ISBN: 978-1-915108-32-6
Publication Date: 26 June 2025
Pamphlet, 32 Pages
Anima
It’s hard to spot a lynx: it lives
out of human sight, leaps between high branches,
takes other paths than your ones – stranger.
Your true desire is hidden.
It jumps across the gorge, scales the cliff,
and seems to disappear against the rockface and the wood.
It lives in ways you find impossible.
You have to imagine it – your heart’s desiring
somewhere in the hills you’ve come to walk through.
What is it you want? You thought you knew, but
that was back there, in the town, among
your family, noise, other people. This is now.
In the silence, you know something that’s part of you
is beyond you: your will to live.
It is hunting, crossing frozen rivers,
its broad paws – webbed – patting
down upon the snow.
You don’t want its skin: no. You
want to be like it. The life it is living.
Sometimes, you get a sense of its light,
within you: knowing eyes, that glow.
*
Sophie Cooke’s poems combine landscapes from the Swedish winter with the Water of Leith in Edinburgh, two places where the author walked and reflected as part of an inner journey of recovery. They come from the place we enter when we let our bodies speak, and we have time to listen.
The repetition of the simple physical activity of walking, combined with the gently changing scenery of nature within which she walked, made an environment where it was possible to face fear and begin to heal.
It was not a pilgrimage but a wander. This deftly formed sequence of poems takes its readers on a wander too.
Wander by Sophie Cooke
Your Heart Is Not Yours
Although it is beating
your heart belongs to someone else.
And you can’t expel, from your body,
the thing that keeps your life going.
It would rip
the half-mouth –
the only mouth there is
the thing that breathes –
from your lungs and being.*
Bones
From here, I am not here: all that is,
is the air that hangs between
the shadowed branches’ shifting colours:
orange sheen of the final wall of beech,
yellow pennies of the birch – a last hurrah:
the coins a bride and groom once threw to us
outside the church – the silent stillness, now.
The almost-emptied frame of what will be:
the bones we have to live with – winter trees –
and evergreen towers, fringing: pine.I am the frozen strawberry leaf
and twisting of the rock-face – the cliff
for which my path has twisted – and am
my own warm heart, beating in its winter frame:
the small-leaved heather, and the far-off geese,
sending memories through the lichen of my being.
We will come through whatever comes, they say.
One foot, and then the other,
on the side of the mountain.
Sophie Cooke writes novels, short stories, and poetry: her poems have previously appeared as film-poems and in magazines and anthologies. She won the Genomics Forum Poetry Prize, and her film-poem ‘Byland’ was commissioned for the Year of Natural Scotland. This is her first print collection. She lives in Edinburgh.