POETIC DELIGHTS BY HELEN PLETTS-UK
1-roses in a ghost light
white on their fine stems, awake
in the garden; ghost ships afloat on a
dark ocean. They pull all the light
towards them and everything else that
sails is in darkness; the moorings
enveloped in inky paint. The hand
that paints now sleeps in white.
2-the sky is all silver flesh
along a pulled seam of grey. Opening in brightness
revealing the mangroves of winter trees,
unburdening into winter light; blackened boughs
trailing in everything white. In the last gap
between me and the ceiling, the window switches on
the flow of night, filling up the glass with darkness.
The glass is an aperture, closing fast; silver
slips into the thin body of a white eel, and swims
deliberately through
3-Black water
response song to Father’s House - To Helen by Ma Yongbo
I am on the step, I could still turn back,
even the three white gulls overhead have mastered flight,
beaks tucked into the white cloud,
they will know land again before it is darkest.
A still fragile light has never left here,
just as the new roses chose new year’s eve
to close this front door with brightness;
a once false start, and the years are reopening in winter red.
I know the coldness of country brooks, the ancient ways
woven into the brickwork before me,
the walls bulge under past human presence,
one cracked ceiling breaks above us;
terrifying black lines might also submerge us,
winter crawling in through the uninhabited seams
finds only a cold black hearth;
still white logs anticipate a match.
The paintings are warmth and colour,
here black is only an outline of a scottish peninsula,
where the sea still swims, in untroubled millennia.
We disturb the dust, the sleeping coastlines
falling into our arms like long lost children,
a white horse gallops over the dunes of Southwold,
we are both gathering sand around us,
as if we have just been here for years
and I am getting used to this.
We can’t be pillars of salt
worrying about rainfall,
I can’t be worried about you and I not being rainproof.
AUTHOR:
HELEN PLETTS-UK
Helen Pletts is a British poet based in Cambridge, whose work has been translated into Chinese, Bangla, Greek, Vietnamese, Serbian, Korean, Arabic, and Italian. She is the English co-translator of Chinese poet Ma Yongbo.
Helen's poetry has garnered significant recognition, including five shortlistings for the Bridport Poetry Prize (2018, 2019, 2022, 2023, 2024), two longlistings for The Rialto Nature & Place Prize (2018, 2022), a longlisting for the Ginkgo Prize (2019), a longlisting for the National Poetry Competition (2022), 2nd Prize in the Plaza Prose Poetry Competition (2022-23), and a shortlisting for the Plaza Prose Poetry Competition (2023-24).
Her three collections include the illustrated 'your eye protects the soft-toed snow drop', with Romit Berger (2022, ISBN 978-9-657-68177-0, Gama Poetry) and two early collections ‘Bottle bank' (2008 ISBN 978-1-84923-119-0), and ‘For the chiding dove' (2009, ISBN 978-1-84923-485-6) published by YWO/Legend Press with Arts Council support. Her prizewinning prose poetry features in The Plaza Prizes anthologies, and her eco-poetry appears in anthologies from Open Shutter Press and Fly on the Wall Press. Her work is widely published in journals such as International Times, Vox Populi, Ink Sweat and Tears, Aesthetica, Orbis, The Mackinaw, Cambridge Poetry, The Fenland Reed, Poetry on the Lake, Polismagazino.gr, europe
Publisher Kate Birch describes her work: “Helen’s very personal poetry reveals her strong connection to the natural world while also laying herself open emotionally. She writes with a thoughtful, mesmerising delicacy on love and death, on joy and need, illness and exhaustion.”
I enjoy this collection of poems—Helen has restored her individuality into different animals, plants, and even more tranquil scenes, and this process is neither passive nor deliberately planned. Clearly, this new type of relationship between humans and nature not only opens up a new world for us but also places us in the most fitting position within it. The translator’s non-subjective handling of language style, along with the retention of structures like post-positioned adverbs, allows Helen (who can also be seen as the modern human subject) to faithfully present her sense of restoration within the concise framework of Chinese. Their joint effort gives readers the trinitarian nature of the medium, that precious power which expands through the natural, spiritual, and linguistic ecologies—clear, silent, and growing. (Yan Rong, poet, PhD, professor)
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