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Estelle Price
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the poet
From lawyer to classicist to charity worker to poet, Estelle Price won the 2025 Kipling Society's John McGivering Writing Competition, 2024 SaveAsWriters Group International Writing Competition (Poetry), 2024 Passionfruit Poetry Prize, 2023 Mairtín Crawford Award and 2023 Welshpool Open Poetry Competition. Her poetry has been long-listed three times in the UK's National Poetry Competition, and placed or listed in several other prestigious competitions. Often writing from a feminist perspective on her East End past, Estelle has had poems in The Honest Ulsterman, bath magg, The Ekphrastic Review and elsewhere. Featured in Nine Arches Press' Primers 6, she's working on her debut collection.
the poems
Blessings
‘It would be infinitely lonely to live
in a world without blessing.’
~ John O’Donohue ~
Bless the fox that tears into your bins
and scatters your shame in the street. This is not
the worst that can happen. Bless the red
at the corner of the sky where there is a rip. You are
part of it. Bless the blood that wells into the phial
to be sent for analysis. Bless your stooped father
when you leave him, like a grieving swan, on his doorstep.
He needs guarding. Bless the baby you miscarried and the mystery
of where she is. Bless the hands that picked the apple
you are eating. Somewhere those hands seek rest.
Bless the Earth and the voices that sing her anthems
in your cities. They are the planet’s prophets. Bless the man
you divorced. Bless the man you married after. Both
have gardens in your heart. Bless the cupboard
you hide in when memory wears laddered stockings.
Bless hope when she navigates your mind’s black
canals and places her fingers on the lock-gates. One day you will
open. Bless the new-born river when it trickles into the light.
You are that river. Bless the man in the tweed jacket who delicately
lied to you. He is a house by the ocean whose walls
are cracking. Bless the stranger in the red coat
who jostled you in the grocers. She is the woman
you were when your mother died. Bless the boy driving
too loud in his souped-up car on the bypass.
He is your faraway son. Bless the moments
that surge like waves drowning the shore you love best.
You are an oyster shell above the high tide mark.
Bless the woman you still can be, who waits
in your life’s long grass for you to grip
her hands and dance.
her wrist
slender like a stick
of bamboo. its bone an unexpected
table-top balanced on a bed of wrinkles
that crease and crinkle like a plate
of over-cooked spaghetti. the skin
thirsty. its texture roughed by eighty
summers to the colour of toffee. freckles
grown bold and sassy speckle her forearm
where once a bracelet of daisies linked arms
and danced a joy-jig until dawn.
at the base of her thumb, a scar, napkin white,
the pigment burnt lifting a feast from the oven.
lean in touch can you feel the demands
of steel cuffing her to a fence when the world wobbled
on its nuclear tight rope? today she’s watch-less.
it’s time to give up on earth’s beating drum.
take a moment you don’t have long. rotate.
be gentle this wrist is porcelain-frail. there
you’ve found her shy-side split in two by a wand
of blood. take your chance place a kiss
where once a pulse purposed. cut
through the hospital tag set free
a prayer for your mother as her life
softens to memory.
Diva
Let the red curtain go up on the stage at Covent Garden
and let it be you, Nan, skipping into silver footlights
an audience of toffs in black ties and glitzy frocks clapping,
conductor, down in the pit, his baton raised (but not for hitting).
Let it be you whose ruby lips trill a Mozart aria
who flings fear, like a cadenza into corners of the auditorium
out-of-reach of echo.
You, who bellowed from a stall down Petticoat Lane,
flogging cast-offs from Chelsea.
You who stood in factory-rain, a black-sequinned dress
dangled off smoky fingers, telling the girl, who turned her perm away, to
‘try it on luv, it’ll fit like a glove, luv’.
Cos if it’s you, Nan, you can choose to be Mimi, Tosca, even Queen
of the Night. but please don’t pick Carmen, I can’t watch you stabbed
by a soldier
or a husband who chases you down the stairs with a knife.
Let it be bouquets of freesias, not punches, that fall round your frizzy hair.
I can hear you yelling to stop ‘avin a larf but it’ll be fun Nan
Trust me. I’ve got an Oxford degree. I know how
to get creases out of consonants, how to bleach vowels.
Your vibrato will be adored from Rome to Milan.
No more whelks in Southend, no more whispers on the pier with your sisters,
no more sharing a dodgem with Harry and his docker-fists.
Even the King will love you (at least for a season or two).
And in the end Nan, instead of wheeling the stall back to the lockup
as if it were a pram full of ten children
instead of Saturday nights at the bingo, I promise you’ll
fly out the window
(like I did) head west (goodbye Plaistow!) wearing the black-sequined dress – cos surely you must want to?
Publishing credits
Blessings: Ten Poems from Welshpool (Candlestick Press)
Won first prize in the Welshpool Poetry Competition 2023
her wrist: Manchester Cathedral Poetry Prize Pamphlet 2017
(Highly Commended poem)
Diva: exclusive first publication by iamb