Sarah Corbett
Sarah Corbett nació en Chester, Inglaterra en 1970. Estudió inglés y sociología en la Universidad de Leeds. Realizó un máster en escritura creativa en la Universidad de East Anglia y un doctorado en escritura crítica y creativa en la Universidad de Manchester. En la actualidad es profesora de escritura creativa en la universidad de Lancaster. Ganó un Eric Gregory Award en 1997 y su primer libro The Red Wardrobe se publicó en 1998 y fue finalista del T. S. Eliot Award. A su segundo libro The Witch Bag, 2002, le siguió Other Beasts en 2008. Puedes seguir leyéndola en su blog: https://sarahcorbettpoet.wordpress.com
Sarah Corbett was born in Chester in 1970 and grew up in North Wales. She received a BA honours in English and Sociology from Leeds University in 1992, an MA in Creative Writing from The University of East Anglia in 1998 and a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Manchester in 2013. Sarah taught Creative Writing for the Open University from 2004 – 2009 and is currently part-time Lecturer in Creative Writing at Lancaster University. Sarah was awarded a residency at The Yaddo Foundation in 2005 and was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow in 2012.
Sarah began writing poetry as an undergraduate at Leeds, and her first poems were published in magazines such as Peninne Platform, Aireings, Iron, Stand, Ciphers, Poetry Wales and The Rialto. Sarah won an Eric Gregory Award for Poetry in 1997, and her first collection, The Red Wardrobe, was published by Seren books in 1998. The Red Wardrobe was shortlisted for a Forward Best First Collection Prize and the T.S Eliot Prize in 1998. Her second collection from Seren was The Witch Bag in 2002, followed by Other Beasts in 2008. Sarah’s forthcoming book, And She Was, is a verse-novel to be published by Pavilion Poetry (Liverpool University Press) in 2015. Sarah’s work has been widely anthologised, most recently in Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe 2010), The Best British Poetry, (Salt 2012) and Sculpted: Poetry of the North West (2013).
Sarah has won three Arts Council England Writer’s Awards, for The Inner Tourist, a poem for two voices, performed at The Hebden Bridge Arts Festival in 2003, for Other Beasts in 2006 and for a new collection of poems, Being Here, in 2011. Sarah’s current projects include ‘Magical Strangers’, a narrative poem/film in collaboration with the novelist Nicky Harlow. Sarah hosts the reading series poetrynites@thebookcase, every third thursday in Hebden Bridge.
A un nonato
Creciste en mi interior
y ahora te adoraré,
si, durante treinta días y treinta noches
esperas, completo,
un poema de amor doblado
entre las hojas de mi libro.
Permanece gordo, almacena visiones.
No debes llegar antes de tu hora.
Tu cráneo insiste
donde mi hueso se suaviza
y toco mi dedo con tu dedo
que recorre la manopla interior.
Preparo nuestra cama,
algodones satinados para tu piel-tierra.
La casa vaciada
y vuelta a llenar.
La sala de partos cuelga
entre Lavender y Mozart.
Extiendes una mano hacia
mis sueños, azul turquesa y palpitante.
Cada dedo cubierto
con una suave uña blanca.
Tecleas en una lengua que leo
con los ojos cerrados.
¿Es este un mes lunar
el que robamos? Su disco plateado
se resbala sobre mi lengua.
Estos días siento
la luz atravesar
mi piel recién agrietada.
La desenredaré, ahora una madeja
como el cielo recorrido de nubes,
te haré una armadura,
pequeño guerrero. Con esto
puede que te acerques, entres
por la feroz puerta del mundo.
de The Witch Bag, Sarah Corbett.
To An Unborn
Yo grew inside me
and now I will worship you,
if, for thirty days and thirty nights
you wait, completed,
a love poem folded
between the leaves of my book.
Lay up fat, store visions.
You must not arrive before your time.
Your skull insists
where my bones oftens
and I touch finger to your finger
running the gauntlet inside.
I am preparing our bed,
the silken sottons for your eart-skin.
The house is tipped
out and put back again.
The birth room hangs
between Lavender and Mozart.
In to my dreaming you extend
a hand, egg blue and pulsing.
Each finger is capped
with a soft white nail.
You tap in a language I read
with my eyes shut.
Is this a moon-month
we are stealing? Its silver disk
slips over my tongue.
These days I feel
the light touch through
my new lycracked skin.
I will unravelit, now a skein
like the cludrushed sky,
make you an armour,
Little warrior. With this
you may drawnear, enter
the world’s fierce gate.
Aborto
En el escáner viste un corazón palpitar
dentro de un rizo de carne nueva.
Vi esa expresión de pelota de vida
como una manzana caída y mordida
ya descomponiéndose entre las hojas.
Así había prueba de tu existencia,
creímos inmediatamente que nuestro hijo viviría.
Tuve una semana de dolorosas rosas sangrantes,
prueba de que lo que es cultivado en fe
se convierte en el espacio que deja.
Volvimos a esperar al ángel de la muerte.
Vino por la ventana a medianoche,
dejó caer sus alas negras sobre la cama
en que paría. Conocimos la pérdida en ese momento
bajo su puño recubierto.
Nos abandonamos a la tristeza,
lo que cargábamos pero no podíamos decir,
a llenar los días con nuestras manos
deambulando a los lugares donde todos los agujeros aparecen
brotando como hongos entre los árboles muertos.
de The Witch Bag, Sarah Corbett.
Miscarriage
On the scan you saw a heart beat
within a curl of new flesh.
I saw that couched ball of life
as a wind fallen and bitten Apple
already decaying among the leaves.
So you had proof of existence,
believed at onece our child would live.
I had a week bleeding painful roses,
proof that what is grown on faith
becomes the spaice it leaves.
We returned to a wait death’s angel.
It came from the window at midnight,
dropped black wings about the bed
where I laboured. We knew that moment’s loss
under its encasing fist.
We abandoned each other to sadness,
what we carried and could not speak,
to filling in days with our hands
wondering where al the holes have come from
sprouting like fung among the dead trees.
http://latribudefrida.com/poesia/poemas-de-sarah-corbett/
The Red Wardrobe
The red wardrobe where you shut in my sister,
the iron key sliding into your pocket.
The red wardrobe that fell on my sister,
its colour old blood and rusty oil
on the soft blue insides of her elbows, her wrists,
like the Chinese burns she gave me
as I cried and hated her, until I remembered
how she made herself small in corners,
how i thought she was a kitten crying until I shook her.
The red wardrobe, its doors opening and closing in my dream,
the warm nuts in its dust becoming mice eyes,
their long tails, scratching,
that my father splintered and burnt
the day all the women left and we had fireworks.
From The Red Wardrobe, Seren, 1998
The Witch Bag
Remember me. I am the woman
who shook her fisted nipples
at the moon,
bearing down the dark streets
that could not take her.
My face broke in two
as I ate its bright cheek,
my hands sudden as marshlight
held before me
into the dark nights that followed.
I am the woman who flew
not only in her dreams,
but remembered the spell as she woke
and hunted sighs like ticks,
dipping and turning as she went.
That woman, weightless thing,
thin as pond moss,
blacker than the pond’s black belly.
she hooks its clammy limbs around her own
and sucks the water into herself.
That woman, without a world,
who goes hopping with one boot
between twilights,
a bagful of grave treasures
lost and lost again –
mask of hair, milk tooth,
heel-bone, blood purse, name.
From The Witch Bag, Seren, 2002
Fox at Midnight
It is the longest night and we are out,
crossing the field from the house.
Our shadows fall through the trees like owls.
A fox slips from the wood. It has come
for the sheep lain dead for days by the well.
We stop. It is thin, its red dips
to blood red at its ribs, a vixen
in its fluid line and lightness
with cubs to feed, scurried under the earth.
She comes swiftly on and begins to dance,
throwing the sheep’s mantle
like a crown of blossom over her back,
pirouetting neatly in the last of the guts.
From Other Beasts, Seren 2008