Alison Prince’s islands can be at once a place longed-for from exile and “reassuring little skerries of relief” to raise the spirits.
The poet and distinguished children’s writer herself lives and works on the island of Arran. She has written biographies of Kenneth Grahame and Hans Christian Andersen, has won the Guardian Children’s Fiction and SAC Children’s Book of the Year Awards, and, twice, the Literary Review’s Grand Poetry Prize.
The thoughtful piece below is her contribution to I’m Coming With You, Scottish PEN’s anthology of prose and poetry celebrating its ninetieth anniversary (£8).
ISLANDS
Missing the sea, cast up like bladderwrack
beyond all tides to dry black in a sun
blocked off by square, high building tops, I am
aching with desperation to be back
on the island where each casual gaze
is outward to the linking, steady line
of the horizon. Yet struggling to find
ease shows that the eye has subtle ways
of reassurance. Buddleia has grown
fat purple blossoms halfway up a wall
and further on a dandelion unrolls
its gold in a crack between paving stones.
Here is a tree that the Council has put
in a littered gap. See how it tries
to prosper. Chopped by its leaves, the sky
is the same sky that will glow at sunset
over the far-off sea. This time will pass.
Meanwhile, these little skerries of relief
offer a hopscotch of non-urban life,
rock after rock. Privet, a patch of grass,
a gutter puddle left from last night’s rain.
Such things do not perceive human distress
or know themselves as lovely, effortless
islands of safety for a marooned brain.
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