Our New Poetries VII contributor this week is Phoebe Power. You can read her piece 'Installation for a New Baby', and find out some of Phoebe's thoughts on her selection for the anthology.
Phoebe Power received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2012 and a Northern Writers’ Award in 2014. A live version of her pamphlet, Harp Duet (Eyewear, 2016) was recently performed with electronic music, and her current project, Christl, is a collaboration between four artists in poetry, visual art and sound. Her first full collection is forthcoming from Carcanet. She lives in York.
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‘Clarsach’ and ‘Sleeping in his Harp-Case’ belong to a sequence with the central motif of the harp. They are dream-like imaginings of strange possibilities, where the boundary between the harp and the body is unclear. In these poems, the aural texture of the poems is vital towards rendering a sense of the physical, tangible body. Materiality is also key to poems which express a love of the visual. For example, ‘children’ is an ekphrastic poem which aims to re-create an encounter with a painting by Egon Schiele. ‘Installation for a New Baby’ is similarly based on an experience of looking, but in this case at an assemblage of everyday items not intended as an artwork.
In ‘Es war einmal’, I am interested in the possibilities of a condensed narrative. This poem retells the life-story of my Austrian grandmother, Christl, while ‘Villach’ records a journey in search of her hometown and relatives. Tone, syntax and prose rhythms are the material I am working with here. ‘Name’, ‘Austrian pastorals’ and ‘Epiphany Night’ are more fragmentary, intuitive gatherings of images. As some of the titles suggest, the latter poems in this selection are involved with the landscapes and language of Austria, in particular rural and religious culture.
Installation for a New Baby
HANNA LENA
29.02.2016
4285g
51cm
To celebrate the Hanna Lena we cut storks
from hardboard, painted white
with black outlines, orange legs and disney eyes.
We tie balloons from oberbank and peg a row
of weeny clothes, jeans and ’gro’s, nine
still-folded size 1 nappies, marked
each with a letter of her name.
We save soup cans, bean and veg tins
to clatter where they trail the grass,
pin a spray of rubber dummies and a
pillow, sagging rain. The doll of her
sits forward in a car-seat, up-raised
polyvinyl queen. Na ja, we marker-pen,
was kann es schöneres geben
als ein kleines neues Leben?
