Joanna Guthrie
Biography
Joanna Guthrie’s first collection, Billack’s Bones, was published by RIALTO in 2007. Her second, Water Person Kit, was completed in 2015, and she is currently working on her third collection, provisionally titled Her Whereabouts.
Her non-fiction manuscript about the Florida Keys, Hurricane Season, was shortlisted in the New Writing Ventures award 2006.
Translated by Reeds, her libretto for two East Anglian rivers, was performed in 2012, in collaboration with Richard Mabey.
She was selected for Aldeburgh Eight in 2014; commended in the Gingko Ecopoetry prize in 2017; and has been published in Poetry Review, The Rialto; Poetry Ireland Review; Magma; Butcher’s Dog; Under the Radar ; Salzburg Review ; Poetry News and, for non-fiction, The Guardian.
She is involved in Climate Cultures, Poets for the Planet and Extinction Rebellion. She lives and works in Norwich.
The poem she reads here, Waiting, appeared in the Gingko Ecopoetry Prize Anthology 2019, as it was one of two runners-up in 4th place. Another poem, Irma, was commended in the same prize.
The Poem
Waiting
The peaches were so good that year
were so
translucent dense dewy sweet
their flesh so
velvet yellow insistent clinging
their flavour
at some holy nectar pinnacle.
They arrived in a row
in a clear rounded box like a plastic bra.
They went out with a bang.
The planet was so good that year
in places, was so
so extra blue and green
could crack your heart in half
with the way its sunlit branches lay
outstretched, like hands full of offerings
their trees standing solemn and occasionful
like the best candlesticks; bracken
high and hairy-shouldered –
we embedded in its mesh
in our country in the north
motionless in ticking heat
from where we watched scrappy butterflies
more magnetic than ever
flash to and fro.
We just sat, watched, waited.
We realised the hedgerow and us
were more or less the same thing.
We ordered some chairs online.
It was a good year for outdoor furniture.
That went out with a bang.
We rubbed grass seeds like ticks into our gums
blinked burdock, sneezed
cobweb.
The plums were so plentiful that year. So quenching.
.
We were just waiting for winter.
And after winter. The things after that.