She is Fierce Read online

  For my daughters

  Contents

  Introduction

  ‘My roots spread’ – Roots and Growing Up

  Diaspora

  Sue Hardy-Dawson

  To Make a Homeland

  Amineh Abou Kerech

  Metaphors

  Sylvia Plath

  Milk-Jug Jackers

  Hollie McNish

  A Glasgow Nonsense Rhyme for Molly

  Liz Lochhead

  Ode on the Whole Duty of Parents

  Frances Cornford

  When I Was a Bird

  Katherine Mansfield

  School Parted Us

  George Eliot

  Timetable

  Kate Clanchy

  A Glass of Tea

  Shukria Rezaei

  How to Cut a Pomegranate

  Imtiaz Dharker

  Bridge

  Aisha Borja

  I Am My Own Parent

  Deborah Alma

  Huge Blue

  Pippa Little

  Song

  Lady Dorothea Du Bois

  To My Daughter On Being Separated from Her on Her Marriage

  Anne Hunter

  Flight Radar

  Imtiaz Dharker

  Heirloom

  Kathleen Raine

  Mali

  Gillian Clarke

  The Pale Horse

  Lesley Ingram

  On Forgetting That I Am a Tree

  Ruth Awolola

  ‘We’ve had a whirl and a blast, girl’ – Friendship

  5th Dudley Girl Guides

  Liz Berry

  Thirteen

  Kate Tempest

  Lacing Boots

  Helen Burke

  Witch

  Jean Tepperman

  Polly

  Rhian Edwards

  To D. R.

  Laura Grey

  To Mrs K., On Her Sending Me an English Christmas Plum-Cake at Paris

  Helen Maria Williams

  Friendship

  Elizabeth Jennings

  from Essay on Friendship

  Mary Leapor

  Friends

  Polly Clark

  from The Bas Bleu

  Hannah More

  Introductions

  Moya Cannon

  When Last We Parted

  Catherine Maria Fanshawe

  Long Departure

  Sappho

  Fiere

  Jackie Kay

  ‘My heart has made its mind up’ – Love

  Phosphorescence

  Victoria Gatehouse

  Practice

  Mary Jean Chan

  A Pride of Ladies

  Anne Halley

  Siren Song

  Margaret Atwood

  Valentine

  Carol Ann Duffy

  A Moment

  Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

  In an Artist’s Studio

  Christina Rossetti

  The Lust of the Eyes

  Elizabeth Siddal

  The Guitarist Tunes Up

  Frances Cornford

  Before the sun goes down

  Astrid Hjertenaes Andersen

  Translated by Nadia Christensen

  Sonnet 43

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  A Birthday

  Christina Rossetti

  The Sun Has Burst the Sky

  Jenny Joseph

  The house was just twinkling in the moon light

  Gertrude Stein

  Reconciliation

  Else Lasker-Schüler

  Translated by James Sheard

  Camomile Tea

  Katherine Mansfield

  To my Dear and Loving Husband

  Anne Bradstreet

  A Decade

  Amy Lowell

  Wedding

  Alice Oswald

  Anniversary

  Elaine Feinstein

  Song for the Last Act

  Louise Bogan

  Kissing

  Fleur Adcock

  Renouncement

  Alice Meynell

  Among His Books

  Edith Nesbit

  Why?

  Mary Webb

  Love Comes Back

  Hera Lindsay Bird

  heat

  Yrsa Daley-Ward

  One Art

  Elizabeth Bishop

  Dead Love

  Elizabeth Siddal

  Let It Be Forgotten

  Sara Teasdale

  ‘Star-high, heart-deep’ – Nature

  The Awakening River

  Katherine Mansfield

  High Waving Heather

  Emily Brontë

  Address to a Child During a Boisterous Winter Evening

  Dorothy Wordsworth

  Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day

  Anne Brontë

  Breakage

  Mary Oliver

  The Trees’ Counselling

  Christina Rossetti

  The Unseen Life of Trees

  Chrissie Gittins

  Green Rain

  Mary Webb

  from Aurora Leigh

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  For Forest

  Grace Nichols

  Sylhet

  Rukiya Khatun

  How to knit a sheep

  Di Slaney

  Nerval and the Lobster

  Katharine Towers

  Nan Hardwicke Turns Into a Hare

  Wendy Pratt

  Of Many Worlds in This World

  Margaret Cavendish

  Power of the Other

  Francesca Beard

  Friday Afternoon

  Alison Brackenbury

  Speak of the North!

  Charlotte Brontë

  A Memory

  Lola Ridge

  Wind and Silver

  Amy Lowell

  from The Land

  Vita Sackville-West

  Twinkled to Sleep

  Ursula Bethell

  ‘I’m glad I exist’ – Freedom, Mindfulness and Joy

  It Is Everywhere

  Remi Graves

  On Foot I Wandered Through the Solar Systems

  Edith Södergran

  Translated by Malena Mörling and Jonas Ellerström

  The Orange

  Wendy Cope

  New Every Morning

  Susan Coolidge

  If Once You Have Slept on an Island

  Rachel Field

  Full Moon

  Vita Sackville-West

  Seven Times One: Exultation

  Jean Ingelow

  Today

  Jean Little

  Freedom

  Olive Runner

  To Sleep, Possum to Dream

  Vahni Capildeo

  Submerged

  Lola Ridge

  The Moon in Your Hands

  H.D.

  You Who Want

  Hadewijch of Antwerp

  Boats in the Bay

  Winifred Holtby

  Three Good Things

  Jan Dean

  There Is No Frigate Like a Book

  Emily Dickinson

  This Poem . . .

  Elma Mitchell

  Uppity

  Eileen Myles

  Stanzas

  Emily Brontë

  Antidote to the Fear of Death

  Rebecca Elson

  ‘Phenomenal woman’ – Society, Fashion and Body Image

  Phenomenal Woman

  Maya Angelou

  Lullaby

  Dorothy Parker

  To a Proud Beauty

  ‘Ephelia’

  A Scherzo: A Shy Person’s Wishes

  Dora Greenwell

  Mirror

  Sylvia Plath

  A Poet Advises
a Change of Clothes

  Anna Wickham

  Tough Dragons

  Selina Nwulu

  Homage to My Hips

  Lucille Clifton

  My Body

  Abigail Cook

  And then he said: When did your arms get so big?

  Kristina Close

  Poem in Which My Legs Are Accepted

  Kathleen Fraser

  Not Andromeda

  Katie Byford

  ‘But still, like air, I rise’ – Courage, Protest and Resistance

  ‘Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers

  Emily Dickinson

  The New Colossus

  Emma Lazarus

  Ain’t I a Woman?

  Sojourner Truth

  Protest

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox

  Eliza Harris

  Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

  Rosa Parks

  Jan Dean

  My First Day at School

  Michaela Morgan

  Wanted A Husband

  Marion Bernstein

  To the Ladies

  Lady Mary Chudleigh

  The Battle of the Sexes

  Liz Brownlee

  Still I Rise

  Maya Angelou

  Saltwater

  Finn Butler

  The Call

  Charlotte Mew

  Before I Leave the Stage

  Alice Walker

  The Juniper Tree

  Vittoria Colonna

  Ruth

  Pauli Murray

  Inventory

  Dorothy Parker

  93 Percent Stardust

  Nikita Gill

  God Says Yes To Me

  Kaylin Haught

  Warning

  Jenny Joseph

  May 1915

  Charlotte Mew

  Immensity

  Mabel Esther Allan

  The Brits

  Colette Bryce

  There Will Come Soft Rains

  Sara Teasdale

  ‘Behind Me – dips Eternity’ – Endings

  Remember

  Christina Rossetti

  Not Waving but Drowning

  Stevie Smith

  The Child in Me

  May Riley Smith

  September Rain

  Helen Dunmore

  Woodland Burial

  Pam Ayres

  The Things That Matter

  Edith Nesbit

  Behind Me – dips Eternity

  Emily Dickinson

  About the Poets

  Index of First Lines

  Index of Poets

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  It’s an exciting time for poetry. Slams and performances are attracting huge audiences; book sales are booming; some of today’s biggest online superstars are poets. Women are at the forefront of this movement: winning prizes, headlining festivals, topping bestseller lists and connecting with thousands of readers in digital spaces. It has not always been so.

  Anthologies have traditionally been dominated by male voices, seasoned with a mere scattering of women – usually, the same few names. And yet women – wondered at and worshipped by male poets – danced through and dominated those pages. It puzzled me, so I started reading.

  Women’s songs have always formed a part of oral traditions, though these were often not recorded. Female poets were active in the ancient world but, for the most part, their work was not preserved and some – like Sappho’s – was edited or suppressed later. Throughout history and into our own times, women have faced educational, religious and social limitations on their freedom both to write and – especially – to publish. During most eras, it was almost exclusively aristocratic women who had the leisure, learning and liberty to become known as poets.

  For centuries it was considered shocking for women to lift their eyes from the housework and seek employment outside the home, and especially for them to trespass in the ‘male’ arena of literature. Women writers were condemned, or mocked. Parents worried in case potential husbands were put off by their bookish daughters. It has been hard for women – especially if they are also mothers – to find time to work, and to get that work taken seriously. We will never know how many women wrote but didn’t dare publish, or exactly how many published under pseudonyms (often men’s names), as George Eliot and the Brontë sisters felt that they must.

  It was often felt that women should stick to certain subjects – family, friendship, dutiful religion and the prettier corners of nature – and they have written beautifully and powerfully about all these. However, in the poems gathered here and elsewhere, female poets consider every possible subject: science and our magnificent universe; politics and protest; bodies and belief; myths and mental health; war and displacement.

  I have included brief biographies of the poets – and what women they were, and are! From suffragettes and freed slaves to schoolgirls, I was fascinated to uncover their stories, many of which were new to me and will, I think, be new to you. Some of these women faced poverty, war, physical and mental illness, oppressive societies and cruelty, but they spun from their experiences wonderful poetry that will speak to readers for generations to come.

  Poetry is personal, so any anthology must carry a sincere apology for omissions. I have never found the process of whittling down a longlist more agonizing – there were hundreds of poems loved and lost in the process. I hope you will find in this book a diverse but representative choir of voices – many of which have been unheard for too long – and there will be something unfamiliar and intriguing for every reader. I wish you as much joy reading it as I had compiling it.

  Ana Sampson

  ‘My roots spread’ – Roots and Growing Up

  Here are poems about where – and who – we come from. In some of these verses, the poets explore the notion of home, tracing their own deep roots, and the experience of displacement when those roots are torn up. Others conjure up childhood, from the smell of school to the giddiness of garden games.

  Here are sisters: a little Katherine Mansfield fluttering fantasy feathers, and George Eliot movingly mourning her brother’s affection after twenty sad years of silence between them. Here are mothers: Sylvia Plath pregnant with promises that must now be kept; Hollie McNish spinning stories about her mysterious baby’s midnight adventures; Frances Cornford banishing bedtime terrors. We see them bidding that first farewell at the school gate or the others that come later, when their children fly the nest. And here, too, are daughters: unravelling their futures with a flourish, or sifting the treasures handed down to them by the generations of women that came before.

  Diaspora

  My roots spread tap and spur from Portugal

  the slap, of turquoise seas, on distant sands.

  Stems of mine came from ice to Africa

  later – to boast a son of Abraham.

  I am fertile seed, carried from Ireland

  emeralds rich with peat and blue mountain mists.

  I am black-work under pomegranate suns

  the tale, of a princess of Spain, no less.

  Red branches – an envelope, from a new

  Chinese uncle. I am a paper dragon

  dance, animal years that blossom haiku.

  Grown from Gaul leaves, Roman petals sprout words,

  Pict, Viking, Saxon, Norman, conquered

  with prayer or sword. I am Indian spices

  a Maharaja wearing a silk peacock

  I am chi, pashmina and pyjamas.

  I am every woman, man and small child

  in every mirror – puzzles of ancestry

  we who call ourselves British, yet as I

  sometime migrants invaders refugees.

  Sue Hardy-Dawson

  To Make a Homeland

  Can anyone teach me

  how to make a homeland?

  Heartfelt thanks if you can,

  heartiest thanks,

  from the house-sparrows,

  the apple-trees of Sy
ria,

  and yours very sincerely.

  Amineh Abou Kerech

  Metaphors

  I’m a riddle in nine syllables,

  An elephant, a ponderous house,

  A melon strolling on two tendrils.

  O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!

  This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.

  Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.

  I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.

  I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,

  Boarded the train there’s no getting off.

  Sylvia Plath

  Milk-Jug Jackers

  Baby you look tired, where have you been?

  My baby girl smiles gummy and looks up at me.

  She says, ‘Mummy every morning between midnight and three

  We go milk-jug-jacking all my babies and me.

  We meet in secret on the green just outside the flats

  The babies, bunnies, birds and the cats

  We sit on bunnies’ backs, galloping, and follow the birds

  The cats’ eyes light the path of the outside world.

  To the big park lakes is where we run

  Where, waiting by the piers, are our friendly swans.

  We jump off bunnies’ backs to the white swans’ wings

  Sit amongst the feathers where we whisper and sing:

  “We are the milk-jug jackers and we’re coming your way

  Ladies better watch out, put your nipples away

  We’ve got our crowbars at the ready to snap off your straps

  Happy slapper milk-jug jackers, hope you’re ready for that.”

  With our animal friends and our bunny-rabbit cars

  We sit, snapping bras, in our milk-jug bars

  Till our potbellies are full of white baby rum

  Then the swans fly us home for our feed time with Mum

  Sipping on your nipple I giggle in delight

  Cos you don’t know I’ve been drinking milk in all the night.

  Sipping on your nipple I giggle in delight

  Cos you don’t know I’ve been milk-jug-jacking all of the night.’

  Hollie McNish

  A Glasgow Nonsense Rhyme for Molly

  Molly Pin Li McLaren,

  come home and look

  at the pictures in your brand-new book –

  a tree, a bird, a fish, a bell,

  a bell, a fish, a tree, a bird.

  Point, wee Molly, and say the word!

  Oh, Molly, I wish

  you the moon as white and round as a dish

  and a bell, a tree, a bird and a fish.

  Touch! Taste! Look! Smell!

  (tree, fish, bird, bell)

  And listen, wee Molly, listen well

  to the wind,

  to the wind in the tree go swish