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Lisa Dart
Lisa Dart - a new addition to our list of published poets with her exciting pamphlet the self in a photograph. Lisa has published poetry in a number of journals and has read her poetry in England, America and Greece. She was runner up for the prestigious Grolier Poetry Prize in America in 2005. She is studying for a doctorate in Post-modernism & poetry at the University of Sussex.
publication:
the self in a photograph
Lisa's poems present stunning moments from a lived life in an eloquent language that penetrates our own.
Andrea Hollander Budy
The Hour of the Wolf from the self in a photograph
The hour between night and dawn, when most people die, when sleep
is the deepest, when nightmares are most real. Ingmar Bergman
Sleepless 5am.
I'm looking at a postcard.
Trees, lamp posts,
black and sentinel, stare back
as the river's mist
creeps into the threat of distances.
I look and shiver in this almost dawn,
what draws me to this picture?
The two faceless figures
who will never turn round, their unforgiving backs?
Dreamlike, always unknown,
caught with ghostly blurs of breath on hard-frost ground.
One man stands motionless
(though there's a swell to the wind)
as if he's caught, suddenly,
slower, smaller, hunched against the cold,
an older self, who shuffles on ahead.
What obsesses us about a place
real or imagined,
is a memory, dream, or what we sense
will come. In this November hour
as you still sleep
I stare again at the wall, the river,
autumn's thinning out of trees.
What haunts me in this postcard:
light that startles as it brightens
beyond the cut of shadows,
the scatter fall of leaves.