Nicola Healey
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Losing ‘a sense sublime’: anosmia and poetry
William Wordsworth at 28, by William Shuter Nicola Healey Smell is arguably the poet’s sense, and the most poetic sense: it is the most mysterious, least understood sense; scent triggers […]
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‘Flute Lesson’: a poem by Nicola Healey
Flute Lesson Played with real feeling,my examiner wrote. I envied cellists and pianists –they didn’t require one breath to flowfrom their lungs, up tremulous throat, to mouth,through neatly-aligned embouchure to […]
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‘In and out of time’: on Declan Ryan’s ‘Five Leaves Left’
By Nicola Healey Crisis Actor by Declan Ryan was my favourite poetry collection of 2023 – I wrote on it at length for The London Magazine in July 2023, where […]
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‘You must live through hell’: On Survivor’s Notebook by Dan O’Brien
Nicola Healey Survivor’s Notebook (Acre, 2023) interrogates the aftermath of Dan O’Brien’s recovery from cancer. A memoiristic sequence of prose poems, it forms a companion to Our Cancers (Acre, 2021; […]
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A poem by Nicola Healey
Below is a poem from Nicola Healey’s debut pamphlet, A Newer Wilderness, published by Dare-Gale Press this month. Summer/Winter This brazen blue day is a dangerous scene.My mind clashes like […]
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‘The Ghost of Emily Hale Replies to T. S. Eliot’: a poem by Nicola Healey
The Ghost of Emily Hale Replies to T. S. Eliot ‘I see myself as a blood-sucker’– T. S. Eliot, in a letter to Emily Hale (2 August 1934) Our posthumous […]
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Three poems by Nicola Healey
Photo by Alicia Healey Veteran Beech ‘I see a picture that thy fate displays / And learn a lesson from thy destiny’ – John […]
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‘All our past lives’: on Emily Berry’s ‘Unexhausted Time’
Nicola Healey I have long admired the way Emily Berry’s poetry handles complex thought, not just feeling, within carefully considered sentences, her intelligent sensitivity to our interior […]
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Two poems by Nicola Healey
Anosmia ‘The natural world is not kind.’ – ‘How viruses shape the world’, The Economist (22nd August 2020) I live to smell the flowers. I’d […]
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The Lustre in Dullness: Philip Larkin, Sinéad Morrissey and Balance
© National Portrait Gallery, London Nicola Healey In Sinéad Morrissey’s collection On Balance (2017), Morrissey selectively quotes from Larkin’s ‘Born Yesterday’ (1954) as the epigraph to her […]
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Two poems by Nicola Healey
Six Months Away (After Robert Lowell) Discharged as ‘homeless’, then to a room that felt wilfully hostile (lurid curtains and bristling carpet squares), I was […]