ISBN: 978-1-915108-17-3
Publication Date: 20 February 2024
Nuala Watt’s poems lead us through the bureaucratic labyrinth of government assessment, the anxious joy of expecting a child and, with verve and originality, the realities of being a disabled parent. The book isn’t only about disability though. It’s about authenticity, justice, passion – life in dynamic fullness – conveyed in verse that is formally astute and spiritually attuned. It’s about anger, hope, frustration, love, and “how to take up a life and walk away.”
Receiving My Poems in Braille
My thoughts have arrived in the post.
I don’t know which ones.
I think they may be cyclists in the dark.
I was a bright child. Nobody else touched sound,
so I shuddered away from the raised dots
that captured my name. Braille cells.
At playtime I was an empty space
among footballs. I stayed bilingual
for only minutes, afraid to be trapped
in a lonely alphabet.
Now silence arrives, enveloped. The dense paper
spins in my hands. Is it upside down?
Is this the love poem in which I’m a cobra?
My thoughts have arrived in the post.
I guess I’m somewhere, embossed.
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“Sit down before you read these poems. Open the window. Open the door. There’s a bolt of pure electric coming for you. Nuala Watt looks without flinching, and then crafts her vision with wit, tenacity and rhythm. I’m in awe of this work. It’s kaleidoscopic, disturbing, revealing: these poems challenge the white space of the page and wake it up, shake it until it gives back something that’s beyond the constraints of society’s myopic ways of thinking and categorising. Daring, skilful, urgent – I’m already impatient to see what this poet does next.”—Alyson Hallett
“Watt’s words glow. This is a collection that morphs and moves like glass – a body reforming, reshaping, refracting.”
—Jen Campbell
