At Lullington Church/To My Daughter
by Toby Martinez de las Rivas
In my kingdom it is winter forever.
The snow falls & there is no time nor day —
no distinction between things, no compare,
no flaw to taint our rudimentary clay.
The falcon has flown away with history,
the bullfinch sheathed in ice & snow, the bare
branch shall never know its May,
nor husband teach the vanity of despair.
Nothing disturbs its peaceful sleep, no dream
of life, no hope, no falsifying dawn
alleviate the blank space within the frame —
no words to speak, no beauty to adorn.
Until she wakes and finds herself alone,
you are her rock, Lord. Lord, you are stone.
Lully, Lulley, Lully, Lulley.
From Black Sun. Reproduced with kind permission of Faber & Faber
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Collection 2018
Black Sun
Toby Martinez de las Rivas
About Toby Martinez de las Rivas
Toby Martinez de las Rivas (b. 1978, Winchester) moved from north-east England to Córdoba after the publication of his first collection, Terror, in 2014. In an interview with Lucy Mercer, he described how the ‘black sun’ of his new collection’s title developed from the small black circles which served as Terror’s section dividers: ‘Some time after Terror went to press I was toying around with images and motifs. I sketched a much larger circle into a document and infilled it with black, and I was suddenly aware of it as a presence separate from me… I found something terrible about it, about its featureless, even, dense nothingness. But I sensed some kind of glory in it, too.’
The poems of Black Sun take their place on that line between terror and glory which characterises the best religious poetry. Asked what advice he would give to his younger self, he writes: ‘Be cautious. Not too cautious. Believe in language’.
