Liz Berry's first book of poems, 'Black Country' (Chatto 2014), described as a ‘sooty, soaring hymn to her native West Midlands’ (Guardian) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, received a Somerset Maugham Award and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award and Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2014. Liz's pamphlet 'The Republic of Motherhood' (Chatto, 2018) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice and the title poem won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2018. A new book of her collaboration with photographer Tom Hicks will be published by Hercules Editions in 2021.
'Blue Heaven' is what we need this morning and every morning, a prayer to the past but also a poem to the bustling, vibrant, tragic, temporary blast that is the human spirit, that is love. Liz Berry is a fine poet (she wouldn't be in the Backroom, otherwise) but she is also an ecstatic poet, so let us enjoy this moment of fierce reflection and joy, inspired by one of the photographs in her new collaboration.
Blue Heaven
Our poem which art in blue heaven,
give us this morning,
daffodils spilling Spring's song like yolk,
moss sporing on the guttering, snug
for wet-the-beds; jenny-wren and weeping birch
watching over us, our unanswered emails
and half-built Lego palaces, milk cups
and toast crumbs, photographs of us
in the nineties, drunk and so in love
we look like children.
Give us griefs and small kindnesses,
wunce apon a time in clumsy boy's hand
on the back of a phone bill,
library books and Germolene, sanitary towels
soaked with clotted rubies,
pyjamas shed beneath the bunkbeds
like adder skins, money spiders, stories,
the nights we touch in darkness
with that wild honeymilk of recognition.
Tenderise our hearts to all that is holy:
the dog and her blanket, the playgroup collage,
and forgive us our trespasses -
pulling tight the shutters on our hearts
when others are knocking,
cussing in the night when we stumble to the cot.
Teach us to love each other as the tree loves the rain,
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