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Extract from "Oak" by Katharine Towers
This entry in our series on Oak Poetry is an extract from Oak, a book by British poet Katharine Towers. The book consists of a sequence of poems that accompanies the oak from acorn to grave and into its afterlife. It has been described as a "long poem at once fragmentary and whole, with all the sophistication of folklore and all the play of true poetry." The extract below is from the third section of the book, entitled "The Lover", reproduced by kind permission of the author.
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such a thrill and a skinny branch it's only Robin all the same the oak has reached the age of a lover stupid to think an oak an oak is not an iceberg an oak is two and each needs the other and each loves the other I have three loves (and this is the song of the little oak tree) regarding the first true love of an oak which is Light
like a quirk of the tongue thus an oak on its own in a field making of the sun a god regarding the second true love of an oak which is Air
a breeze rattles through the twigs or a river with a swerve in it a tree must catch what it can before dark regarding the third true love of an oak which is Rain
or Rain is quickly passed from leaf to leaf and Rain will dribble down the trunk and Rain will wash an oak tree clean |
Katharine Towers was born in London and now lives in Derbyshire with her family. Her debut poetry collection The Floating Man won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and was shortlisted for the Jerwood-Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. The Way We Go from this collection appeared as a Poem on the Underground and was also set to music by composer Laura Stevens. Her second collection The Remedies was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Katharine’s poems have been broadcast on BBC Radio and included in several anthologies, as well as in The Guardian, Poetry Review, and Poetry London. From 2016 to 2018 Katharine was Poet in Residence at the Cloud Appreciation Society.