Skip to main content

Poem by Camellia Stafford

Eyewear is very glad to welcome Camellia Stafford (pictured) to its pages this Friday. She is one of the younger London poets now emerging who is worth reading and attending to.

Stafford was born in Warwickshire. She studied English Literature and Language at King's College London, and has an MA in Art History from the world-famous Courtauld Institute of Art.

She received a commendation in New Writing Ventures 2006. Her poetry has appeared online at Limelight. She has published a collection with Tall-Lighthouse, in the pilot series overseen by Roddy Lumsden, Another pretty colour, another break for air.

As befits a poet who has studied the visual, her work is sensuous, peppered with images, and enriched with colour. I look forward to her next collection.


Before a mirror, I kneel to tend my face

Cache of gloss and brushes, gel and cake,
my make-up bag, ritually unzipped reveals
silver encasements. Each bares use marks,
fingerprints of peachy foundation stippled
with tinct dusts, clouding the metallic shell.

Squat, in front of a cloudless looking-glass,
I vanish capricious shadows with a solution
of flesh, reliable in hue, coverage and set
by the powder pad's sweeps and presses
into every pore, tier and recess of my face.

Mantled with blusher, a silken brush swirls,
its powder blossoms flower on my cheeks.
Sponge applicator plunged through lustred
cream, strokes lips into a pearlescent glaze.
Candies perfume the next breath's confetti.

Possibilities of colour volunteer my eyes.
Lidded chamber of rose and aquamarine
shades tempt me with matte and shimmer.
I twirl my finger in their haloes applying
one, then another from the palette's rosary.

Comments

Brian Campbell said…
I enjoyed this poem. Thanks, Todd!
Hayli Lindgren said…
breathtakingly beautiful

Popular posts from this blog

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".