Jemma Borg

Relic

Language: english

Translations: german (Relikt)

Relic

Bell Laboratories, New jersey, 1965

One whole year on our hands and knees,
clearing pigeons from the curious ear
of the antenna, listening for silence

under the city's noise and the pulsar's roar
and still this sound as weather makes at a door,
a low worry everywhere, burrowing

into the hours from the immovable darkness,
uncurling its strong horsehead,
until we catch it, finally, as a telescope does

in its wide dish, until we hear it
for what it is: this sound of creation
whose infinitesimal enormity

is now a thin travelling irritation;
this sound of time clocking on
and now corroded into this radio hiss.

Jemma Borg

photo © Anne-Sophie Olive

* 09.10.1970, Billericay, Essex, United Kingdom
lives in: Tunbridge Wells, United Kingdom

Jemma Borg was born in Essex. She took a first in zoology at Oxford, where she also completed a doctorate in evolutionary genetics. She has worked as a science editor and writer, research administrator in the charity sector, environmental campaigner and teacher, and has lived and worked in places including Australia, Pakistan and Hong Kong.

Her poems have been widely published in magazines including Poetry Review, Poetry London and Stand, and in anthologies including I am twenty people! (Enitharmon, 2007), Oxford Poets Anthology 2007 (Oxford Poets/Carcanet, 2007), Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam (Eyewear/Cinnamon 2012) and The Poets’ Quest for God (Eyewear, 2014).
She has received prizes, or been shortlisted, in competitions including the Kent and Sussex Open Poetry Competition, the Bridport, Mslexia Poetry Competition, Smith/Doorstop Pamphlet Competition and the Jane Martin Poetry Prize. She won the New Writing Ventures Award for Poetry in 2007 and was a resident at the Leighton Artists’ Colony at the Banff Centre in Canada in 2009. Her first collection, The Illuminated World, is out from Eyewear in October 2014. She currently lives in East Sussex with her husband and young son.

photo © Anne-Sophie Olive

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