Dreaming of Yellow

There’s been a rising tide of poetry during these strange COVID-19 days of living a half-life. As we slowly re-emerge from home isolation, I keep returning to Anne Sexton‘s poem ‘Yellow.’ It’s my poetry equivalent to musical earworm. And it looks beautiful alongside Brett Whitely’s ‘Still Life with Banana’ don’t you think?

There have been some poetry blessings lately. A huge thanks to Denise O’Hagan for profiling four of my poems in The Blue Nib in April. I’m looking forward to receiving a hard copy in the post soon! Such a depth and wide geographic representation. I was also grateful to have a poem in Not Very Quiet – not exactly a theme, this time, but female poets responding to a new year and a new decade. Little did we know when submitting quite what 2020 would turn out to be. Thank you so much to editors Moya Pacey and Sandra Renew as well as producer Tikka Wilson. It was uplifting to hear all those strong female voices in the recordings from poets that made this edition unique. At the end of March, I also had three poems in The Glasgow Review of Books alongside Georgi Gill, Colin Bancroft and Shara McCallum– warmest thanks to poetry editor Samuel Tongue.

Some days I feel compelled to write poems about how I’m feeling, and as a record of things at this disjointed time. Some of them are quite surreal. Other days words completely refuse to materialise. This one is about family really — I’m missing my mother who is three hours north but there have been lots of phone calls, and a time will come soon when life will be yellow again.