City of Departure
by Helen Tookey
When I stepped out of the house the air held rain, the scent of it, the taste. The light was bruised and yellowish. A blackbird was singing, very clearly, his song amplified by the coming rain. The scene felt familiar, already lived-through. The caption was Morning in the city of departures. I was walking through narrow streets close to the docks, under the piers of bridges, through brick archways. The cobblestones were wet and I had on no shoes. There had been a railway accident, journeys were disrupted or rendered impossible. You didn’t appear and yet you were present, if only in the feeling of missed connections. You were there in the sense of having spoken a vital word to me and then gone away, leaving me wandering the wet quaysides holding the word I couldn’t use, a bright coin in the wrong currency.
From City of Departures. Reproduced with kind permission of Carcanet.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Collection 2019
City of Departures
Helen Tookey
About Helen Tookey
Helen Tookey (b. 1969, Leicester) takes inspiration from the fleeting and vestigial — dreams, overheard stories, works of art and remembered children’s book illustrations all contribute to the eerie landscapes of City of Departures. There is also a strong European dimension, with poems set in Germany, Denmark and France: part of the overwhelming sense of loss arises from Brexit and the consequent ruptures of place and identity.
Tookey lives in Liverpool, where she works as Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at John Moores University. Her previous collection from Carcanet, Missel-Child, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize. The poems she is currently writing arise out of her response to the ecological crisis: poetry, she says, can and should tackle big ideas, ‘but you’ve got to get those ideas across by showing the reader something specific and tangible that they can take hold of.’
