INDIGO DREAMS PUBLISHING LTD
Deborah Harvey is co-director of The Leaping Word poetry consultancy.
Her poems have been widely published in journals and anthologies, broadcast on Radio 4’s Poetry Please, and awarded several major prizes, most recently the 2018 Plough Prize Short Poem Competition.
'The Shadow Factory' is her fourth poetry collection, following 'Breadcrumbs' (2016), 'Map Reading for Beginners' (2014), and 'Communio'n (2011), all published by Indigo Dreams.
Her historical novel, 'Dart', appeared under their Tamar Books imprint in 2013.
Poetry
138 x 216mm
68 pages
£9.99 + P&P UK
ISBN 978-1-912876-20-4
PUB: 29/11/2019
ORDER HERE
The Shadow Factory
Deborah Harvey
Praise for Oystercatchers:
'Every word is weighted. Although nothing
is explicit, something important is being enacted, and the epigraph by Camus adds an anchor, so that we guess his are the words being taken to the sea and released from the heart. I kept coming back to this and getting more from it.’
Pascale Petit
‘Deborah Harvey’s … poems are raw
and true. She is the real thing.’
Hugo Williams
The Good Dogs of Chernobyl
‘Don’t kill our Zhulka. She’s a good dog.’
So they stayed where they were told,
they never lost their faith
not even when the buses left
and the fallen star hissed flame and cracked
the air was thick with ash, the rain burned black,
and no one told them what they were
no one stroked their crackling fur
or scratched their ears.
Now they come through underbrush
on paths of wormwood, cinder, dust,
their paw prints brand the bitter earth
and none of them will sit or stay,
these dogs that know no human touch
that do not answer to a name.
The Shadow Factory
Was it nightfall or the sun eloping with a cloud?
No one knew for sure but whatever the cause
the shadow factory vanished.
Workers peered vainly at rollsigns on buses
traipsed to the gates where they’d seen it last;
on encountering rubble and broken glass
shrugged their shoulders, sighed,
applied for redeployment.
Perhaps it retired to a sunlit meadow,
sat itself down by a puttering stream
far from the whine of lathes, the scream of Harrier jump jets
perfecting hand shapes from watching wild rabbits,
learning how bats navigate by sound shadow
on moonless nights.
Oystercatchers
‘Aujourd’hui, maman est morte’
‘L’étranger’, Albert Camus
One day
the day she’s been waiting for will come
and she’ll take these words with her to the sea
unzip her coat, pull open her ribcage
let them fly as purposely
as oystercatchers
pulling the strings of the sky
and tide
lifting the weight from each blood cell
giving her permission
Cover photograph of Herons Green Bay ©Deborah Harvey
