The Oscillations

Kate Fox

• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781913437077
• eBook ISBN: 9781913437084
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Kate Fox 's new collection The Oscillations explores distance and isolation in the age of the pandemic, refracted through the lenses of neurodiversity and trauma in poems that are bold, often frank and funny. Dazzling and open-hearted poems of self-discovery.

Responding to a world that has been broken by the pandemic into a 'before' and 'after'. A strong voice sings of what it means to be many things at once - autistic, creative, northern, a woman. Fox measures not only distances, social or otherwise, but how we breach them, and what the view might be from beyond them.

'It's both comforting and challenging to have Kate Fox as our guide through these turbulent and fractured times; comforting because Kate's language is always inclusive and accessible and challenging because the ideas her superb poems brim with ask us to look deeply inside ourselves." - Ian McMillan, poet and broadcaster

Before

Raft

You see all the details at once

prompt me gently to read

the bright orange of the flotilla of life jackets

the light on the black shore

the men’s reaching arms

until I see the pink inflatable ring

covered in Disney characters

and have to catch my breath

as it expands to fill my vision

the translation hits me at flashbulb speed

where others were tentative as the first words

in a new language I’m trying out loud

here is the girl who should have been playing

here is the girl this might not have saved

here is the girl who almost certainly survives.

Wet

Because, he says, some colours of oil paint

dry at different speeds –

when crimson is built up over lamp black say,

the black might take hundreds of years to dry,

still be wet in museums across the world –

isn’t that amazing?

and I say, imagine you were standing

in front of it the day it dried,

you’d never know that was the exact day

the layers had finally separated,

isn’t that amazing too?

We agree, both the staying wet

and the not knowing,

and us building up pictures with firm brushstrokes

until the layers bleed through

like thoughts looking for words.

Gormire Lake

An amphitheatre of dark green trees are an audience

that expect nothing from me.

A patrolling swan that can’t be rescued from myth

without being trapped in another.

Soon I’ll break the meniscus;

goosebump shoulders unreflected in the bottomless lake.

I’d love to dredge the black silt for genes

as they did with Loch Ness.

Eels, snakes, anthracite,

angry carpenter, emphysemic teacher,

trauma-damaged slug,

a prediction about the Adverse Childhood Experiences

of the damselfly.

The surface black and pixellated with white sparks,

a glider’s horsefly drone.

A temporary ring as air and water meet

like a sentence begun and stopped.

German Girl

‘German Girl’ is a portrait by Euan Uglow and its banning from

an Arts Council exhibition by Bradford Alderman Horace Hird

made national and international papers in 1962.

A German Girl’s hands are braced on her ham-thighs

as if she’s about to plunge down a log flume.

She’s got no clothes on, my Great Uncle

made them put her in a locked room

when the Arts Council brought her to Bradford in 1962.

She stares at me now on Google Images,

chin up, eyebrows slightly raised, basin of purposeful hair,

small dog ears of breasts pointing off to each side,

the brown triangle of her pubic hair the portrait’s vanishing point.

Turns out she’s actually Polish.

The archive shows Great Uncle Horace –

an owl in round black glasses –

hand resting on a gold mace embossed with boars,

Mayoral medallion warm on the centre of his chest,

ram and goat entwined in a disc of gold.

Pornographic, he said,

Lascivious.

It will corrupt families.

We don’t want somebody to see it

and go off and do something unspeakable in the park.

His nephew married my mother

the year the Yorkshire Ripper started carrying a hammer

and women stopped walking on their own after dark.

My stepfather photographed me with no clothes on

each birthday from when I was four until I was eight,

straining to stand straight, arms at my sides, eyes front,

tiny, uncertain marble soldier.

My sister slowly puts the Polaroids

on a salvaged pile of childhood photographs

as if they’re the winning cards in a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• After
• Before
• Notes
• Thanks and Acknowledgements
• About the Author