Bird Sisters

Julia Webb

• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781911027249
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

' Bird Sisters exerts a powerful hold, as if to read it is to be haunted by things one half-remembers.' – Moniza Alvi

'All is strange or estranged in fact, but it is articulated in poems of supple inventive concentration. In that sense Bird Sisters is a book that casts deep shadows.' – George Szirtes

Julia Webb's Bird Sisters is a surreal journey through sisterhood and the world of the family via the natural world. Fascinated by the 'otherness' of things, her poems expose places and relationships that are not always entirely comfortable places to exist. Many of them feature transformations of some kind – both real and metaphorical: a woman wears a dress of live bees or becomes a bird and family members turn into owls and sparrows.

In exploring the ways in which both adults and children are casually cruel to one another, often within a mythological framework, Julia Webb blurs the boundaries between fairy tale and reality. These families are terrifying in their complexity and dysfunction, yet utterly compelling and convincing and with dark undercurrents of humour that ensure the poems are never bleak.

Sisters (part i)

i.

This sister is the bones of the outfit,

she is the stuff that keeps the body up,

she is dem bones, dem bones,

she is calcified connective tissue,

she is femur, tibia, ulna, ribs.

ii.

This sister is the perfect scrunch

of English Rose,

all delicate petal curl, subtle pinks,

she opens her smile up to the sun.

This sister is a fuzzy stamen

with a dust of pollen,

she is the heady waft of perfume

begging you to bring your face down to her,

to bring your face right down.

iii.

She is the one with the hair just-so,

the handkerchief skirt hems, the well-cut clothes,

and on birthdays she gets the family all together –

we line up for photos that never looked posed,

and how she laughs at being vegetarian

but each Christmas allowing herself a little meat.

She is the one with the dainty features, the cutesy nose

the one they look for when you enter the room,

and the way they hang on her words makes you nauseous

but you can’t say it, because she was the one

who watched out for you behind the shops and in the playground.

She is the one with the amicable divorce

and the books on cake decorating –

all those fiddly womanly things you have no patience for,

and she is the one who sat up all night in the crematorium

plaiting flowers into your mother’s hair.

iv.

This sister reads Nietzsche,

her hair is twisted into bunches like tiny horns,

she makes abstract art with fur and feathers,

she likes to collect things from gutters and pavements,

and her eyes have that sparkle you were scared of as a kid.

v.

This sister is the bee

and we are the nectar,

she is drawing us in

with her persistent buzzing,

her talk of the hive mind,

her tremble dance.

Bee Mornings

The bees that sleep inside me

fill my mind with buzz.

We are Nectar they say,

we are Wax and Cone,

we are of Bee but not of Bee.

In the morning I look at my stripes

under the covers, something strange

is taking place inside me,

my tongue has turned to fur,

my head hums like something electric.

Yet by breakfast you would never know:

I fidget the toast around the plate,

it feels quite wrong

to eat honey on bee mornings.

Any minute I might take flight.

Feather Factory

We kiss by the side of the feather factory,

the stench of singed wings

fills our noses and mouths.

We are nest-bound – tongues entwined,

pockets full of Swan Vestas and Player’s Number Six,

your nylon trousers spark to the rub.

Later the birds will haunt us:

their feathers will float around our heads,

pillow our eyes against the brightness of the day.

Family Values

Sun Daddy believed that the world was small

When the world knocked at his door

Sun Daddy put his head under the pillow

and shouted go away.

Every few weeks the world knocked

and Sun Daddy shouted,

and so it went on for years.

Sometimes when Sun Daddy was at work

Moon Mother invited the world in,

listened to its stories,

but made sure to shoo it out

before Sun Daddy’s return.

One day Sun Daddy caught sight of the world

as it rolled away down the hill.

Sun Daddy’s Moods

On good days Sun Daddy was the standard lamp,

he sat in the corner puffing away on his pipe.

The Star Children, their soft faces wreathed in smoke,

would creep nearer and nearer,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Sisters (part i)
• Bee Mornings
• Feather Factory
• Family Values
• Snow
• Winter at Daniel’s Hole
• The Piano Lesson
• Sisters (part ii)
• A Bird Inside
• Quiet Man Norfolk
• Night Feed
• Sun Sister:
• Night Sickness
• Our Father as a Horse
• The Trap
• Definitions (i)
• From the Same Cloth
• Counterpoint
• Lent
• Garden
• After identifying your body
• Water
• Yare Song
• Rain
• The Drunkenness of Noah
• Definitions (ii)
• Thetford Forest
• Something About the Light
• The Callers
• Gin Fox
• Moldewarpe
• Sparrow Sister
• Oak
• My owl sister mistakes me for a mouse
• My owl sister pays me a visit
• Clearing Out Mum
• After cleaning out your house
• Visiting Time
• Operation
• Maternity Ward
• The Miracle
• Breakdown
• I have forgotten my password to you
• no one speaks of you
• This is how to fall
• Bee Dress
• Tickets to the Circus
• Acknowledgements