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Deborah Harvey
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the poet
Deborah Harvey lives in Bristol, UK, where she's co-director of The Leaping Word: a poetry consultancy providing creative and editorial advice for writers, plus qualified counselling support for artists exploring the personal in their work. Her poem Oystercatchers scooped first prize in The Plough Arts Centre's 2018 Short Poetry Competition, while her Conversations with Silence was runner-up in the 2022 Buzzwords Poetry Competition. Deborah's work has been published widely, as well as broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please. Her sixth book, Love the Albatross – out in autumn 2024 – is a collection on the theme of estrangement.
the poems
When an albatross
crash-lands in a dream
Long ago I saw an albatross fly
head-first into a dream so fast so
hard it penetrated half a mile deep.
Inside the crater
a wreckage of feather and bone
remains which over millennia became
this fossilised skull you’ve found and which
slicing open my right forearm
you press into the wound
holding the edges until they knit.
We’ll keep this for later, you tell me
we’ll talk about it then.
Just when you get
yourself out of
one labyrinth
you find you’re in another, in fact, you’re not only in it,
you’re accidentally helping to build it & trapping your
children inside with you where you can’t keep them
safe, I know, what a ridiculous promise that was. It’s
the exits that are entrances that are the problem, they’re
so difficult to spot & since the story starts with you
already inside, you’ll have to think backwards. Maybe
it’s that stone staircase that tunnels down, getting
narrower with each step, till you squeeze into a room
with walls the colour of smokers’ lungs, bare lightbulbs
& abandoned fridges, where the glass in the portholes
is reinforced with grids of wire. Or perhaps it’s that
chute you saw in the museum of a coastal town, or
maybe it was London, anyhow, it’s the same
neighbourhood where a serial killer’s operating by
means of secret passages through cellars & the guide
says of course we’re not going down there & gives
you a shove & you find yourself wedged between
brick walls, dangling over a long drop into nothing.
Or perhaps it’s the aperture of a shell that's the
whorl of your newborn’s ear & you’re clattering round
& round its spiral steps, desperate to find them & bring
them out & you run through rooms to get to rooms to
get to the one room in the house you’d forgotten about,
where the creature who was there all along steps from
the darkness & turns to face you, a shape in the mirror.
Highly commended in the Slipstream Poets 2024 Poetry Competition,
and shortlisted for The Plough Poetry Prize 2023
Your silence is all
I have left
After Rumi (1207-1273)
‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I'll meet you there.’
so I’ll take it, make of it a field
tucked in the gap between factory buildings
and the railway embankment
with views over the floodplain to the river, the hills,
the high cloud mountains of another, older country.
The shouting of jackdaws and rooks in the rookery
the endless drill of motorway traffic won’t break its surface
nor the bulldozers grazing empty farmland,
digging foundations for a future town
beyond wood and common.
One day a sparrowhawk will come
followed by rain that will wash the silence
clean of hope
and when I straighten up, stretch my arms and back
I’ll find I’ve become its hollowing oak, its fox-
trodden paths, the ditch, these stands of towering hogweed.
By autumn I’ll be mist on its distant horizon
in winter I’ll lie down and turn to mud
looking up at the shapes the night birds make
against the dark.
Shortlisted for the 2023 Bridport Poetry Prize, and runner-up
in the 2023 Frosted Fire Single Poem Competition
Publishing credits
When an albatross crash-lands in a dream: Ink Sweat and Tears
Just when you get yourself out of one labyrinth:
exclusive first publication by iamb
Your silence is all I have left: Ticking Clock Anthology (Frosted Fire)