Poem of the Week: Dawn Wood

Published on Friday 9 January 2009 14:06

In her debut collection, Quarry (Templar Poetry, £9.99), Dawn Wood chooses some surprising subjects and makes wonderful connections. Her poems have a compact energy, and their subjects are freshly observed, as here, where painted cattle with their flowery names are taken into the living context of affection and cost.

On Visiting the Aberdeen-Angus Society

Headquarters in Perth

Big black squares on the boardroom walls.

Some painters seized on the undulations of the dewlap

and the brisket or met flat backs like horizons

with flocks of ducks, Queen's castles, waterfalls.

Notable animals, with names like found poems:

Blackbird, Magnolia, Reunion, and Paris,

the last of his line, whose stuffed head

hangs just inside the yellow door, but alive

and you would have sunk your debt-worried face

into his lived, real, warm pelt, in the year

of the short corn; you would have groomed him,

advertised him in a sea of straw,

you would have played these creatures

blunt notes from the belly of your black pipes.

You can borrow Quarry from the Scottish Poetry Library, which also lends by post. Tel: [phone], e-mail [e-mail] or visit www.spl.org.uk