The Registrar’s Office
by Karen McCarthy Woolf
isn’t really an office it’s a cupboard with
no source of natural light, and I don’t
realise it but I’m loved up like the other
mothers gazing at meconium as if it’s fresh tar
on a road not an odourless, black shit
that’s been on the boil for nine months
and Lydia, that’s the registrar’s name, she
gives me a paper cone of iced water from
the dispenser to calm me down and it
does calm me, the water flows through
me and now we’re holding each other while
Simon’s down in the mortuary and I tell
her all about how he lost his mother from
a brain tumour when I was six months
gone, how her name was Lydia too, that
it was so quick and now this.
We’re still holding on when he comes back
then joins us in a circle of three and even
another form to fill in can’t sober me up
as the morphine unpeels another mezzanine
of hell in a shopping centre where women
with rigid quiffs and rouged cheeks glide
up and down glass escalators and
people believe in the faux marble fountains
although it’s all really a shimmering
colon. Anyway, I’m determined, I say,
as I leave the room, when I get out of here, if
it’s the last thing I do, I will get you
a window because that’s not right, expecting
someone to live and work and sign
death certificates without a window, no-one
should have to put up with that, it’s not
right, she’s a good person with
a good heart, she should have a window.
From An Aviary of Small Birds. Reproduced with kind permission from Carcanet.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best First Collection 2015
An Aviary of Small Birds
Karen McCarthy Woolf
About Karen McCarthy Woolf
Karen McCarthy Woolf was born in London to an English mother and a Jamaican father. Her debut collection, An Aviary of Small Birds (Carcanet, 2014) commemorates the loss of her still born son, Otto, in 2009. At the time, she had been working steadily on a collection populated by many other poems but the work she wrote in response to maternal loss ‘demanded their place and I wanted to make space for them’.
She composed poetry as a teenager, encouraged by a ‘mum who could write rhyming couplets standing on her head’, but credits the 1995 Forward Prizes with drawing her back to poetry as an adult: she picked up the anthology in a bookshop and read a poem by Kwame Dawes, which left her profoundly moved.
Her pamphlet, The Worshipful Company of Pomegranate Slicers (Spread the Word, 2005), was a New Statesman Book of the Year, and in 2008, Karen was one of ten poets selected for The Complete Works – a nationwide mentoring scheme that aims to increase cultural diversity in poetry publishing. She chose as mentor the poet Michael Symmons Roberts, and maintains close links with the scheme, as editor of Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe, 2014), the anthology of Complete Works II poets. She is currently working towards a PhD at Royal Holloway: her thesis looks at new ways of writing about nature in the face of climate change.
