Jane Lovell

Jane Lovell’s “poems unmoor us, find beauty and strangeness in the everyday” (Helen Mort). Metastatic is available to buy here.

Jane Lovell is an award-winning poet whose work focuses on our relationship with the planet and its wildlife. She has been widely published in journals and anthologies in the UK and US.

She has won the Flambard Prize (2015), the Wigtown Prize (2018) and the Geoff Stevens Memorial Prize (2020) and has been shortlisted for several other literary awards including the Basil Bunting Prize, the Robert Graves Prize and Periplum Book Award.

Publications include Metastatic, One Tree, Forbidden and This Tilting Earth. Her prize-winning collection, The God of Lost Ways, has just been published by Indigo Dreams Press.

Jane also writes for Dark Mountain, Elementum Journal and Photographers Against Wildlife Crime.
She lives in Kent and is Writer-in-Residence at Rye Harbour Nature Reserve.

More information can be found at  https://janelovellpoetry.co.uk.

Birdsong
Even the cup in your hand
assumes a strange longevity,

cup, cupboard, carpet,
the paintings you restored
and hung along the wall;

outside, the fallen plum
still survives,
the garden a green cave beneath it.

The world has shrunk away,
moves in different realities;

our life has shucked its skin,
we are already ghosts.

Birds trapped outside the windows
battle the grey dawn each morning;

I lie and listen to you breathe,
ragged wings fixed to hollow bones.

I cannot fly this.

Sometimes it seems it’s just me
and those birds;

all that bird song, so much life.

 

One day the rain

One day the rain, roaring in
upon a rogue wind, bewildering
the landscape while you stand dismayed
at grass grown tall and seeded,
berries splitting on the vine, thickets
of fireweed,

that rain, the taste of it,
its isolating world,
will be your last;

your space, your time
will be defined by nylon screens,
relentless light, the wheeling of machines
back and fore,

an empty chair
and how are you today?

Things to consider:
          the neon mountain range you know
          as the tremor of your tired heart
a tiny paper cup
swallow these, drink this
          a button to press if there’s anything
          you need.

She speaks again and you recall
something illuminated by the light
of dry days
grass blowing in a hot dusk
the shiver of it in long shadows

that blackbird chortling regardless
of his dried dead young

something illuminated by that low sun
something there in all those gone-days.

Remember one morning you walked
on the dew-soaked grass
before the heat
before anyone else was awake

just you out there, and the blackbird

god we could do with some rain