Poem of the Week: The Words Collide by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

The Irish poet’s new collection includes the personal – and ultimately political – story of an ‘unletter’d woman’ of some other time dictating a lovely, mysterious and almost unguardedly sexual letter

The scribe objects. You can’t put it like that,
I can’t write that. But the client
is a tough small woman forty years old.
She insists. She needs her letter
to open out full of pleated revolving silk
and the soft lobes of her ears
where she flaunts those thin silver wires.

Related: The Boys of Bluehill by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin review – distinctive and rewarding

Related: Poem of the week: In His Other House by Jee Leong Koh

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