Nicola Healey
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‘Midway’: a poem by Nicola Healey
Midway […] griefwolfed my heart and all that had stitched me into this lifecame undone that day. – Susan Musgrave, ‘The Broken Hieroglyphs of the Stars’ I am returning to a book I startedwhen you were still alive.Midway through, a numb foghangs over what’s left.The first half seems innocent now,absorbed through another’s eyes.It will need…
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‘Damson Cheese’: a poem by Nicola Healey
Damson Cheese I watched you stir a jam potwhen I came up to oven height.An alchemist’s work stationwould not have held more wonder.Testing to see if it was set, a hot droppedglob was a molten jewel. Your stern warnings not to touchcharged the air with a compulsionto touch, the way a museum sign does. The…
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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 buried memories (those magical Proustian bursts), so is a source of deep inspiration; a smell stimulates feeling, thought and vitality, acting on the brain more…
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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 air. In the school orchestraI mimed high C.I stopped my breath and hid beneaththe other flautists’ reach. I wanted my notes to rise – meldwith…
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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 my main focus was Ryan’s boxing poems. There was one poem that I didn’t explore there – its sensitive subject matter was such that it…
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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; reviewed by Wild Court here), which recorded how O’Brien and his wife, Jessica St. Clair, both developed cancer in close succession – possibly due to…
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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 a dropped cymbal.My skin, like all my clothes,doesn’t fit well. I go indoors but I can’t shake myselfand the sun still glowers:Enjoy me, make the…
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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 letters to the world hang oncurious computers everywhere, like Twitter statements.I was requested to write mine by Princetonwhen I gave them all your letters. It…
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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 Clare, ‘To a Fallen Elm’ We call it ‘the tree field’, where my sister and I walk her dog. Surrounded by nothing stands a…
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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 lives, and her attention to the idiosyncratic, often overlooked, details of living, but Unexhausted Time (Faber, 2022) is my favourite of her collections to date.…
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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 measured out my day in scents and my life in garden fragrances: yellow primroses in March, white lilacs in May, philadelphus in June. All that…
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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 titular poem, ‘On Balance’.[1] She decontextualises his lines, however, to bolster her poem’s feminist drive, distorting Larkin’s poem and misleading the reader from the outset.…
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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 permanently provisional. The whole city became a hospital, a seeping infiltration. Outside was fleetingly better than a condemning four-walled stare. My fat fire door would…