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the poet
Nine out of ten solo poetry titles by prize-winning poet, fiction writer, journalist and photographer Sarah James have either won or been shortlisted/highly commended for various awards. Her latest collection, Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic scooped the CP Aware Award Prize for Poetry in 2021, and was highly commended in The Forward Prizes. Her newest collection, Darling Blue, due out in 2025, combines ekphrastic poems with a book-length fictional poetry narrative – winning Sarah the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize 2024. Author of a poetry-play, an ACE-funded multi-media hypertext poetry narrative > Room, and two novellas, Sarah also runs V. Press publishing.
the poems
An Atlas of Tears
Inspired by Rose-Lynn Fisher’s work
Under the microscope, entire landscapes contained
in every dried human tear. In these photos, grief’s
saline secretions are aerial shots of flooded cities.
Tears of change are a slum, overpopulated
with flimsy dwellings. Basal drops are quake-lines
from the cracked mud of a parched riverbed.
Each one is mapped as art, but doesn’t chart
what happens when ducts block. Nothing explains
the tears that won’t flow, or how a body of skin
and bones can carry years of non-stop rain inside,
yet still remain whole. It wasn’t always like this.
A few decades ago, we had cradles of ice
for our polar cubs, summer skies counterbalanced
by the days of snow. Who’s to say which tears
would shine brighter – mine or the mother bear’s,
trekking for miles across our thinning seasons?
My son’s room
I can only hear birds,
from his open window
but their song rises
and falls on his sleeping breath.
Like this, love is peaceful.
Sure in its presence –
listened to and witnessed.
A hymn that silence turns
to prayer once he’s not
there. Birds sing on
through the opened glass.
Air moves within.
The empty-bellied note
that settles
on my outstretched finger
has a mother’s hunger.
It feeds on the crumbs
of my heart.
The River Girl
After The Lady of Shalott
by John William Waterhouse
Maybe her real curse is Lancelot himself, glimpsed
unwillingly. The glass in her mirror shatters
like a Cinderella slipper forced onto the wrong foot.
Or so, the myth goes … She steps into her boat
in a dress of innocence that’s bridal white.
Sitting upright, her gaze is alive, but eyes fixed
on something out of sight. She has no oars
or means of steering, only her arms outstretched
slightly at her sides like swan-wings half-prepared
to fly or glide. Except, she doesn’t move;
she’s as still as a dead Viking on a funeral pyre
about to be lit and set adrift. As yet, the only flames
are a lantern at the golden prow and one taper candle,
another two having blown to smoke. But her hair
is ready to set fire to the autumn trees in a slow blaze
across this whole landscape. Her tapestried quilt
drapes in the water. Already, a layer of colour
from the tales patterned by that fabric
has slipped onto the river’s surface, like a dream
which has lost both shape and meaning but not
its fluidity. If she were to dive in now to swim
for shore, she’d arrive with a new life dyed
into the white of her clinging dress – dripping
weed, yes, but also the taste of fresh flowing rain
and how brightly sunlight shines through
when freed from a cracked mirror.
Publishing credits
All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb