In celebration of bluebells in my mother’s garden near Bath and maple leaves in my garden in Oz, I bring you the wise, wistful, the wonderful Tania Hershman. She has a way with words and is cutting a swathe through the poetry world. Her fiction is poetry, her poetry transporting, and I am taken back to the week I met Tania in Ventenac in 2013. Giggles later here we are. I bring you with arresting punctuation…
Tania Hershman Author of two story collections: My Mother Was An Upright Piano: Fictions (Tangent Books, 2012), and The White Road and Other Stories (Salt, 2008; commended, 2009 Orange Award for New Writers). Tania’s award-winning short stories and poetry have been widely published in print and online and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4. Tania is a 2014 Gladstone’s Library Writer-in-Residence, judge of the 2014 Bridport Flash Fiction Prize, and founder and curator of ShortStops (www.shortstops.info), celebrating short story activity across the UK & Ireland. She is a Royal Literary Fund fellow at Bristol University where she is studying for a PhD in Creative Writing and has recently won publication of her first poetry collection as a finalist in the Munster Fool for Poetry International Prize.
Delville Wood, The Somme
From when they began
to when they ended
it was a moment’s
sigh and droop. It was
a cuckoo’s cry. It was
a horse
Fire on them
A horse
Fire on them!
A horse, grazing.
Published in Magma, 2014
1 & 2
1.
Catch me, appled, love, oh catch me. Dimpled, I am sweeter, loves of honey, men and ministries.
You talk me, peached; I sink. And sinking, trip; I fly. Summon me troops, warn me whispered, take me longing, fighting, sleepless.
2.
.Night will come and then the night will come and then the rain. The night comes, rained, and you are more night to my rain, darkened we are only shuttered, and after dark. And after: rain.
Published in Tears in the Fence, Winter 2012
Julie Maclean 