such, but also painting, sculpture, architecture and so forth – as elevated above materialistic concerns, they did not situate it beyond them in an absolute way either. After all, as P.B. Shelley famously declared, poets, as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, must aim at “true utility”. Poetry was meant to have its very own use value. In 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto (2018), Brian Massumi claims that “[t]he dominant notion of value in our epoch is economic” (5). If he is right and if it is also correct that the turn of the nineteenth century saw the irretrievable splitting apart of previously cohering conceptions of value, an understanding of the processes that led to and constituted this epistemic shift will indeed be crucial for locating ourselves in the present. Accordingly, the conference is inspired by a relatively recent approach in literary and cultural studies which, amongst other labels, has been named ‘economic criticism’1 and whose basic tenets and lines of investigation Ellen Grünkemeier, Nora Pleßke and Joanna Rostek suggest to be the following: Economic criticism (i) analyses how the economy and what is seen as its constitutive elements (e.g. money, consumption, economic agents) are represented in literature, film, visual arts, etc.; (ii) studies non-fiction about the economy (e.g. the foundational texts of classical political economy or Marxism) as primary literature; (iii) scrutinises activities and phenomena associated with the economy (e.g. shopping, work, class) through the methodologies of cultural and literary studies; (iv) investigates how economic frameworks influence the creation of literary and cultural products as well as the production of knowledge in academic disciplines; (v) explores points of convergence between terms, concepts, and methods of economics, literary, and cultural studies (e.g. circulation, representation, value, utility). (117)
However, precisely because the Romantic conjuncture is complex, it will not be enough to solely consider the literary and cultural as well as other domains through the lens of ‘the economy’ (which economic criticism does not intend anyway). Instead, the conference encourages a discussion about various discursive perspectives on value in the Romantic Age by way of different theoretical and methodological approaches. We invite you to submit proposals for 20-minute papers that shed light on all aspects that touch on the notion of value and help to explain its dissemination during the Romantic Age. Papers may address but are of course not limited to aspects regarding
the value of literature
negotiations of value in literary texts
the meaning and centrality of value in the economic discourse
the value(s) ascribed to the economy
political and politicised notions of value
philosophical, ethical, and/or religious conceptualisations of value
value(s) assigned to and associated with human beings, animals, plants, minerals, ‘Nature’
the value(s) of gender, race/ethnicity, class, age, (dis-)ability etc.
the value(s) of aesthetic, political, social etc. form (literary forms, but also forms of behaviour, architectural form, etc.)
the form of value
representational and/versus affective conceptualisations of value. Please send proposals of 300-500 words and a short biographical note to one of the local organisers by 15 January 2025: Gerold Sedlmayr (gerold.sedlmayr@fau.de), Kathrin Bethke (kathrin.bethke@fau.de) or Mona Kammer (mona.kammer@fau.de).
Works Cited: Grünkemeier, Ellen, Nora Pleßke, and Joanna Rostek. “The Value of Economic Criticism Reconsidered: Approaching Literature and Culture through the Lens of Economics”. Introduction. Proceedings 1 Cf. https://www.economic-criticism.de/. 3 Anglistentag 2017. Ed. Anne-Julia Zwierlein, Jochen Petzold, Katharina Boehm, and Martin Decker. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier (WVT), 2018, pp. 117-125. Krobath, Hermann T. (2009). Werte: Ein Streifzug durch die Philosophie. Königshausen & Neumann. Massumi, Brian. 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto. U of Minnesota P, 2018. McGann, Jerome J. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. U of Chicago P., 1983. Poovey, Mary. Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain. U of Chicago P, 2008. Thompson, James. Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel. 1996.
Amy WilcocksonComments Off on Call for Proposals: Forum for Modern Language Studies Anniversary Conference
14-15 July 2025, Parliament Hall, St Andrews
‘Tis sixty years since’
2025 marks sixty years since the founding of Forum for Modern Language Studies in 1965. To celebrate, review, and renew the founding mission, the General Editors of Forum are hosting an Anniversary Conference, inviting selected speakers from across the subject communities served by the journal to explore ‘sixty’ and ‘the sixties’ envisaged in their many dimensions from the mediaeval to the modern period.
To focus on sixty and sixties immediately challenges the draw of literary history to ends and beginnings, be it the fin-de-siècle or the year 1200, and provides opportunities for fresh perspectives and connections. For Walter Scott, sixty years defined limit of living generational memory. His Waverley narrates events from the Jacobite rebellion ‘sixty years since’, marking a generational turning point that requires the narration of the past. Sixties as decades often mark intensely productive apotheoses: the 1860s are a high point of European Realism (Germinie Lacerteux (1865), Crime and Punishment (1866), Education Sentimentale (1869)); the 1760s sees Rousseau’s major works: La Nouvelle Heloise (1761), Emile (1762), Confessions (completed 1769). The sixties also express the sense of change and conflict in texts ranging from Achebe’s ‘African Trilogy’ (1958-1964), to Grass’s ‘Danzig Trilogy’ (1959-63), to Angela Carter’s ‘Bristol Trilogy’ (1966-71).
In cultural and intellectual history more broadly, the various decades of the sixties emerge as pivotal moments: in literary theory, the sixties take us from Mythologies (1957) to The Death of the Author (1967), from Structuralist Anthropologies (1958) to Writing and Difference (1967); in an earlier age they produced the Geneva Bible (1560). Taking stock of the productivity, critical reflection and sense of new departures in various sixties leads us to reflect on whether these decades present moments in which a generation of authors can take stock on what has gone before. Do they come of age to reject it and start something new, or arrive sufficiently late in a century to complete its major projects?
And if the sixties as decades give birth to iconic works, they also launch individuals in Dante (c.1265), Lopa de Vega (1562), Shakespeare (c.1564), Mme de Staël (1766) as indicative influential figures. To mark ‘sixties’ is thus to think of the generations of writers they produced, and to reflect on the significance of ‘sixty’ for them, their oeuvres, and their place in literary and cultural history. And from births, to biographies: we think of authors such as Theodor Fontane (1819-1898) who began their literary career in or near their sixties, or literary characters in their sixties such as Fontane’s own literary mirror of himself, Dubslav Stechlin. Sixty as an interpretative lens invites us further to revisit the category of ‘maturity’, or the ‘late’ phase of an author’s work, as in Petrarch’s Seniles, Letters of Old Age, begun when the author was 57 and written throughout the 1360s.
The aim of this anniversary conference is thus to explore sixty and sixties for the wealth of ‘cross-fertilization’ and breadth of coverage that Forum set out to foster in its founding statement in 1965.
Proposals should include an indicative title, an abstract of 250 words, your name, and current contract information, and be sent to forum-60@st-andrews.ac.uk by end of November 2024. Further information on the subjects and languages covered by Forum is available at: https://academic.oup.com/fmls
Authors of selected proposals will present their work in a 20-minute paper scheduled in panels over two days on 14-15 July 2025 at the University of St Andrews. Financial support is available in the form of waived conference fee and subsidized accommodation for speakers, and a limited number of travel bursaries for which doctoral candidates can apply.
Two, peer-reviewed special issues emerging from the conference are planned for 2026-7 and 2027-28. There will also be the opportunity for contributors to act as guest editors/co-editors to further shape these issues. Forum has therefore made funding available for selected guest editors to host a workshop to bring their issue contributors together when papers are in full draft. Anniversary Editors will also benefit from the expertise of Forum’s general editors (Articles, Special Issues, Forum Prize) in final preparation stages. Colleagues are invited to indicate their interest in guest editing one of these special issues in the covering email with their abstract.
Amy WilcocksonComments Off on CFP – Before Earthrise: Global Imagining in Literature and Visual Culture, 1550-1968
Exeter College, University of Oxford, 24 June 2025
Keynote Speaker: Professor Ayesha Ramachandran (Yale University)
In a time of planetary crisis, our understanding of the earth as a whole is a matter of ecological and geopolitical consequence. What extinguished worldviews might be salvaged from the past, and (how) can these historical imaginings invigorate new ways of thinking the global? This one-day interdisciplinary conference will explore the theme of global imagining in literature and visual culture of the “modern age,” from the Copernican revolution up to the “earthrise” photographs of the 1960s, which captured a view of the earth from outer space for the first time. Taking as its focal point the idea and image of the terrestrial globe, the conference aims to investigate how and why artists, writers, and other thinkers imagined the earth as a whole before the age of space travel and neoliberal globalisation. We will look to past literary and artistic methods of imagining, representing, and (re)configuring the terrestrial globe across multiple chronological and cultural contexts, shedding new light on the ideological and philosophical stakes of global imagining and reassessing contemporary conceptions of the global.
Proposals may address the topic of “global imagining” in its broadest conception during the period 1550-1968. Proposals for contributions, in the form of 15-minute presentations, are welcomed from scholars at all career stages and across the humanities. Please submit 250-word paper proposals by 31 January 2025. Proposals can be sent via email to the conference organiser, Caroline Anjali Ritchie (caroline.ritchie@exeter.ox.ac.uk). Please include a 50-word bio
Adam NeikirkComments Off on Romantic Poets in the Wild #7: Linda Collins
This week we are delighted to feature the poetry of Linda Collins. A New Zealander, Linda has an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) with distinction from the University of East Anglia. She was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, runner-up in the Mslexia poetry contest, and a finalist in the Joy Harjo single poem contest judged by Pulitzer finalist dg nanouk okpik. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in bath magg, Lighthouse, Mslexia, and Cordite, among other; and is in anthologies including All Shall be Well: An Anthology of New Poems for Julian of Norwich (Amethyst Press) andA Palace of Verandas / Palácio das Varandas (Traça Editora, Portugal). Collins is also the author of a memoir, Loss Adjustment (Ethos Books Singapore; Awa Press NZ; and Beijing Guangchen, China), about the death by suicide of her 17-year-old daughter, who was herself an emerging poet (Voicing Suicide; Ekstasis Editions, Canada).
Her current writing projects include a lyric essay on displacement for a chapbook with Faction Press, Singapore; a collaborate poem to celebrate 10 years of Dunedin as a City of Literature; and a poem for an anthology of translation into te reo (the language of New Zealand's indigenous maori).
Linda Collins. Photo by Malcolm McLeod (Instagram @malpixo).
Her creative practice is informed by the line, "she do the bereaved in different voices", in Denise Riley's "A Part Song", within a framework of poetry that writes to and away from traumatic events. Collins' work is an inquiry into craft techniques and subject matter, including those of the Oulipo school, that create distance or intimacy with a reader, the tension of attraction and aversion within this, and how, in an age of overexposure, the quaint dance of reveal and conceal creates necessary space for a reader.
I was lucky enough to work closely with Linda on her manuscript A voiding in my role as an editor at Muscaliet Press (muscaliet.co.uk). Linda has a playful and lively attention to language and a sense for the properties of a poetic line that really come to the fore in this currently unpublished collection. The poems dance between a writerly joie de vivre and a sense of deep feeling, exemplifying, to my mind, Coleridge's idea that a really good poet needs both wit and sensibility. I regret that we have not yet been able to bring A voiding out for publication as a part of Muscaliet's award-winning chapbook series. However, I hope you will enjoy this selection of poems from A voiding.
things with feathers
My train delayed, I turn my back
on Woodbridge town centre, and set off along the riverside walk
in the hope
of revelling in my solitary self.
Broad-bottomed boats clink anchors like old wives
having a natter and a glass of prosecco. I wave, abstractly,
and around the corner in the distance there's a wave back
from a woman in a shocking
pink dress with feather boa trim, ballet slippers, a wand,
holding a box labelled Sleeping Beauty Costume, and at that fairy moment magicked
behind her come zombies and vampires,
oh, and a child with an axe through his head.
Sleeping Beauty in passing, in teacher voice
explains School Halloween charity walk. The children are quite safe.
Safe?! How do I proceed
through these lines of laughing nightmare-children?
A schoolboy Superman and his Robin rush up,
perhaps safety is reciprocal, a lone older woman
is quite safe; point excitedly to three fairies
by the reeds of the shore feeding white swans.
‘Those girls are swan-whisperers,’ they tell me with besotted awe. Fairies caress
white breasts at the heaving.
Teacher shouts, Hurry up. This way. The fairies are leaving.
Swans arch sleek necks
seeking last remains of Panko pixie dust. I brush something from the breast
of my velvet lapel.
A crumb? A tear? A feather?
I held a cygnet once.
to laugh like her
The wind is blowing a story shaking up your silence
scattering grains of black sand across the frame of memory
a girl in a pink vest, skipping, humming, laughing
child-pudgy fingers scoop white mussel shell
or is the child the wind the eye of it? the eye of the whirlwind
a whirling djinn of sand grains and shell bones
across frames, stills still grainy frames celluloid strips edged in black sand
the girl-djinn dancing laughing as waves clap the sands,
wave-mist rising to the space in between
sea tide sand & the safety of landfall
singing her laugh-song to nearby rocks
to waves wave in wave out all wave long
the wave length of the wave long & longer
into the crack into the hollows
into the shallows of all life’s rock hollows
hollows at the edge of the space
between life & death sea sandstone the girl falling away
& the djinn is laughing joy-laughter let loose from the breath
of her breathing the breath of her the filling of her hollow
the hollows of her clavicle heaving / laughing laughter, it will follow
to laugh like her open your mouth
feel the mist on your face the gritty sand
under your toes surrender to the sea depart the land
it is not submitting it is not losing
be part of it grow or dissolve in that power the heart of it
it is living in the in the midst of the missed
a child lost years now memory a swirl of mist
to laugh like her is to remember her
open your mouth allow the wound to weep
open your rictus mouth to the sky
you live still though you, too, will die
flowers losing their heads
In the cemetery, daffodils butter-dust
grass above a once-body,
nourish the remnants
of a ‘gone-too-soon’; nature so busy rephrasing
dreary ‘here lies’,
into an emo tune
for adolescence,
with a nod,
yeah,
to Evanesence.
.
Petals scatter pollen
in time to wind gusts,
in time to four time,
wild-flowers are wild, are my wild-child, they flourish,
they flourish untouched.
In the cemetery, a cold snap snaps them, yet
they spring up,
they spring up.
Stems bend toward their lost heads,
unfettered blooms bounce
on the once-body
in time to wind gusts;
broken they bust solo moves,
strobe floor aglow, butter-dust, butter-dust.
never leaving
The light linen curtains of summer have been drawn
in every room and secured together with clothes pegs.
Each bed is made, ready for arrival months or years
from now. The skirting has been sprayed for earwigs,
spider webs have been wiped away,
though all will come back when silence settles.
The tank water has been turned off and the last of it
dribbles into the sink. The fridge still hums,
the power stays on for the freezer’s bounty
of stewed rhubarb, vegetables from the garden,
bagged up, stiff, in a hope-chest prone to mould.
Your writing shed has been closed up,
sheaves of poem fragments filed under memories.
Copies of your books are already dusty, you leave them that way.
Suitcases have been dragged out to the car,
a last goodbye is said to the girl in school uniform
smiling aged fourteen in a photo above the TV,
where Tibetan prayer bells loll on a shelf
next to a souvenir from Raffles Hotel.
You tell her to look after the place,
its ghosts. The lock is turned at the back door,
the security camera captures you giving it the finger.
All the leave-takings of all the years
climb into the car with you,
they are eager for a change of scene.
The speckled thrush you called
Missus Busy-Body Thrush, found dead
six years ago in the driveway, nestles
in the passenger foot-well, quite happy.
Join us next time when we will feature something a little different: the Romantically-inspired sketches of artist Brenna Cameron Lopes. Visual media! Until then, stay frosty (but not too a-cold).
Xiaohu Jiang, The Late Eighteenth-Century Confluence of British=German Sentimental Literature: The Lessing Brothers, Henry Mackenzie, Goethe, and Jane Austen (Lexington, 2020)
