Cover of What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo

This is the cover of my new book What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo, to be published by Seren this May. The book can be pre-ordered from amazon UK.

This collection contains fifty-two poems in the voice of the iconic Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Each poem bears the title of one of her paintings. Some are straightforward translations from painting to poem, others are parallels or version homages. Kahlo had a near-fatal bus accident as a teenager which left her in constant pain for the rest of her life. As well as suffering multiple fractures, a handrail pierced her abdomen and exited her vagina. She then married the muralist Diego Rivera, whom she loved but referred to as her second accident. More than just a verse biography, what I've tried to do is explore how she transformed disability and trauma into extraordinary art.


The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico),
Diego, Myself and Señor Xólotl

When you came back to me –

I painted a green day-hand and a brown night-hand
holding up Mexico, her canyons and deserts,
                 her candelabra cacti.

And we were there, embraced by our land.

You were my naked baby

who is reborn every minute with your third eye open.

Even our dog Señor Xólotl was curled

on the wrist of evening,

ready to bear our souls to the underworld if he had to.

Together, we stared out beyond the picture, saw

in the dark window a small woman in a wheelchair

cast out in a workshop far beyond the moon,

desperately mixing the colours of love
            until they vibrated –
watermelon greens, chilli reds, pumpkin orange.

She hurriedly drew the shattered arms

of the universe –

                             holding us all up

as if we were a mountain dripping roots and stones.

This is Kahlo's painting The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Diego, Myself and Señor Xólotl. Señor Xólotl was her favourite hairless dog, one of many creatures in her menagerie. He was named after the Aztec god of the underworld.

Sha'ar Poetry Festival Israel

Last October I attended the Sha'ar Poetry Festival in Tel Aviv and Jaffa; the theme was Poetry from the Conflict Zone. It was organised by the Helicon Poetry School and directed by the distinguished poet Amir Or. My visit was sponsored by Literature Across Frontiers. Most events were held in the atmospheric Arabic-Hebrew Theatre in Jaffa, and included music, theatre, a panel discussion, dance, video art and an amazing rap band called System Ali. Guest poets came mostly from conflict zones, including Jagbu Dorje Tsering from Tibet (exiled in France), Senadin Musabegovic from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chung Hee Moon from South Korea and Gearoid MacLochlainn from Northern Ireland. The local poets included some Palestinian poets, among them Samikh al-Qassem born in Galilee. Guests were given tours of Jerusalem, the Dead Sea and Galilee. This was my second visit to Jerusalem and the 'sea of death' in the Judean Desert. The view of the Old City in Jerusalem above is from the Mount of Olives.

These are 2,000 year-old olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane. 

The Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

The Via Dolorosa (look for the group carrying the cross above the umbrella!) It's an intense place.

System Ali would go down a storm here. I read 5 poems with the Hebrew translations projected behind. Video by Asher Gal.

From left to right: Cai Tianxin (China), Jangbu Dorje Tsering (Tibet), Chung Hee Moon (South Korea), Amir Or (Israel), Pascale Petit (UK), Senadin Musabegovic (Bosnia-Herzegovina), Nese Yasin (Cyprus), Robert Minhinnick (Wales), Gearoid Mac Lochlainn (Northern Ireland). Photo credit Dafna Kaplan.

A seasonal poem 'Hieroglyph Moth' from The Treekeeper's Tale

For years I'd kept a postcard of a tropical hieroglyph moth bought at the Natural History Museum in London. It gave me a particular feeling, those hieroglyph colours on its white furry wings:

As I was writing my last collection The Treekeeper's Tale and had already written two "moth" poems, 'Atlas Moth' and 'Moon Moths (in the Day Room)', I thought surely it's time for me to write that hieroglyph moth, so I did. The poem for me has some of the feeling I associate with the visual image, the colour language on those snow-wings, and the meaning is meant to be quite open-ended, though it makes me think of how I learnt English when I was seven, the newness of the language and the country (mid-Wales) I was having to adapt to from Paris. How hard I found it until someone gave me a picture dictionary. There were the English words below the pictures and after that it all came clear. The three moth poems are in The Treekeeper's Tale, along with other ice and snow poems 'Siberian Ice Maiden', 'Frozen Horses' and much else.

Hieroglyph Moth

When the white ermine wings

opened at night

like a book of frost

smoking in the dark,

I understood the colours of vowels

painted on moth fur –

the black, red, saffron signs

of a new language.

Antennae grew from my forehead,

my tongue was restless in its chrysalis.

I felt lift-off

as if my bones had melted.

I stepped out into the snow –

not even an exoskeleton to protect me

in this strange country.

Video of my poem What the Water Gave Me

Here's a video of me reading 'What the Water Gave Me (VI)' from my next collection What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo, to be published by Seren in May 2010. This was filmed at the Sha'ar International Poetry Festival in Israel by Asher Gal last October at the Hebrew and Arabic Theatre in Jaffa. There are six poems in the collection based on Kahlo's painting of that name, interwoven throughout the book. I'll post photos from the festival and of Israel soon.

In Kahlo's painting she is lying in her bath surrounded by scenes from her life and paintings. This sixth of my WtWGM poems is more a version than a literal interpretation.

Poetry from Art reading at Tate Modern

Poetry from Art: a public reading by poets on the Tate Modern course. 

Monday 23rd November, 6.45 – 8.45

This is my fourth year of tutoring poetry writing courses at Tate Modern and this year the course has expanded to three terms. This autumn term will culminate in a reading open to the public. 25 poets have been working in the magical setting of Tate Modern, when the galleries were quiet and closed to the public. They wrote poems in response to works from the permanent collections (including Anselm Kiefer's Palm Sunday), from current exhibitions (John Baldessari: Pure Beauty and Pop Life: Art in a Material World) and past exhibitions. You are invited to hear their poems in the unique surroundings of Tate Modern’s autumn exhibition John Baldessari: Pure Beauty.

Level 4, Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG

Admission free, booking essential as seating is limited 

For tickets call 020 7887 8888 or book online http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/talksdiscussions/20562.htm

                                Palm Sunday by Anselm Kiefer (Energy & Process)

                         Hotel International by Tracey Emin

                 Brain Cloud by John Baldessari

                  Untitled by Maurizio Cattelan (Pop Life)

Interview in Horizon Review & Poetry at Tate Modern

Issue 3 of Horizon Review has just gone online and includes Michelle McGrane's interview with me, Dreams, Spirits and Visions. Michelle also has two fine poems featured from her forthcoming collection The Suitable Girl which I highly recommend.

Last night was the first session of my Poetry from Art course at Tate Modern. Twenty-seven of us sat in Anselm Kiefer's installation 'Palm Sunday' in the Energy & Process collection and soaked up the uprooted palm tree and its thirty-nine vitrines. I can gaze and gaze into these and always see new things among the ghostly plants and pods bursting from cracked clay, smoke, earth, ash, ladders, flying clothes and scratched words. I handed out a hat containing lines from Paul Celan's poems (huge influence on Kiefer), carefully selected but picked at random to incorporate in a 5 minute quatrain, then asked everyone to introduce themselves by offering the group a gift line from their resulting quatrains. These were poems in themselves. After discussion of Celan's techniques (twisting language to say the unsayable, in his case the aftermath of the holocaust), everyone had ten minutes in which to respond to the installation in a poem, aided by selections from the list of gift lines.

The results were impressive and rather moving, as one by one, each participant stood in front of 'Palm Sunday' and read out their first drafts. The course is launched! I've been planning it for months and thrilled with the results so far, but it never fails to amaze me how people can write to order in such a short time. Perhaps pressure is the key. Next week we are in the John Baldessari: Pure Beauty exhibition and I'm plotting writing games for his extraordinary new ocean installation 'Brain/Cloud', if Tate confirm we can keep the AV on that evening. This is also where we will hold the public reading at the end of the course on November 23rd. Book early if you'd like to come and hear the poems written on the course, entry is free but seating limited.

I've encouraged the poets to email me their works in progress but guess I'll have to respond on the hoof as next Tuesday I'm off to Tel Aviv to take part in the ninth Sha'ar International Poetry Festival, and I get back on Sunday night, just before Week 3 in the Pop Life exhibition, and after that I'm off to do lots of things in the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, so an exciting time ahead.

Tezcatlipoca & Guest blog for Bernardine Evaristo

This week I'm delighted to be a guest on Bernardine Evaristo's blog. Bernardine's latest novel Blonde Roots made the Orange Prize Longlist, then was shortlisted for the Orange Youth Panel Award, which it won. My guest blog is titled A Suitcase-full of Hummingbirds and explores the relationship between images and my poems and how I draw on my training as an artist in my poetry. This image from my guest post of a suitcase-full of hummingbirds in pyjamas prompted me to write my poem 'The Strait-Jackets' in The Zoo Father.




One source of imagery for me has been Mexico, both Frida Kahlo and Aztec mythology. I love this animation of Tezcatlipoca the Aztec night jaguar/ trickster god, twin to the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl. I used Aztec mythology in my third collection The Huntress, all about my mother who suffered from severe mental illness and seemed to me as a child and teenager to be a powerful trickster, always changing faces, some quite terrifying. However, the fire/ice jaguar in this animation is a beautiful creature, and I hold on to the idea that there was some beauty within her under the terror.