Pillars of Salt by Judy Brown

LOUDNESS

After bad news, and its pulled-back fist,
flows in a sound that's not a sound. It's not
the brain's tide beating blood in propped
and shored-up workings, not the tapestried
texture of attended silence, the goffering
of quiet air folding and unfolding
in a house where nothing is happening.

After bad news, you tell the seconds,
hungry for the hurrying thunder
that never comes. Instead, a chemical fizz
fills the ears, before the descaling. An angel
rides the stirrup and anvil, spurring on the drum,
works like wild weather in wet sheets,
flapping and cracking the body's flat muscles.

Long after the bad news, when it's bedded in,
you notice most clearly the mild loudness
of the not-so-old man in the foot tunnel,
drumming and drumming and biting his mouth.
The posed coins in his blue cloth
are tiny, like a cast handful of earbones.

Judy Brown was born in Cheshire and has lived in Northumberland, Cumbria and Hong Kong. She now lives and works in London. In 2005 she won the Poetry Society's Hamish Canham Poetry Prize and in 2006 she received third prize in the Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition.

"...I liked Judy’s poems so much I published three of them in Magma 34, including Passenger. So I was very pleased to see she’s just published this pamphlet - an absolute steal at £3."
Tim Turnball - Magma Poetry

Reviews of Pillars of Salt

This title has not been reviewed yet.

Have you read Pillars of Salt by Judy Brown? - Be the first to write a review