Maitreyabandhu has won the Keats-Shelley Prize, The Basil Bunting Award, the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, and Ledbury Festival Competition. His pamphlet, The Bond won the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition (2010) and was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award. His second pamphlet Vita Brevis won the iOTA Shots Award (2011). His first collection The Crumb Road (Bloodaxe, 2013) is a PBS Recommendation.
‘The Crumb Road has a rich, melancholy modesty, and to spend time with it enriches our attention.’ – Sean O’Brien, The Guardian.
Photo by Nick Stone
Laura Scott writes poems about what she sees. Many of her poems come from the desire to make the reader see again with words something that doesn’t reside in the words. Her poems have appeared in various magazines and in 2011 she got an Arts Council Grant to work on her first pamphlet, What I Saw which was published by Rialto last year.
If I were a fish
I’d swim into your head as, waiting for sleep,
you lay on your side. I’d dart from temple
to temple until you felt the curve of my silver belly skim
the muddy sheets of your brain. I’d stir up your silt
with a flick of my tail and your lips would be as cold
as mine as we chased the river’s mouth back to the sea.
And you’d watch as they hauled me up in their nets, see me
swallow fistfuls of air before they laid me on a marble slab
and the cold stilled my gills. You’d turn away as their blade
slit me open like a letter. And when they dropped me
into the yellow froth of butter, I’d cry out as my flesh
hissed in the heat of the pan, my translucence evaporating –
but you wouldn’t hear. You’d sip your wine
with your fork still in your hand, tell them I tasted of mud.