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| Templar Poetry |
The Way I Dressed During the Revolution
Jane Weir
Jane Weir
In this assured first collection Jane Weir interrogates the
hazards, freedoms, sorrows and fears that shape the
geography of our inevitable revolutions. The host of
characters staged here - men, women and children, their
many faces in the crowd, confront the rhetorics of
convention and the moribund tyrannies of establishment;
discovering the agonies and the ecstasies threatened,
promised and occasionally given by change and renewal.
The dialogues and negotiations in these poems reveal
with an intense poetic insight both the power and the
powerlessness of the individual with a deftly struck
contemporary resonance. There isn't always a happy
ending here, but there are dollops of freedom, playful
asides, sensual accords, glitz and glamour on the way,
sustained by a visceral honesty. With an extensive
itinerary, from Belfast to Sardinia and beyond and a time
canvas that conflates centuries The Way I Dressed During
The Revolution is quite simply an astonishing
breathtaking debut.
hazards, freedoms, sorrows and fears that shape the
geography of our inevitable revolutions. The host of
characters staged here - men, women and children, their
many faces in the crowd, confront the rhetorics of
convention and the moribund tyrannies of establishment;
discovering the agonies and the ecstasies threatened,
promised and occasionally given by change and renewal.
The dialogues and negotiations in these poems reveal
with an intense poetic insight both the power and the
powerlessness of the individual with a deftly struck
contemporary resonance. There isn't always a happy
ending here, but there are dollops of freedom, playful
asides, sensual accords, glitz and glamour on the way,
sustained by a visceral honesty. With an extensive
itinerary, from Belfast to Sardinia and beyond and a time
canvas that conflates centuries The Way I Dressed During
The Revolution is quite simply an astonishing
breathtaking debut.
RECOVERING
When I cough no matter whether
it's short and raspy or endless
like a marching army on slush and ice,
you're attentive. You always get up,
answer with a look, always follow
up with deft touches.
Half awake I watch you light
our bedroom fire- the room's
Moscow in winter.
You pull up a stick chair, open
your serious book. I silhouette
the side of your face with my eyes
and think of Tolstoy,
your other family, our child
who's due in a month.
Now that I'm slowly getting better
you surprise me, etch my name
in ice on the window pane,
investing in a still from my favourite film.
Today you bring a wad
of sunflowers into the room.
I am full of sleep,
secretly you had positioned them
so that when I wake
I can observe them
from our bed, their petals tigering
through an alchemy of winter light.
If spies had pressed their faces
to the glass they would have seen us.
We were the two figures skating.
When I cough no matter whether
it's short and raspy or endless
like a marching army on slush and ice,
you're attentive. You always get up,
answer with a look, always follow
up with deft touches.
Half awake I watch you light
our bedroom fire- the room's
Moscow in winter.
You pull up a stick chair, open
your serious book. I silhouette
the side of your face with my eyes
and think of Tolstoy,
your other family, our child
who's due in a month.
Now that I'm slowly getting better
you surprise me, etch my name
in ice on the window pane,
investing in a still from my favourite film.
Today you bring a wad
of sunflowers into the room.
I am full of sleep,
secretly you had positioned them
so that when I wake
I can observe them
from our bed, their petals tigering
through an alchemy of winter light.
If spies had pressed their faces
to the glass they would have seen us.
We were the two figures skating.
HB £7.99
ISBN-13 978-0-9550023-2-8