Poetry Shelf themes: Shirts, dresses, overalls

By Poetry Shelf - Paula Green | Posted: Friday Oct 18, 2024

At first I went hunting for fancy dress poems for my fifth theme, but the more I read, the more the theme widened. I was captivated by the wide array of clothing items that make an appearance in poems, whether fleeting or as a central focus, whether physical or metaphorical. How a jersey might lead to a grandmother’s knitting needles and bedtime stories, or a shirt might lead to a trattoria in Rome, or a pair of tramping socks to a cruel argument, or a warm sweater to the love of your life. Ah.

I love bringing a suite of voices together, singing different notes, in different keys, activating senses, allowing ideas to drift and settle, and drift again. Every time I assemble a theme, I muse on what poetry does, on why I am so drawn to it, on how it is such an open field, so rich in connections and melodies.

Move from the shadows and denim coat worn by the girl in the park moon-gazing (Hone Tuwhare) to a mother’s wedding dress and haunting spaces (Majella Cullinane), to spikes and nibbles, ice and calm (Rachel McAlpine) and Rebecca Hawkes’ mesmerising ‘Technicolour dreamcake’, an ekphrasis poem after a painting by Adrian Cox, “Border Creatures with Secret Life”. I move through the suite wondering if a poem is both a dressing and an undressing, a comfort sweater (like my daughter’s new range featuring her artwork), a swaddling, or a secondhand clothes shop brimming with dust and allure and hand-me-down stories.

One more theme to go . . . but I’m so enjoying this daily poem meandering, I’ve invented a second series! Thanks to all the poets and publishers who gave permission to post today’s poems.

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