“…a poem is a way of happening, a mouth.” (W.H.Auden)
Wuthering Heights
for Kraige Trueman
It’s never far away from me despite being
no longer young or romantic and when
Dora runs free across the pergola she
reminds me more of Kate Bush than a
Norwegian Forest Cat. It was the darkness
that captured me years ago: Lockwood in
his oaken Georgian bed the sliding panels
like a coffin. Cathy calling outside, the
cruelty of her arm sawn across the glass.
Even in my dreams last night when Liadain
came down to the basement frantic to tell
me that someone was calling and knocking
in the back garden outside my casement
window and even in my stark terror when I
lifted my head from under the covers in
the lightening room – which I could see
was empty now except for Dora’s shaggy
silhouette – I couldn’t help asking the
dream-Liadain even though I knew the real
Liadain was still asleep in her own room
was it like Wuthering Heights?
Martina Evans grew up in County Cork and trained in Dublin as a radiographer before moving to London in 1988. She is the author of twelve books poetry and prose. She has won several awards including the Premio Ciampi International Prize for Poetry in 2011. Now We Can Talk Openly About Men (Carcanet 2018) was shortlisted for the 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award, the Pigott Poetry Prize and the Roehampton Poetry Prize and was an Observer, TLS and Irish Times Book of the Year in 2018. Mountainy Men, a narrative poem, was the recipient of a Grants for the Arts Award in 2015. She is a Royal Literary Fund Advisory Fellow and is an Irish Times poetry critic. Her new collection American Mules is forthcoming with Carcanet in April 2021.
