Swimming Between Islands

By Charlotte Eichler

Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2024. Swimming Between Islands, Charlotte Eichler's first collection, has its own distinctive weathers, atmospheres and fauna. Egg collectors, moth trappers, hermits, cuttlefish, pyjama sharks and bloody henry starfish all play a part. This islanded world is the starting point for poems that explore how we try to connect with each other – despite misunderstanding, family silences and unwanted legacies. 'Read Charlotte Eichler's poems slowly, so that you can really take note of them, because they're astonishing,' said Laura Scott, responding to Eichler's poems in New Poetries VIII. Anthony Vahni Capildeo characterised her first pamphlet as 'modern pastoral, not nostalgic, and well beyond the ordinary domestic lyric'. Swimming Between Islands gathers this work with a substantial collection of new poems. In Eichler's poems, the first person singular is relational, social; it refuses to mark one consciousness neatly off from another. The poems' perspective is often plural, a 'we' which is one minute a couple considering marriage, the next, childhood friends divining the future from ladybirds and four-leafed clovers. The reader is invited to come close, and then right into the centre of the poem; the book progresses towards ever wilder, more isolated places in Scotland, Scandinavia, Russia, Alaska, where 'we are found: / the gannets are white flares / hitting the water / under a fishbone sky'.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Apr 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781800171381

Charlotte Eichler

Charlotte Eichler was born in Hertfordshire and studied English Literature and Russian at the University of Nottingham. She has an MA in Norse and Viking Studies, also from Nottingham. Her debut pamphlet, Their Lunar Language, was published by Valley Press in 2018 and a selection of her work was featured in Carcanet's New Poetries VIII in 2021. She lives near Leeds.

Book preview

3

8

For my family

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Islomane

Divination

Baby Swimming

Clean White Bones

David

Bathroom Ghosts

At Mirror Lake

What Little Girls Are Made Of (i)

Goblincore

Backstage

The Rec

Brimstones

A Pheasant

A Meditation of Small Frogs

Trapping Moths With My Father

Autumn at the Wireworks

The Fifty-Year Traffic Jam

1,000 Porcelain Eggs

Malham Tarn

Walking Dragline Excavator

Saltburn-by-the-Sea

What Little Girls Are Made Of (ii)

Balloonist

Mary, 1903

Woman and Wall

The Babies and the Dahlias

Emergency

Cephalophores

The Navigator

What Little Girls Are Made Of (iii)

Ant Farm

Survivors

At the Cathedral of the Spilled Blood

52 Sovetskaya Prospekt

The Coffin Calendars

Halfway to Voronezh

How To Do Nothing

What Little Girls Are Made Of (iv)

Hervör and Völund

Owlish

Valkyrie

Kaktovik

Into the Fjords

Fata Morgana

Siri’s Island

Uninhabited

The Hermit of Treig

Pabbay Cliffs

Mousa, Shetland

Asteroidea

Swimming Between Islands

Note

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

9

SWIMMING BETWEEN ISLANDS

11

ISLOMANE

She thinks of unhatched things:

eider weaving slippery nests

from the surf,

sharp rains

of skua and tern

when she strays from the path.

Some days she misses people

and sees them in seals

strung out in lines beyond the breaking waves.

With a toe in the water,

she leaves rows of pleated shells –

wedding dresses

and the trees filling

with a robin’s twisted

ribbons of song.

*

13

DIVINATION

We knew everything, playing oracle on the carpet.

Saturdays crawled with our ladybird circus –

from the ends of our fingers, solemn as blood,

we sent them to find our future husbands.

We let them trickle