Eliza Mood

Eliza was born in Warkworth, Northumberland, a stones throw from the dunes in the room that has become the ‘Jackdaw Café', a premonition of which perhaps bestowed her love of corvids, especially the ravens of Whitbarrow Scar. Her childhood was spent messing about along the banks of Wansbeck and Aln and tramping the Duke of Northumberland's park, reeling at the vertiginous view from Brislee Tower. At thirteen she took the train to school among the chalk hills of Hampshire and spent five years jumping out of mullioned windows and watching the dawn over Stoner. After a period of getting sloshed by the Cam, cycling from Turnham Green to Brixton over Waterloo Bridge and peppercorn renting a condemned house in Camden she settled back in the North teaching English in Northumberland, searching for hut circles on Yeavering Bell, collecting samphire on Morecambe Bay and, to come up to date, teaching creative writing at the University of Cumbria.

In 2006 she published her first novel, ‘Giving up Architecture' with Seaglass Books and is looking for a publisher for her second, ‘Ruby's Room: A Theory of the Giant'. She has been publishing poetry in various magazines and journals since 2004.

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In Denial

Slave shepherds washed in the beck
at a pool called the black dub (Dent museum).

You stare at encryptions on my palm
as though you might read whether
mine was the hand that cracked the whip
or bled, flayed by the cat's nine cuts.

Did summer's ultra-violet brand my arm
or, from deep in, draw pigment out?
My tongue, a split ash, one root in Africa ,
the other a Cumbrian upland meadow
where clints cross-hatched by grikes
quiver with rue and quaking grasses, is silent.

Stone's friction grazes on skin
where my great-great-grandfather's
dead cells feed lichen; my labour
repairs this wall but not the damage.

Sheep may hoof over a breach,
though not your gaze, enslaved by vigilance;
one transaction binds a hand that proffers coin
to a hand sold. And so tongues, palpating
the dough we kneaded in your kitchen,
mingle saliva with our sweat and piss.

At night you swim in curses, half-heard,
that taint your child, skinny-dipping
forbidden waters of the Black Dub,
dyeing her limbs fatal river-dark.

Now, ignorant of your own history,
you rap farm doors to dig at truth.
After all, it was not Quaker abolitionists
who got under our skin but, more slippery,
the deoxyribonucleic acid in our tears,
still weeping salt of the Atlantic.

Published in Iota 76