Isn't Forever

Amy Key

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781780371719
• eBook ISBN: 9781780371740
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice. Amy Key's Isn't Forever is a grimoire for feminine selfhood in a world where a sense of self is flimsy, elusive and unrequited. The poems in this book are obsessive in their desire to construct and breach the terms of their own intimacy. They have their own 'narrative costume' but are vexed with it, not quite able to master the 'diligence of having a body'. This is a book where a tender and sabotaging shame of aloneness has taken root. Where wants cluster and are at war with each other. Where the heart is at once 'all lurgy' and an investment piece to be saved for best. Where the sea is the only solace, but the sea is blasé. The 'ta-dah!' and candour of these poems is an exercise in Amy Key's imaginative protection and urge for personal extravaganza, an attempt to acknowledge but fight back the brutal inner voice. The obscure audience of the reader is never out of sight.

V

we

entered it completely

and let our bodies lose all

their loneliness.

Anne Sexton

The news reported she wore her body to the event

Delphine is not dressed for the weather

1

On the tiny beach Delphine counts how many steps to cross the shore. 113. She retraces her steps, this time picking up all the bits of plastic in her path. 39. Further up the beach she sees a washed-up Halloween pumpkin, the colour of scooped-out sea urchin, a pumice stone look to it. She opens her mouth, feels the wind through her front teeth. I want to be see-through she thinks, and this comes close.

2

In the hotel behind the beach, her family barters for harmony with the noises each of them are making. Her family push tasks around like something on the plate they don’t want to eat. Conversation is ‘I’ll pay you, if you pay me’.

3

Things that do not belong in the sea will take on the appearance of things that belong in the sea, given time. The pumpkin is a kind of octopus – a coral disguised as a pumpkin. A hole in the plastic bottletop – a shell you thread onto a necklace.

4

Snow won’t lie on the shore but Delphine will. She gathers seaweed and wraps her scarf around it. She has a talent for making a bed. She reaches to pull the lace-edge of the tidemark salt towards her.

5

Last night she lay in the dark in her hotel-room imagination, fighting off a teen sentiment (hips, cassette). The thoughts you have in hotel rooms must be used wisely, decanted into small bottles for later.

6

Times Delphine felt like a lemon born into a weak summer. Once in a while she was a nib of lemon in a salad of mild leaves.

7

A man walking his dog leaves the beach. She tests her singing voice ‘diving off a rock into another moment’. Again ‘finally it’s mine.’

8

Delphine records the sound of the waves and wind. Waves are portable, she thinks, and I am dressed by the wind. She digs her nails into the pods of seaweed; she should have worn gloves.

9

Someone else’s arrangement of pebbles kinks in her lungs. She kicks at the edge of someone else’s stick-drawn heart, bends to fingerwrite her name in the middle. I’ll take the san...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Title Page
• Contents
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• [ ]
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright