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POETRY FOCUS: 4 POEMS FROM CHLOE STOPA-HUNT

Eyewear's blog is very pleased to be able to feature, this Sunday, four poems by the recent Eric Gregory winner, Chloe Stopa-Hunt.

She grew up in Oxfordshire, Dorset, and Hampshire, and was educated at New College, Oxford. She was twice a Foyle Young Poet of the Year, subsequently winning the University of Oxford’s English Poem on a Sacred Subject Prize and the University of Cambridge’s Winchester Reading Prize. In 2014, Stopa-Hunt won an Eric Gregory Award.

Her poems have appeared in a range of journals, including POEM, Oxford Poetry, Envoi, Magma, and Ambit, and I she has also contributed reviews or review-essays to Asymptote, Poetry Matters, The Oxonian Review, Mslexia, and Poetry Review. Some recent poems can be read online at Ink Sweat & Tears and Visual Verse, and her poems have also appeared in several anthologies, including Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam and Best British Poetry 2013.

Chloe Stopa-Hunt
Ms. Stopa-Hunt is currently doing graduate research into Renaissance literature at the University of Cambridge, where her collection of fiction, drama and historiography themed around Camille and Lucile Desmoulins won the 2012-2013 Rose Book-Collecting Prize.




Luxembourg Prison

These hazards end. It’s time to say:
all risk is finished. The room looks
bare again. We don’t need refuges,
they’re obsolete. And so are locks.

Now something has emptied sorrow
out into the streets. Now light laps
the walls. Now the hush that follows
a long-held note stills all our lips.
 

 ***
 

The Miller’s Flowers

Flower-songs are sewn with silver
     On your furious tongue,

I will tolerate your weeping
     If it’s not prolonged.

Are you revenant or flower?
     Slaughterer or toy?

Prairie gentians like to call you
     Summer’s whipping-boy.

 
***
 

My koala child

My koala child
playing in the moon-pool,

O climb up the rocks, swan-winged
infanta, give a blood sample
before nightfall,

give bone-marrow, better things
than that, my

skinned-wheat infanta,
my girl, my bear.

 
***
 

Cold Snap

The poppies were
Spared nothing.

Red piths of love
Shamed afresh.

This cold snap is
No fault of mine.

The poppies were
Spared nothing.

 
all poems copyright Chloe Stopa-Hunt, 2014.

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