The Friday Poem

A poem every Friday

Book

We chose ‘Book’ by Meg Peacocke to be our first Friday Poem. At 91, Peacocke writes with a beguiling mixture of wisdom, candour and playfulness. ‘Book’ is full of startling imagery, allusion, word play and dry humour. It’s a list poem, kind of, which links the formative and ritual moments in a life lived richly, and ends on a note of wry defiance: what’s done is done. Don’t mess with this old lady, she’s seen it all.

Book

The Book of the unknown foetus.
The Book of cats in bags, pigs in pokes,
Moses in baskets with all the eggs.
The Book of errors, terrors, accidents (happy),
accidents (unhappy, Vol. II).

The Book of rambling worms and moths,
half a page, half a page onward, coding
and ciphering in plainsong,
perishing under the rose.
The Book of random inclinations,

of keys, doors, entrances, exits
with bears, sniggering under sheets,
loves on the brink of hatreds, holy
alliances, barefoot dances,
losses, peregrine snatches.

The Book of direct and indirect speech,
The Book of lies hidden in plain sight
which omits what most matters, riddling
Lazarus gospel. Thumb through it if you must,
it’s written and can’t be amended, this book.

Meg Peacocke grew up in South Devon in a musical family and read English at Oxford. She taught, brought up four children, trained in counselling and worked in the children’s cancer unit of Addenbrooke’s Hospital, then moved to a small hill farm in Cumbria where she lived for 25 years. Peterloo Poets published four collections: Marginal Land (1988), Selves (1995), Speaking of the Dead (2003) and In Praise of Aunts (2007). Shoestring Press published Caliban Dancing (2013) and Finding the Planes: New and Selected Poems (2015). She has won several major prizes and in 2005 received a Cholmondeley Award. ‘Book’ is from her forthcoming collection The Long Habit of Living, which will be published by HappenStance Press later this year.

Read this next