The Friday Poem

A poem every Friday

The Friday Poem on 21/07/23

We chose ‘The Climbing Frame’ by Sarah Corbett to be our Friday Poem this week because the journey of the poem – from the delineated square of concrete to the precarious summit of the climbing frame – both describes and enacts the narrator’s cry to self-determination. It speaks to that part in all of us that refuses to surrender to external forces, to abandon a position of knowledge or power, and to be brought down to earth. The poem is tightly written and evocative – it’s a time-travelling tour de force!

The Climbing Frame

For Nicky

Square of hot concrete and new plimsolls 
pulled on, elastic at the front, the soft/snap 
over my heels & I leap up, five-year-old 
queen of the climbing frame, those primary
coloured bars beneath hands and knees
a puzzle I’m just grasping as I crouch 
at the summit, sun on my shoulders, pony- 
tail swishing. Someone is telling me to 
come down, and my No – rackets through 
the years like a capsule sent into the future 
to arrive at this moment – the camera-eye 
of memory shrunk to a fuzzy-edged spectacle, 
a code, an image, a child in shorts and plimsolls,
halo of sunlight and indignation as she refuses
all that it means to be brought down to earth.

Sarah Corbett has published five collections of poetry, including the verse-novel And She Was (Pavilion, 2015). Her most recent collection is A Perfect Mirror (Pavilion, 2018). In 2022 she produced and directed the Sylvia Plath Literary Festival, and co-edited After Sylvia: Poems and Essays in celebration of Sylvia Plath (Nine Arches, 2022). Her work has been shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection and the T.S. Eliot prize, and her debut collection The Red Wardrobe (Seren, 1998), was given an Eric Gregory award. She has won two Northern Writers Awards for fiction. She is currently working on a novel, and a new collection of poetry is forthcoming from Pavilion in 2025. She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Lancaster University and lives in Hebden Bridge.

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