Sean Borodale

23RD JULY: NOISE & WASTE

Language: english
Translations: german (23. JULI: GERÄUSCH & ABFALL)

23RD JULY: NOISE & WASTE

Today the hive
is trying out its harmonics,

a weepy low fugue I think to burning sun.
The loss of flowers is overwhelming:

dry sheaths and packets
stapled onto brown skulls.

The nagging air swings gibbets of drought.
Some clumps of the world are barred,
The dump stinks in flowerbeds, weedbeds,
and the river's clogged two miles of hemlock rots.

Mangled carapaces fall out of air
skinny in their little traps of make-up.

A chimera of scrap parts.
Grass-blade emerald twisted.
Glitter paste of bumps & grazes.
The air's ears are traumatised,

and on the flames of the hour
just a whiff of decline,
just a whiff more.

The white dry heat jangles;
it's like a kiln is shaking at the corners.

Tomorrow,
must search the dawn's damp ash
for broken mirrors.

Sean Borodale

photo © Mark Vessey
* 12.06.1973, London, United Kingdom
lives in: London, United Kingdom
Sean Borodale, born in London in 1973, was a Northern Arts Fellow of the Wordsworth Trust in 1999 and Guest Artist at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam in 2002, before he became a teaching fellow at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL.

He works as a poet and artist, making scriptive and documentary poems written on location. His long topographical work Notes for an Atlas has been described as an ‘extraordinary 370-page poem written whilst walking through London.’

photo © gezett.de
Bee Journal, his debut full-length collection of poems, published by Jonathan Cape in 2012, is a lyric and at the same time scientifically precise journal of beekeeping. It follows one colony for around one year, from the initial establishing of a bee colony to the queen’s death in the beehive. Bee Journal was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize and the Costa Book Award in 2013.

Borodale was selected as a Granta New Poet in 2012, was Creative Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge from 2013-15, and Resident Artist & Writer at Bluecoat, Liverpool, 2016-2017.

His documentary poem for Radio 3, Mighty Beast, won the Radio Academy Gold Award in 2014 for Best Feature or Documentary.

Borodale’s second collection of poems, Human Work  (2015) was written while cooking at home, among pots, pans and  plates.

Asylum (2018) was written on-site in caves, mines, geological and archaeological spots of the Mendip Hills in Somerset. Looking for voices that express the damaged and the damned, Asylum pays homage to the darkness of the human cave.

The poems of his latest collection, Inmates,  stage encounters with insects at sites in and around the house of the writer, with whom they are sharing time, as fellow inmates. Again an attempt to examining  the co-exist with the natural world.

After living in Liverpool and Ireland, he is back in London, teaching Creative Writing at Royal Holloway.

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