Soft bruised and pelted raw
A new poem by Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe about dappled horses among other things
Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe is a really good emailer and poet, but not in that order. Talking to Tim MacGabhann (who we’ll publish next week) about new Irish poets, he recommended I comb the internet for her work and order her first collection, (out with Faber), ‘Auguries Of A Minor God’. On my scroll today I saw a tweet that read, “We get it, poetry, you’re about loss.” Nidhi’s poems are about loss sure, but of the flesh-eating parasitic type that burrows furiously into folds of skin and gently consumes you from the inside out. Her poems combine Sanskrit scripts, Hindu mythologies, Qur’anic texts, references to Gaelic folklore, and more, whilst ‘Auguries Of A Minor God’ at one point uses an abecedarian structure to trace the story of a migrant family. It’s a heady mix, one which The Guardian described as, “a startling gesture in the face of a threatening world, and one that feels, in Wallace Stevens’s words, “like / a new / knowledge of reality”. I’m very glad she gave me a new poem, which you can read below. - RA
Buy Auguries Of A Minor God here.
“This poem takes inspiration from the prehistoric dappled horses cave painting at La Grotte du Pech Merle, its first line opens a dialogue with Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrote: when the eye sees a thing of beauty, the hand wants to draw it.” - ND/AE
Drawn
for Cian Tormey
When the eye sees a thing
of beauty it wants to draw
closer now
Where dawn enters the mouth
curved through a jagged rock
carved face
When we spotted the horses
two, drew near, knew breath
drew blood
Where deep in the obsidian
eyed glint of a swift animal
desire rose
When our throats slaked those
vermilion borders stained with
madder lake
Where we marked out hide
soft bruised and pelted raw
blushed rivulets
When light falls to an eye
flayed by beauty then yes
then again.