the book you were reading called Night stillfly-leaved to your fingers, the bedsidelight casting shadows like bison running at fullstretch for centuries now, you know of courseyou have been dreaming of the cave’s widemouth and a small boat negotiatingthe underground stream to its receding source:you have the word bark on your tongue,the root of it twisted and solid in the shifty roomas the thick of the current, the needlepointeye of the creature in the eye of the hunt, or the storm.
Waking,
Jane Griffiths
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“Waking,” from LITTLE SILVER: by Jane Griffiths.
Published by Bloodaxe Books on December 6, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by Jane Griffiths.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Jane Griffiths was born in Exeter in 1970, and brought up in Holland and Devon. After reading English at Oxford, where her poem ‘The House’ won the Newdigate Prize, she worked as a book-binder in London and Norfolk. Returning to Oxford, she completed her doctorate on the Tudor poet John Skelton and worked on the Oxford English Dictionary for two years. After teaching English Literature at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and then at the universities of Edinburgh and Bristol, she now teaches at Wadham College, Oxford, and is literary editor of the Oxford Magazine. She won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1996. Her book Another Country: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), which included a new collection, Eclogue Over Merlin Street (2008), together with large selections from her previous two Bloodaxe collections, A Grip on Thin Air (2000) and Icarus on Earth (2005), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her later collections from Bloodaxe are Terrestrial Variations (2012), Silent in Finisterre (2017), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and Little Silver (2022). She co-edited the study Architectural Space and the Imagination: Houses in Literature and Art from Classical to Contemporary (Palgrave, 2020) with Adam Hanna.
"Mesmerizing and cinematic, standout pieces such as 'The Drowning at Porthcurno' prove Griffith’s power as a natural storyteller. The reader instantly relaxes into the dexterous fingers of a poetical grasp so sensitive and assured, her academic, literary and lexicographical credentials seem hardly necessary blurb... Griffiths maintains a deft maturity throughout, and a steady reflexive gaze on the creative process, tying her personal narrative to broader and deeper human themes."
— Karen Smith, ARTEMISpoetry, on Little Silver
"Little Silver is a Janus-faced book, concerned with boundaries between the real and imagined, life and death, past and present."
— Francesca Peacock, Poetry London
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