Emily Berry

ACT ONE

[Alone onstage with a coffin. Windchimes]

me one: There is a part of me that will always miss what I lost

me two: They all said the same thing in their letters. Poor little ____. I hope she will be okay, poor little ____

me one: I went back to the burned house

me two: Day of the week: immaterial. Time of year: immaterial

me one: Who was there: me and another girl, also me...

‘Attempts at description are stupid,’ George Eliot says, yet one may encounter a fragment of unexhausted time. Who can name its transactions, the sense that fell through us of untouchable wind, unknown effort – one black mane?

Anne Carson

Funny you should mention a crow.For years light … for years light eluded meor stayed only a short time … something...

I went to Paris to visit a writer I admired. Because I was not confident he really wanted me to be there, he promised me that he did and we hugged for a long time but he let go first and I was not completely reassured. In his apartment he had taken my photograph when I had just finished showering and was looking rather dishevelled because I had dressed hurriedly and I asked if he would take...

Light stretching my late summer shadow longover parched grass, low sun, this alive, thisevening. Light of mid-morning picking outall the trees’ capillaries, black against the lightof blue’s possibilities, would I rush outsideto see this, yes I would, this light? It’s so kind,it remembers me. Light of first thing, spilled skymixing day up, all the colours that go into day,you...

Selima Hill’s work often seems tactile – or ‘sensory’, as she herself has described it. Some of the short poems have the immediacy and speechlessness of found objects or readymades. And, like such objects, they can feel indivisible, complete in themselves, so that one hardly thinks of quoting from them except in their entirety.