The Friday Poem

A poem every Friday

The Friday Poem on 15/04/22

We chose ‘Observation’ by Nicola Healey to be our Friday Poem this week partly because it brought an immediate smile of recognition to both our faces. Why are simple outpourings of pain — sometimes unmediated by craft or time — welcomed with such hushed reverence in the poetry world? This poem questions the preoccupation some poets and publishers seem to have with poetry as catharsis, or therapy. Whatever one feels about that, we think this poem is tightly written and full of controlled emotion. It’s smart, and provocative, and we love the final, scathing couplet. Bravo!

Observation

‘I like a look of Agony,
Because I know it’s true —’

   — Emily Dickinson

I have noticed
when I am gripped and wrung
by agony, and manage
to catch its distilled drops

in a poem, the bowl beneath
a slaughtered animal, those get
accepted, affirmed.
                                          The others 
loiter like wallflowers,
or lost messenger pigeons.

In academia, the knife-threat is
‘publish or perish’. Here
I perish and publish and persist.

I’d call that a communal ritual 
sacrifice, not a career.

Nicola Healey’s poems have been published in The Poetry Review, PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The London Magazine, The Rialto and Wild Court, among other places. She won the Metro Poetry Prize 2021 and was a runner-up in the Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry 2020. She is the author of Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge: The Poetics of Relationship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), a revision of her PhD which she gained from the University of St Andrews.

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