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    Pit Lullabies
    Pit Lullabies
    Pit Lullabies
    Ebook106 pages47 minutes

    Pit Lullabies

    By Jessica Traynor

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    About this ebook

    These intimate, visceral and often wickedly funny poems journey through the darker days of new parenthood, teasing out the anxieties which plague us when night falls. Violence against women, the destruction of our environment, the poisons and pitfalls of 21st-century living are explored here in poems by turns lyrical and earthy, yearning and angry. They mine gold from the darkness and seek luminescence in the deepest oceans. Pit Lullabies is Jessica Traynor’s third collection, following Liffey Swim (2014) and The Quick (2019) from Ireland’s Dedalus Press. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloodaxe Books
    Release dateMar 24, 2022
    ISBN9781780376073
    Pit Lullabies
    Author

    Jessica Traynor

    Jessica Traynor was born in Dublin in 1984 and is a poet, essayist and librettist. Her debut collection, Liffey Swim (Dedalus Press, 2014), was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award and in 2016 was named one of the best poetry debuts of the past five years on Bustle.com. Her second collection, The Quick, was a 2019 Irish Times poetry choice. A Place of Pointed Stones, a pamphlet commissioned by Offaly County Council,was published by The Salvage Press in 2021. Her third collection, Pit Lullabies (Bloodaxe Books, 2022), is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She has received commissions for poems from BBC Radio 4, The Arts Council of Ireland, The Model Gallery Sligo, The Salvage Press, VISUAL Carlow, Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council and The Poetry Programme (RTÉ), and awards including the Hennessy New Writer of the Year, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary, and the Listowel Poetry Prize. In 2016, she was named one of the ‘Rising Generation’ of poets by Poetry Ireland. She reviews poetry for RTÉ’s Arena, and for Poetry Ireland Review, and has held residencies including the Yeats Society, Sligo, and Carlow College. She is an inaugural Creative Fellow of UCD, where she completed her MA in Creative Writing in 2008.

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      Book preview

      Pit Lullabies - Jessica Traynor

      JESSICA TRAYNOR

      PIT LULLABIES

      These intimate, visceral and often wickedly funny poems journey through the darker days of new parenthood, teasing out the anxieties which plague us when night falls. Violence against women, the destruction of our environment, the poisons and pitfalls of 21st-century living are explored here in poems by turns lyrical and earthy, yearning and angry. They mine gold from the darkness and seek luminescence in the deepest oceans.

      Pit Lullabies is Jessica Traynor’s third collection, following Liffey Swim (2014) and The Quick (2019) from Ireland’s Dedalus Press.

      ‘Visionary, luminous and haunted, Jessica Traynor’s poems are home to a host of compelling characters: witches, changelings, the spirit of Hildegard of Bingen. In The Quick, even the grotesque is rendered with subtle delicacy – a woman whose lungs fold like an origami bird. These poems will give you goose-bumps.’ – Helen Mort

      ‘Written with a lightness of touch, these poems are capable of dealing with the big themes – especially those of birth, death or illness…this poet [is] capable of creating canonical work which draws on a contemporary rethinking of poetic traditions while finding a voice that is wholly her own.’ – Siobhán Campbell on The Quick in Poetry Ireland Review

      ‘Traynor is a master at delineating these almost imperceptible but vital changes…Traynor’s fine delicate lyricism belies a social consciousness that subtly bleeds through several poems.’ – Martina Evans on The Quick in The Irish Times

      Cover detail: La Vérité sortants du puits (1896) by Jean-Léon Gérôme

      MUSÉE ANNE DE BEAUJEU, MOULINS

      OIL ON CANVAS, 91 x 72cm

      3

      JESSICA TRAYNOR

      Pit Lullabies

      Here’s a song

      from deep in the hole…

      CHRIS GOSS

      CONTENTS

      Title Page

      Epigraph

      pit lullaby

      Megalodon

      Anatomy Scan

      In the Birthing Room

      Metaphysical Breast Milk Poem

      Ophelia in Ballybough

      Midwinter

      pit lullaby ii

      A Plea for the Sanctification of the Ditches of Ireland

      Child you cut me open

      What It Takes

      Patchwork Quilt

      If You Can Tame a Wildcat, You Can Raise a Baby

      pit lullaby iii

      On Poisons

      pit lullaby iv

      In the Wrong Place

      Forecast

      On Plastics

      Supermoon Trifecta

      Walrus

      Men Are Talking

      pit lullaby v

      An Island Sings

      pit lullaby vi

      The Signs

      pit lullaby vii

      Nureyev in Dublin

      Holidaying with Dad During the Divorce

      Dad Cars

      pit lullaby viii

      Milk Teeth

      Lessons

      Zodiac

      Rock Pool

      Turbulence

      pit lullaby ix

      Hungry Ghost

      Bilbea’s Response

      Lock Years

      Onion Poem

      In the Bathroom Showroom

      Hunting Lions

      Hawthorn

      Night Run

      pit lullaby x

      Lullaby

      Notes

      Acknowledgements

      About the Author

      Copyright

      11

      PIT LULLABY

      A whisper in your ear as you sleep –

      when I was carrying you,

      and you were an electrical storm,

      a clump of eels behind the gut,

      I cursed a man.

      I called all of my demons down

      from their rookeries to carry your shock

      of legs and stingers to latch onto him.

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