Delighted to be Featured Writer in November's Federation of Writers (Scotland)'s Newsletter.
Featured Writer
This month we are delighted to welcome the winner of this year’s Alastair
Reid Poetry Pamphlet prize and co-curator of PoetryLit, Stephanie Green, as
our featured writer. As her biography shows, Stephanie has an excellent track
record as a writer and collaborator in poetic projects and has the distinction of
having been shortlisted for the Wigtown Poetry Prize this year as well. ‘The
Roider’, the poem she has chosen to share with newsmail readers, is one of
the poems in the prize-winning pamphlet: its visceral immediacy, economy of
language and the poignancy of its deeply moving ending amply demonstrate
the qualities of Stephanie’s writing which so impressed the Wigtown judges.
Biog.
Stephanie Green is Irish/English. Her pamphlets are ‘Glass Works’ short-listed
for the Callum McDonald Award, 2005, ‘Flout’ (HappenStance, 2015) and
‘Ortelius’ Sea-Monsters’ (Wigtown Festival Company, 2023), winner of the
Alastair Reid prize. She has collaborated with Sonja Heyer, Sound Artist,
creating poetry/sound walks: ‘Berlin Umbrella’ which appeared at StAnza,
2020 and ‘Rewilding’ (online at Writers’ Rebel) at the Orkney Nature Festival,
2023. She was shortlisted in the Wigtown main prize, 2023 and came 2nd in
the Poetry Wales Award, 2023. She co-curates ‘PoetryLit’ online, works as a
Dance reviewer and lives in Edinburgh. www.stephaniegreen.org.uk/
6
Roider
A dark red H – I once knew the word -
on the black funnels of whaling ships.
I pray your flesh, dark, red, will cure me,
but I must have nil by mouth,
strung up, fed with liquids like the gulps of sea
that swooshed through your baleen, a vast brush,
each cold, rubbery strand jammed tight,
trapping thousands of micro-organisms
as once every sensation, pulse of life,
filtered through my brain.
How many remembered now?
Synapses fizzling. Black-out.
Acrid smoke fluctuates, revealing
sunlit trees, as I walk through a wood
down to the beach holding my mother’s hand.
Who is the stranger who seems to know me
as she kisses my forehead? A young man
comes less often, and is impatient to be gone –
he seems familiar – one of my ship mates, perhaps -
who sniffs the kelp and salt on the wind
and hears, as I do, the call of the white seas.
Note: H stands for ‘hval’, Icelandic for whale.
This poem is taken from ‘Ortelius’ Sea-Monsters’ (published by Wigtown
Festival Company, 2023). It was the winner of the Alastair Reid pamphlet
prize. ‘The Roider’ was first published in the Rialto.
© Stephanie Green 2023
