Louisa Adjoa Parker, How to wear a skin

I've just finished my second reading of this powerful and moving collection of poems by Louisa Adjoa Parker (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2019). Every poem held my attention. I will return to this compelling collection again and again - I couldn't put it down. Some of the poems are set in Dorset and Devon; the places and people she calls up or recalls are evoked with extraordinary honesty, yet approached with calm precision, however tragic the circumstances, however novel the poet's perspective or angle of vision. Highly recommended.


From Sunflower (about her return to an old friend's house in Devon):

"I've woken in a house I used to sleep in...

The bath's moved closer to the door,
as though it's trying to escape..."

"Louisa Adjoa Parker’s latest collection is an exploration of identity. Mostly set in south west England, Parker explores themes including place, race, friendship, motherhood, love, and loss, as well as what’s happening in society today. She takes inspiration from her own story and the imagined stories of others – a boy at a train station; a woman with a tattoo – and weaves them together in her quest to understand our place in a beautiful, yet fractured world" - Indigo Dreams


https://www.indigodreams.co.uk/louisa-adjoa-parker/4594728255


Some of the poems are reproduced here.


Land, Real and Imagined


Yes, I am from here, really,
but also from there. My feet
connect me to this piece of earth
which rolls away in green waves,


this piece of earth inhabited
by people who do not look like me.
This is how I wear my skin:
it tells the story of another place;


an imagined country
with dusty roads, hot nights,
which I have yet to see.
We all lean into the dark


towards our ancestors, who lean
towards us, with bent spines,
trying to tell us where we are from,
where we are going.



Love, Ending



Love ends how it begins.
The suddenness startles you
like the wingtips of a late-home bird
brushing your cheek in the dark.


Love, when it comes, spills across,
fills your world like rising seas.
Now it has gone, there is no bright star
out there, loving you, carrying
your heart in theirs.


Like tides, love quickly retracts
– cold water moving over stones.
Whereas once it flooded you,
now the shore is empty
and in the quiet, seagulls cry a name.

Beach Huts


Next to bone-white huts
in the half-dark, where red and green lights


strung like necklaces, hang
against the sky, I want to tell the woman


with the little boy who trails behind her,
while she calls out Charlie


every now and then as though the word
will reach out, wrap itself around him


like rope; pull him close, I want to say
I lived here once, I lived here, me.

Louisa, when she lived in Poundbury, Dorchester.

Photo: JP.

Beach Huts, Lyme Regis

Photo: JP

Weymouth: JP

Louisa was born in Doncaster. She moved to Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire and then to Paignton, South Devon (when she was 12/13). She moved to Lyme Regis, Dorset when she was 19, shortly after her first daughter was born. She spent 18 years in Lyme Regis before moving to Poundbury (in April 2010), where I interviewed her for Marshwood Vale magazine (March 2011 issue). She has since moved house again. Three of us later collaborated, as co-editors, on the Dorset Voices anthology (Roving Press). 

Louisa's website and previous writing history.