The Insomnia Poems

Grace Nichols

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781780373409
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

In her latest collection, The Insomnia Poems, Grace Nichols explores those nocturnal hours when Sleep (the thief who nightly steals your brain) is hard to come by, and the politics of the day hard to shut out, never mind the lavender-scented pillow. Here memories of her own Guyana childhood mingle with the sleeping spectres of dreams and folk legends such as Sleeping Beauty. A lyrical interweaving of tones and textures invites the reader into the zones between sleep and no-sleep, between the solitude of the dark and the awakening of the light. The Insomnia Poems is Grace Nichols's first new collection since Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009). Neither that collection nor this one is included in her Bloodaxe retrospective, I Have Crossed an Ocean (2010).

Sleeping Legend 1

Sleeping Beauty

They never mentioned the curse

of the thirteenth fairy or the mitigating wish

of the twelfth who hadn’t yet spoken.

Or how they’d burnt every spindle in the land.

Instead my royal father and mother

watched over me like velveted falconers –

Every breath I take

Every move I make

(haven’t I heard that sung somewhere?)

Yet in my fifteenth year, fate construed

to let their eyes mislay me for a moment

and like a fallen shawl unnoticed by its owner,

I slipped to the tower where my destiny

(in the shape of an old woman as spindly

as her spindle) sat waiting to deal me.

You know the rest, how I begged a try.

Pricked as predicted, I fell out of time,

my contagion sweeping the whole palace into sleep –

the king, the queen, the maids, the cooks,

the scullery boy, the horses, the dogs,

down to the flies on the wall; the doves on the roof.

I hibernated for a hundred years.

Wars raged, inflation flourished,

but I slept on, nourished

on the black milk of sleep,

I became a legend, a ravishing rose

in an impenetrable forest of thorns.

You can imagine how waking up –

even to a prince’s kiss, was for me,

a traumatic second birth.

What if I said that I preferred

my enchanted dark

to the active daylight of the world. 

Memory is its own vision

            GEOFFREY HILL

The Brain – is wider than the Sky –
For – put them side by side –
The one the other will contain
With ease – and You – beside –

            EMILY DICKINSON

Night Muse

You who always come flooding back

in the shades of your original form –

but shot through now

with street lights and neon –

a glitzy black mother of pearl

Dressed in black olive

                               and onyx

drinking dark chocolate

                               and licorice

at the trendy Café Noir.

You who can reverse yourself

and light is born.

But I remember when you

were simply a dark astonishment

that allowed fireflies and stars to glow

as I star-gazed with my brother

at childhood’s window

And you yourself bent down low

to harbour us in your arms.

Watershed

I only had to take a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Title Page
• Dedication
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CONTENTS
• Epigraph
• Once Again
• One Night Comes Like a Blessing
• The Projectionist
• A Brief Odyssey
• Moon-mothers
• The Accomplice
• An Insomniac’s Attempt at Her Own Self-hypnosis
• Another Day
• At the Edge of the Table
• Nightmare
• Wherever They Lie
• Night-coos
• Insemination of Pig Between Sleep and Wake
• Learning
• Sleeping Legend 1: Sleeping Beauty
• Night Muse
• Watershed
• Tonight My Childhood
• The Shadow-stealers
• Diablesse
• Our Pied Piper
• Moon-calf
• Rain Rain
• Beyond the Dreaming Dark
• Streams of Mercy
• Snowdrops at the Hurst
• Sleeping Legend 2: Rip Van Winkle
• Gift from a dead father
• Parallel World
• The Myoclonic Jerk
• Close to the Edge
• Dream Libation
• Within the Gospels
• To the Virgin of Guadalupe
• Sleeping Legend 3: Gilgamesh
• My Best Cure (for John)
• The Long Haul
• In the Meditating Dark
• Starry Night
• Adam to Eve
• Baby Sleep
• Dawn Speaks of Dawn
• Twin Sisters
• Waking-up London
• Reflecting on Pebble
• In Search of Sleep
• Guitar
• The One You Don’t See Coming
• About the Author
• Copyright