Sometimes,
the seal from next door borrows my bathtub
to loll in cool water. He says, there's nowhere left
to get
wet and lets himself in with the key I leave
in a dried up sea under broken corrugated coral.
When I get home,
I close the mouth of the loo; sit and watch
him swish this way and that; his fat, wet behind
rises up and down like a barren island in a storm,
sending waves to me –
the kind that make you want to club the
wicked,
or throw a fish.
Later,
when only his head can be seen,
we talk in ripples that circle him;
silence our lost worlds.
I don’t know why he comes, it’s not as if we're
lovers:
he’s a seal, and I
just live here.
From The night my sister went to Hollywood, Cultured Llama, 2013
www.culturedllama.co.uk/
Buy a copy HERE
Reviews:
It’s one thing to have a vivid imagination. It’s
another to be adept at language. It’s quite another to be gifted with the
language to release and express that imagination. Hilda Sheehan has all three.
She has the ability to see the pathos – as well as the joie
de vivre – in the human
comedy, and to convey it in a vigorous and sometimes seductively surreal
language. We are enabled to see what we may not have been able or prepared to
see, or even thought of seeing: this is what poetry is all about. Robert Vas Dias (Still
Life, Shearsman)
A joyful, freewheeling poetry that
showcases a surreal wit worn with a lightness that can only be achieved through
a firm grip on her craft and a sure habitation of her magically real
neighbourhood. This is a collection that licks its hanky and scrubs the muck
from your chops. Martin Malone (The Waiting Hillside, Templar)
Hilda Sheehan’s trajectory from raw talent to
accomplished craftswoman has been breath-taking. Her poems are unsettling,
dark, humorous, and poignant at once.
She has the astonishing ability to be poignant at her most bizarre and
humorous. Hilda is a risky poetry that reveals uncomfortable subtexts to do
with mothering, family relationships, relationships between women, marriage and
sex. This is a poet who can use bizarre, even surreal imagery, to clarify the
natural. It is a poetry to be reckoned with; a poetry deserving of, and
altogether ready to be, shared with a wider audience. Wendy Klein (Cuba
in the Blood, Cinnamon Press)
