'Josephine Dickinson's poems are exceptionally original. Hers is a vision edged with mystery and rendered with arresting, occasionally breathtaking craft. She bears, with no small authority, an air of independence reminiscent of Emily Dickinson' - Michael Donaghy.Josephine Dickinson, profoundly deaf from childhood, read classics at university, and then taught music for many years. She has had compositions performed in London, Devon and Orkney; and poems published in magazines. She lives with her husband in Cumbria, high in the Pennines, ‘penning a few sheep in a gap of cloud.’ Scarberry HillInside the house is silence. We sit and look across the room.You shift your elbows, smoke and tap your pipe by turns. I write my words in my little book. We look across the room, or read, or meet to talk from time to time. On Scarberry Hill the shadow under the white cloud spreads and rolls our way. It’s far away. Perhaps it won’t come down this far before it stops - above the white washed house, the tumbling river washing the valley below. Perhaps we have to wait until it passes over. Just a bit of rain, that’s all. And when it’s past, the sun will shine again. The wind sock pulls to east. It might yet rain. The moment stays. As tiny cars are shuttling, changing place across its darkening pastures, Scarberry Hill appears to frown. You’re shuffling papers round, I’m writing in my notebook still. It passes. On Scarberry Hill the blinding streaks of green flood out, the sky’s all sun, we wipe our glasses.
There is a rod of steel all the way through ‘Scarberry Hill’ that anchors it firmly in the real, solid, working world of the farmer. When it works it’s exhilarating and exhausting at the same time. Comparisons with Ted Hughes’ ‘Moortown’ poems are inevitable; but the technique seems to have a measure of Sharon Olds in it too. Really though, it’s all her own and very effective.
Steven Waling
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