Friday 1 November 2019

A poem by Ramona Herdman

I've been a fan of Ramona Herdman's excellent poetry for several years, but I wasn't aware of just how good she is at reading it until I attended the HappenStance event at StAnza last March, where she was exceptional. As a consequence, she went straight on our hit list when Mat Riches and myself started discussing the line-up for the forthcoming Rogue Strands reading in London on 28th November (see Facebook page here, plug, plug, plug...!), and we were delighted when she agreed to feature.

Moreover, the poem she's sent as a taster of her work is also top-notch. It represents so much of what makes her work special. Her control of line-endings and stanzas is delicate, working in perfect tandem with the build-up of semantic tension. And then there's her treatment of the contents themselves: this is highly personal poetry but never confessional in tone, and its emotional impact is consequently greater...


‘Wake up: time to die’
(Blade Runner)

It’s supposed to be digitally remastered
but it’s pixellated to shit still, luscious
city smog, rain, light blare like morning mist.

The year my father knew he was dying,
every film turned out to be about death.

Blade Runner the worst: built-in
obsolescence and a four year life-span
in the near-distant future of 2019.

I must have watched it yearly since
and every time Harrison Ford gets younger.

I don’t remember whether dad liked it
but every time Rutger Hauer dies for our sins,
too perfect to imagine, I think of watching it
with him: the oxygen tank, the tipping

chair the NHS lent him and how that year
he was too ill for his lifetime trip to India
so watched TV all day. I don’t care

if Deckard is a replicant or not.
I just hope he makes it to the mountains.

This evening, I am grateful to watch
yet another Director’s Cut, to wonder
at Pris (your standard pleasure model),

Daryl Hannah‘s tender immortal quarter-
century inner thighs – self-sustaining miracles.

I am grateful that you are here
again to snicker with me when Deckard fails again
to persuade anyone that he’s still quit,
to toast life as it is and still being part of it.


(First published in Under the Radar)

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