There were barnacles…
by Sarah Howe
‘Once there were . . .’ – Cormac McCarthy
There were barnacles that marked the edges of oceans.
Late scramblers on the rocks could feel their calcic ridges
stoving sharply underfoot. The wet rocks glittered beneath
and in the wind they smelled of verdigris. The barnacles
fused in intricate settlements. For their whole lives they
cleaved, and in turn the fragile rock cleaved to them.
Volcanoes and thimbles and strange constellations.
Together they mapped distant cities and willed the sea to
overtake them. and when the russet tide came they opened
themselves like unfamiliar lovers. The whole thing some
actinic principle: a forest grew up in a second, to grace a
world where the sun was a watery lamp. Where none had
been before, white mouths frilled softly in the current and
squat armour issued forth the unlikeliest of cilia:
transparent, lightly haired, cherishing each updraft as,
feathered, they moved with it. They only existed for that
half-sunk terrain. And as they briefly lived, those tender
quills wrote of their mystery.
From Loop of Jade. Reproduced with kind permission from Chatto & Windus.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best First Collection 2015
Loop of Jade
Sarah Howe
About Sarah Howe
Sarah Howe (b 1983, Hong Kong) came as a child to England, her father’s country, but grew increasingly interested in the history of her mother, who fled from China in 1949. She says for a long time, poetry was something she did ‘under the radar of my official life as a university teacher and literary critic.’
‘Strangely, poetry became the place where I explored my Chineseness, something that otherwise had not place in my life – except perhaps for a hankering to go home to my mum’s fried noodles.’ It is no coincidence, she adds, that she began to write poetry in earnest while on a scholarship to Harvard, ‘a period of geographical displacement, when home was far away and imaginary again.’
The poems in her debut collection, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2014), span a decade: the earliest is inspired by two journeys: her mother’s as a baby and her own first trip to the Chinese mainland in 2004.
Her 2009 pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia (Tall-lighthouse), won an Eric Gregory Award, while her poems have appeared widely in magazines and, in 2014, were anthologised in Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe).
She is the founding editor of Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism and is a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where she teaches Renaissance Literature. In 2015-16, she take up a year’s writing fellowship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute: ‘It feels like coming full circle.’
